“You don’t have to pamper me.” She accepted a mug of hot and chocolate and warmed homemade croissant filled with blueberry jelly she had made the day before.
“I don’t need. I want to.” Propping his feet on the center table, he munched on his croissant and moaned over its flavor. “Mmm. This is good.”
They ate and drank in silent companionship; the last sunrays of the autumn disappeared, bringing darkness into the room. Tavish flicked on a lamp and, draping an arm on the sofa back, leaning against its tall arm, nestled her between his legs. “Who was he?”
She was startled by his bluntness, but she shouldn’t have been. She knew he was going to press the issue. “I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“You expect me to believe you?”
“Why not?” she whispered, leaning her cheek on his chest.
“Because you have been hiding your past from me.” It was clearly a difficult topic for her. And yet, it was necessary to talk about it. Somewhere in those secret past years was the key to solving the mystery of the phone calls that scared her so much. “I believe it’s knocking on your door.”
Yes. She just didn’t have the desire to conceal herself from him or the energy to avoid the subject anymore. She adjusted the long sleeves of her turtleneck and sighed. “I don’t know who that man is—was, but . . .” There is no way to tell this . . . “I’ll be right back.” She wriggled out of his lap and moved at a snail’s pace to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of Black Label whisky, a bucket, and two tall glasses. And Cleopatra at her heels.
His eyebrows rose high on his forehead. “What is this for?”
“You might need it. I know I do.” She filled half the glass. “Ice?”
“Neat.” Cleopatra jumped beside him on the sofa, rubbing her head on his leg. “Hello, Cat.”
“Cleo, not Cat.” She gave him a glass and sat in an armchair in front of him, nursing her whisky.
He leaned back on the sofa, scratching Cleopatra behind the ears absentmindedly. “I’m waiting.”
“Many things I’ll tell you won’t make sense.” She sipped her whisky, trying to sort how she was going to explain it all to him.
“Just tell. From the beginning, if you please.” He ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture she recognized as impatience. “Can you stop dawdling over this whisky?”
“I’ll understand if you don’t ever want to see me again . . . or cancel The Blue Dot contract”—you’re mad, Laetitia, completely, crazily mad—“but, please, sit there and listen until I finish.” She chewed on her bottom lip, almost drawing blood. “If this story ever gets beyond these walls . . .”
He raised an ink-black eyebrow. “I’m a tomb.”
She laughed dryly and drank a huge gulp of her whisky, put the glass on the center table, and plopped down again in the armchair, entwining her hair in her fingers, on and on, waiting for the alcohol to take effect and give her some courage.
“For fuck’s sake, Laetitia!”
Cleopatra jumped from his lap, hissing.
“Shush, Cat.” Cleopatra narrowed her eyes at him, flashed her teeth, turned, and left the room. “No’ very loyal, uh, Cat?”
“She likes you,” Laetitia said smiling.
“And you are stalling.” He put his elbows on his knees and pinned Laetitia with his sea-green eyes, more turbulent than ever. “I’m not the enemy, Laetitia. I’m here to help.”
“Very well.” She sighed faintly and stopped trying to think about what to say, letting whatever wanted to come out, come out. “My story has no beginnings, just endings. Laetitia Galen is dead.”
CHAPTER 29
He was rendered speechless, and it irked her that it was becoming a common reaction to her stories.
Tavish was expecting to hear many things, but not that. He looked at her, astonished. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’ll try to be brief.”
“Brief?” he repeated. “How can ye presume tae be brief after dropping a bloody bomb in the room!”
“Because there’s not much to tell.” She lowered her face.
“Are ye serious? There’s enough for a bloody novel! If ye doona want tae tell your story, fine—”
“But I am telling. Honestly,” she said. “You don’t want to hear?”
Genuine curiosity in her tone, rather than snide anger, disarmed him. Give her a chance. “Go on.”
“If Laetitia Galen were alive, she would be a bit younger than me.” I guess. “She’s buried in the grounds of the monastery where I grew up in Ireland,” she said.
