The Mistresses Collection. Оливия Гейтс
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“I do,” she whispered. “I do love you.”
And that was the last of his foundations turned into dust, just like that. Setting him free.
He swept her into his arms and held her high against him, drowning in that look on her face, as if he was the man he’d always wanted to be. As if she saw him when no one else could.
“I am a rough man,” he told her fiercely. “I made myself from fists and sheer will, and that is all I know. There were no ivory towers for me. No easy escapes. I’ve had to fight for every single thing I have, and most of what I lost.”
She reached up her hand and held his face with it, her touch somehow healing, even as another tear tracked its way down her cheek.
“I’ll fight for you,” she whispered.
He lost himself then in the sweet, slick heat of her mouth. In the perfection of her arms around him, her body against his, the fact that she knew him better than anyone else in the world, and she loved him anyway.
When he pulled back to breathe, they had found their way to the bed, and she wrapped herself around him as if she would never let him go.
“I want more than two weeks,” he told her in a rush, things opening wide inside of him, like she was the light and all of his shadows were surrendering to her, one by one. “I want forever. Live with me. Marry me. I don’t care. I want everything.”
She smiled at him, that beautiful smile that changed him from the inside out, and he understood. Finally, he understood.
“I love you,” he said, and the words sounded stilted. Strange. As well they should. He’d never said them before. In any language.
Or maybe it was that his life, his love, his heart—everything he was or wanted to be—hung there in those three small syllables and the woman who gazed up at him, her face scrubbed clean and her dark red hair a fierce tangle.
Her smile deepened, changed. Made new worlds, and took him with her.
“I know you do,” she said softly, and then she kissed him.
Binding them together, like a tightly held fist, unbreakable and sure.
Forever.
Eighteen months later, Miranda stood in her one-bedroom apartment in New York City, wrinkling her nose as she looked around at the bare white walls. The empty floors. She stood in the center of what had been her bedroom so long ago, when she’d been a completely different person. When she’d hardly known herself. When she’d fought her nightmares nightly and alone, instead of very rarely and with Ivan. She gazed down at the simple, elegant solitaire that he’d slid onto her finger only a week ago now, when she’d finally agreed to marry him after a very long campaign.
Mostly conducted in bed, his preferred negotiation strategy.
Miranda smiled. It was time to trust. It was time to let go of fear. It was time to officially move into the sprawling penthouse on Central Park West he’d bought to be near her during the Columbia school year. It was past time.
There was no noise behind her, no sound at all, but she knew he was there. She always did. She turned slowly, and let the punch of his sheer physical presence move through her, as ever. He was big and dark, wearing a great black coat over jeans and a jacket, looking every inch the wealthy, famous man he was. Beautiful and lethal.
And hers.
“Second thoughts?” he asked, in an arrogant tone of voice that scorned the very idea.
But she knew him so well now. She knew what he hid beneath all of that bluster.
“Never,” she said.
He smiled in that open, real way that still made her a little bit giddy, and nodded at the book she held in her hand.
“A memento?”
“It was stuck way back on the shelf in my closet,” she said, flipping it over in her hands. It was a hardcover copy of Caveman Worship, the book that had started all of this. A book of lies that had led her here to the only truth that mattered. “Maybe I should leave it here. I wouldn’t want you to feel you had to ritually burn it in on the terrace one night.”
“Revert to my favorite judgmental professor of old, milaya moya, and I might burn you on the terrace instead.”
“Promises, promises,” she said in a singsong voice, and laughed when he walked into the room and kissed her soundly, then pulled her against him.
“How much longer will we stand here?” he asked quietly. “We have the rest of our lives to start living, and these ghosts are not invited.”
Miranda looked at the book, and felt it all move through her—the things they’d been through. The things they’d put each other through. And what they’d managed to build together out of all of it. Her latest book had been about high fashion as a cultural conversation, and no one wanted to talk about it on television shows. She’d discovered that was a relief. Instead of using entertainment gossip as a way to bludgeon Ivan, she worked with his foundation instead, creating outreach programs for juveniles in homes with domestic abuse.
And he made her forget herself whenever he touched her, and she was finally, perfectly safe. Much better than any fairy tale, she thought.
“Let’s go,” she said. She went to throw the book on the floor. “I think we’re done with this.”
But he stopped her, taking the book in his hand.
“I want it,” he said, grinning at her. Happier and brighter in these last months than ever before. The man, he told her often, he’d always wanted to be. It made her feel like flying. Like they already were. Like together they were made of wings—and joy. “It’s my favorite work of fiction.”
CATHY WILLIAMS can remember reading Mills & Boon books as a teenager, and now that she is writing them she remains an avid fan. For her, there is nothing like creating romantic stories and engaging plots, and each and every book is a new adventure. Cathy lives in London, and her three daughters—Charlotte, Olivia and Emma—have always been, and continue to be, the greatest inspirations in her life.
ROSIE HAD NEVER been to a cremation before. Even when her dad had died eight years before, there had been a funeral. Friends—and he had had a surprising number of them, bearing in mind he had spent the majority of his life blearily watching the sun rise and set from the bottom of a whisky glass—had come to pay their respects. Rosie had known few of them. Her own friends had tagged along to give her moral support. At the age of eighteen, she had needed it. From recollection, a distant cousin who had turned out to live a scant three blocks away, in an impoverished two-bedroomed bungalow on a council estate remarkably similar to theirs, had shown up and expressed regret that he hadn’t been a more consistent family member.
For all his drunken ways and love of the bottle her father had been a jovial alcoholic and the number of people who had turned out on that brilliantly hot summer day had been testimony to that.
But this…
She had arrived late. It was bitterly cold and a series of small mishaps had made the journey far longer and more arduous than it should have been: Ice on the tracks. Rush hour on the tube. Signal problems as she had neared Earl’s Court. It hadn’t helped that she had purposefully decided to arrive late so that she could sneak into the back of the chapel and disappear before the service was finished. She had anticipated blending into the crowds.
Hovering now at the back, Rosie felt her heart begin to thud