Page 73 of The Vow

The difference fifteen years made to my desire for Damon Remington was woefully inconsequential. However, the difference the last two weeks made to our electric rapport was suffocating.

I didn’t want to dwell on what happened that night. To him. To me.To us.

I didn’t want to recall my conversation with Pat or the things he’d insinuated. Or hear Nonna’s evening update on Damon’s recovery every night with dinner. I didn’t want to dwell on the torture he’d endured or the way he tried to spare me from knowing about it. And I didn’t want to remember just how easily I’d come apart for him.

One touch, a plea of intimacy, and I’d become a puddle of writhing want, grinding myself on him like I hadn’t orgasmed in fifteen years.

Maybe the brutality of my avoidance was extreme, but it was necessary. A recoil away from something—someone—whonot only had the power to hurt me but the ability to make me vulnerable to that hurt.

Damon had betrayed me. Left me for another woman—a friend—without warning or explanation. And then had the audacity to walk back into my life, blackmail me into working with him, and finally tempt me with the feelings I couldn’t deny.

So, I wouldn’t feel guilty for keeping my distance. Not that he’d been able to venture far from his room, needing the time to recover from Belmont’s beating. It was only a few nights ago I’d heard the familiar sounds of the sliding door, a signal that he was well enough to go back into the pool.

Then, I’d found myself wandering upstairs to the window, relieved to find Pat nowhere in sight. From the darkness, I watched Damon slowly fish his hats one by one from their underwater graveyard.

I wouldn’t feel guilty for those either. If I had a hat for every time Damon kept a truth—or part of one—from me, they wouldn’t fill a pool but an ocean. And that was the very root of my fear.

Even if he could earn my forgiveness for the past—even if there was some magical proof of his fidelity—it wouldn’t change who he was: a man with too many faces to know which was real. To know which to trust.

I glanced again at the beautiful man beside me in the back of the Mercedes, my eyes craving the sight of him after being deprived for almost two weeks.

The trim of his suit, the relaxed fold of his hands, and the new, unblemished fedora resting on his head—it was almost déjà vu to the confident con man in the same seat from almost four weeks ago, one whom no one would suspect had been since damaged by torture and temptation.

Then again, that was Damon; his greatest skill would always be pretending to be exactly what he wasn’t.

My heart thumped irregularly, as the same could be said for me.

Swallowing, I forced words through my lips. “So, what’s our plan for tonight?”

It was better to take charge of the conversation than to wait and see where we combusted.

Outside my window, the skyscrapers stretched toward the stars, rising higher as we drew closer to the convention center downtown where GrowGood’s annual fundraiser was being held.

I turned, feeling Damon’s eyes on me. The slight crinkles at their corners worried me. Any fracture in a man always so composed was cause for concern.

“You did a nice job on the Christmas tree.” His whiskey-smooth voice complimented and completely ignored my question.

So much for keeping a tight hold on the topic of the conversation.

“It was something to do,” I brushed him off.

The day after Damon’s beating, I’d been drawn upstairs to the expletive-laden commotion of Pat hauling a live evergreen tree into the house and setting it up in the living room. I would’ve forgotten about Christmas without that tree, and Damon knew it. I saw it for what it was: one more attempt to remind me I couldn’t ignore what was real forever.

Not life. Not family. And not the feelings I’d so stupidly revealed to still have for him.

I would’ve left it undecorated, but when he started swimming again, it was my only excuse to be close to the window.

“Do you even have a plan?” I countered. “Do you just haveto make a donation? Does it have to be given directly to Belmont? What exactly did he tell you to do?”

Pat’s eyes flicked to the rearview, and I didn’t miss the way they caught Damon’s or the look he gave him.

I was missing something. Unease made the diamond choker around my neck feel uncomfortably tight.

“We’re here.” Pat pulled around the back of the building so we weren’t caught in the media circus out front.

Cameras. News crews. Journalists. Influences. Everyone waited for a slice of the spectacle as the cars pulled up, delivering hundreds of esteemed celebrity guests.

“Thanks, Pat,” Damon said, running his fingers along the brim of his hat.

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