“Where in Ireland?”
“Somewhere with woods. Lots of virgin woods.”
“Great,” he said. “Google Maps should hire you.”
She grimaced. “Would you believe me if I said I don’t know?”
“In a place where you, scary owl screeches, the idiotic Irish legend of a banshee, a psycho, and a dead woman all fit in a monastery lost in the middle of nowhere?” he said quietly, his eyes locked on her face, searching for a telltale sign that she was lying but finding none. Either she is mad or a great artist. And I’m an idiot.
“You know the banshee is a fairy who died in childbirth, right?”
He rolled his eyes. “This is what the legend says.”
“I was a child, and my ears didn’t help,” she said, with a shrug. “When an owl screeched in the monastery, they said the banshee was announcing my death.”
His frown deepened, and he was silent for a second, pondering his next question. “And your parents did nothing?”
“I am an orphan, left at their doors with no name, and no one bothered to give me one. People referred to me as her, she, sister—a few times dear or darling.” She lowered her head, sad and ashamed. “Geoffrey—he called me freak, and I felt like one.”
“Jesus . . .” Should I believe this?
“Not Jesus,” she said, smiling ruefully. “Geoffrey.”
“Geoffrey who?” If this is true, I will fucking skin him. Alive.
“Lord Geoffrey, as he called himself, was the leader of the cult.”
“What’s the cult’s name?”
Her head lowered even more, and her hair fell over her face. “Could you give me a second to get it out? Please?”
He grunted. He no longer knew what questions he wanted to ask. Or what he wanted to hear. Or if he should believe it.
He rose and started to pace the room.
“Geoffrey never liked me. And after a few years, the others avoided me, too, not wanting to risk being expelled for being kind to me and giving me attention. It happened more than once.” She twirled on and off a lock of her hair in her fingers. “My life was simple. I rose, bathed, ate, slept. I had been taught to read by one of the acolytes, an old French lady, so I spent my hours in the monastery library; it was an unending coffer from which spilled precious treasures only for me.”
A small smile appeared on her face, but it didn’t placate the anger boiling in his chest.
There were so many things that could break a person if there was no one to hold that person together, and abuse was one of them.
Something inside him twisted. He was angry with himself for wanting to believe in her, for doubting the weird story.
“When I was older, I split my hours between reading and painting. The books were old, ancient, and full of instructions on how to make paints from raw materials, to prepare surfaces from bark and clay. I made my utensils; I studied and invented techniques. It’s how I began painting. It was not that bad.”
At the age when most kids were trying to figure out who they were, Laetitia had been busy building walls around her, piling brick upon brick, forming a tall, narrow tower, where what was left of her self-esteem resided.
Tavish sloshed more whisky in his glass, drank, and dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. He stopped in front of her, imagining how many nights and days of loneliness and fear she must have endured, and admiring her for still being able to look at the memories with
some fondness.
She shook her head, like a small child. “It wasn’t. It was just . . .”
Scraps you found for yourself. “Lonely. Painful. Empty of love.”
Yes. “It’d seemed silly for anyone in my place to plan for the future. Sillier still to desire something. Or to dream.” She shrugged and swallowed the lump in her throat. She recalled her hours of solitude, when her dreams helped keep her reality at bay, not letting anger define her or indulging in self-pity. “But I did. I wanted it. The future. I wanted it so much.”
“You have it, Laetitia.”
“No, I don’t.” She raised her eyelashes to gaze at him, her lips curled, and she lowered them down again. There was a hollow look on her face that threatened to become a black hole. “I know this sounds unbelievable.”
“It does.” He turned his back to her. “And you’d probably wouldn’t be telling me, if not for the calls.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” she admitted.
I should fucking leave. I should fucking leave and never come back. But he couldn’t, not as he watched shame, sorrow, and pain fill her, as she ripped words from her chest. “Goddammit, Laeti—should I call you by any other name?”
“I have no name. Just the one I stole from a dead woman.” A small sob escaped from her lips, but contrary to his expectations, she didn’t cry. “Please, don’t hate me.”
It was one of those moments when nothing could make it feel better but contact. Muttering a curse, he crossed the room, picked her up, and sat in the armchair with her in his arms. “I’m sorry, Little Elf. I am.” All of them. I will hang the sons of bitches by their toes.
“Me, too.”
He smoothed a strand of her hair behind her pointed ear, tracing it, lovingly, not only to sooth her but to ground himself as the need to strike at those who had hurt her grew steadily inside him. “Then?”
“Then I met this guy. He promised me the future, when I was sixteen.” She faced him and said, “Three months later, my life was over.”
“How?” The word sprang as a growl from him, his arms wrapping tighter around her. And whoever this prick is, I will have every piece of his body torn apart. Slowly. Painfully.
I am so not going there. She shook her head softly, resting her cheek against his heart.
“So you left,” he concluded.
“There was no such possibility as leave. Not with Geoffrey. Not after what I had done . . . I fled, Tavish Uilleam.”
“Laetitia, what could you have possibly done that was so horrible?”
“I—I . . . wasn’t in my right mind.” She sighed, snuggling more against his chest.
He shook his head, and a lock of his midnight-black hair fell over his eyes. “What should I do with you?”
She pushed the strand back and gazed in his eyes. She whispered, “I don’t know. Whatever you want.”
He rested his forehead on hers. “I doona know, either, but I’m no’ letting you go.”
London, Notting Hill
Johansen Kinsella’s apartment
11:23 p.m.
His head propped on his hands, Johansen gazed at his wife’s iPad.
“I’m going to return it,” his wife said, turning it off when he made no comment, and putting it away. “I thought you would like it.”
“I did.” He passed an arm around her body and pulled her to him, kissing the crown of her head. “It’s a very good painting.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking when I brought home a painting of a cemetery. At the gallery, it seemed so serene. So full of contrast. Innovative. These angels . . . this new artist has something about her. A degree of aesthetic violence I’ve never seen before.” Her fingers played with his chest hair. “I’m sorry, I’m going to return it tomorrow.”
“Trisha, it has nothing to do with the painting. I am . . . I am worried about a new project. That’s all.”
It should have been a fleshless, flat, graphic aspect of a still-impersonal type of painting: a dark-gray thick background brought forth an avenue of silhouetted angels watching over tombs done in grayish-blue and grayish-white.
The problem was, he knew that place, and it was nothing but anarchic and violent.
He stretched out his arm and switched off the lamp, trying to conceal the scene on the canvas with darkness. But a shaft of light coming from the street fell over it.
“In fact, darling, call The Blue Dot tomorrow and buy that one you showed me. This Laetitia Galen is a promising artist. I want us to meet and sponsor her.” It felt strange saying her name out loud. It made it feel real, when it wasn’t, and for it to belong to her, when it didn’t. He instantly recognized the girl who had no name: her beautiful eyes and her elfin ears gave her away. He sighed faintly, shaking his head at himself. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
She was soon sleeping, but Johansen stayed awake, walking through the tombs of the same cemetery represented in front of him.
It was there that he had met her the first time, when he had kissed her, talked with her, and had fallen in love with her.
It had been there, two months after, where he watched, ashamed and horrified, in what was supposed to be a happy ceremony, his brother brand her between the shoulder blades with a hot poker and then take her violently, while she stared into his eyes, as though he was her lifeline. When it was over, Geoffrey had ordered the acolytes to leave his drunken brother, a sobbing Laetitia, and his shocked self alone.
It was in that cemetery, filled with beautiful marble angels, that he decided he would rather save a living nameless woman than his fallen brother, who lay sprawled on the lawn, doped by the effects of the hallucinogen he had imbibed all night.
And the angels did nothing when a trembling Laetitia picked up the poker his brother had used to mark her and slashed it over and over his identical twin brother’s face.
Nor did he.
CHAPTER 30
Beardley Lodge
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
8:36 a.m.
Tavish woke up with the first rays of the sun. He couldn’t remember when he had last slept so well.
His arm was slung possessively around Laetitia, and he ran his fingers over her thigh and stomach, spanning her tiny waist. When his hand moved to glide past her arms to cradle her breast, she stirred in her sleep, crossing her arms to protect her chest.
It reminded him of how she reacted when he had stared at her dressed only in her panties, and of his response. He rolled onto his back and put a hand under his head.
A myriad of thoughts crammed his mind, all concerning Laetitia: the calls that left her so unhinged; her past, which had been sad and lonely; her present, which she was entangled in and tiptoeing around; and the future that she desired and dreaded so much.
They had called Sebastian, who promised to settle everything for her to move to London in five days, maximum. After Laetitia had slept, he had texted Alistair, asking to meet Baptist in person later.
He spooned with her again and burrowed his head in her hair, smelling that unique scent of hers, so fresh and clean. Her trust had grounded him as nothing else could have done, and suddenly he had found a new purpose in life.
His fingers dipped into her shiny pale-blonde hair, turned even whiter under the soft light of the lit bedside table lamp.
He rose on his forearm to adjust the covers over them. One of her hands slipped from the tucked position under her chin as she shifted to curl better against him. The long sleeve of her nightgown fell.
It was then that he saw the very thin and practically invisible scar on her wrist. He pulled the sleeve back, his eyes following the line that ran four inches up her forearm.
Horror filled him as he turned the other arm in his direction. There was a matching scar on it. That is why she is always wearing long-sleeve shirts or dresses and prefers to make love with dim lights. He closed his eyes, sadness filling him. It must have been an utterly dismal life that drove this sweet, gentle woman to try to kill hers
elf.
With the scars running vertically up the inside of her forearm, he couldn’t deny that she had done it with purpose. And yet, they were extremely superficial, as if she couldn’t go through with it. Jesus, how could I have never seen this before? What does it say about me as a loving, caring partner?
“Hmm,” she purred, moving to rub her body against his, sleep warm and very hard. Slowly, lazily, she turned; her palm stroked up the curve of his thigh and came to rest on his waist. “Good morning.”
“Laetitia,” he whispered. He leaned in and brushed his lips over hers with such tenderness it tightened her stomach. His touch said things he didn’t know if he could specifically say yet.
Her hands slid up the wall of his chest and into his silky hair. She was still sleepy, but her hands had learned his body quite well the day before; her skin rejoiced at the feelings he brought forth. He took her to places she had never imagined before and made her feel safe when he embraced her after making love.
Half-frightened, half-angry with the possibility of losing her, without having ever known her, he growled low in his throat and bent his head, his tongue sliding across the seam of her lips until she opened to him, and he thought he’d drown in her.
With a soft sigh, Laetitia pulled back. “Tavish Uilleam?”
“The things I’d like to do to you,” he murmured darkly, lowering his lips to the hollow of her throat and biting the sensitive nerve on her neck. His lips were on her skin; his breath, hot. His tongue traced a path from the collarbone to the ear. To her earlobe. And down again, to the other side, the morning stubble grazing her, driving her wild.
“Do some of them,” she whispered, shivering, feeling desire claw down her body. “Or just one. Do one thing. Please?”
When he lifted his head, she could sense he was deliberating.
In the past, he’d never restrained himself when it came to seeking physical pleasures. But all the other women he’d been with had been experienced, understood what he wanted, and appreciated it. It was not only her white-blonde hair and violet-blue eyes in the faylike face or her delicate body that gave her a shy-maiden look. Her touches were unpracticed, her reactions not yet fully unraveled or deciphered. Laetitia was what he would consider innocent, and yet she had surprised him. Every time he tugged on her control, she allowed him to ignite the wild, untamed depths of the passion he could feel hidden within her.