My body softens, relaxing into the warm, reassuring strength of his thigh. Locks of my hair pool over his leg, tickling my collarbone, and Jasper takes a deep breath as I settle there, his eyes a galaxy.
From this close, I can see the flecks of silver at his temples. The delicate lines beside his eyes. He seems older today.
Serious and tired and deeply thoughtful.
But I feel him tremble against me.
“Tell me what you want, Eden,” he repeats.
My breath shivers out, and his eyes burn like banked coals. It’s the way he looked at me that first day, when he and Beau kissed me and fingered me to climax.
I think of him promising family. His careful attention as I read. Every note he’s left me. I think of how it might feel to curl up right here with a book, his hand in my hair, sharing passages and private moments. How thoroughly he’s seduced me.
Maybe. Maybe I can hope for more.
And so, I grasp for the sun.
“Everything,” I whisper. “I want it all.”
Jasper’s eyes sink shut, his lashes a dark veil over his thoughts. But I feel him go someplace else. I watch him turn the whole world over in his mind—and whatever he sees there seems to pain him.
When he sighs, it’s like a song. Sad, but desperately resigned.
“You deserve it all, Eden. You both—” He shakes his head, meeting my gaze. “You all do.”
My eyes sting. Sting because I’m starting to believe it. I do deserve more.
I always have.
“I heard you in the music room with Lucien,” he murmurs, and my cheeks flood with heat. Catching the look, his lips turn down. “My mother liked to hear my father play—she designed the intercom system so his music could play through each room of the house. Lucien must have accidentally forgot to turn it off.”
He heard that?
“You sounded . . . happy.” Jasper’s voice is feather soft. “Were you?” When he captures my gaze, he doesn’t let it go. “Was he?”
I think it might be impossible to lie to him, at his feet like this.
“It was one of the happiest days of my life,” I whisper, and his eyes shine liquid bright. Wetting my lips, I add, “I think Lucky . . . I think he was happy too. I mean, how do you tell? He smiled a lot. But he always smiles a lot.” Just thinking of it makes my lips lift. “But he wanted to spend time with me today too. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
When I look at Jasper again, all cracks and minutiae of emotion have vanished from his face. He’s a perfect mask—solemn and pretty and impossible to read. Then it breaks, his eyes press closed and he looks tired again. No, more than that—he looks exhausted, sucked of life and energy.
“Are you okay?” I whisper.
It unnerves me more to see him like this, I think. I want him stern and cold and pretty again. This tiredness of his, it goes to the bone. I understand it. Too well.
I watch his throat work, then his reply sighs from his lips.
“Sometimes.”
And I understand that too.
His hand strokes over my hair like the breeze of a breath, and I feel the tingles all the way down my spine.
Then his fingers curl, and he draws away.
I watch it happen. In so many tiny little ways, I watch him pull back.
And with a portentous, glacial crash, every hope and romantic breath in my body shatters.
“Eden,” he says, so heavily, and I turn my face away.
In my name, in that one word, I hear the apology. The brutal empathy. The guillotine over my dreamy imaginings.
The tingles in my spine become ice daggers. Dread reaches up through black waters and pools in my stomach.
This wasn’t a seduction. It was a rejection.
“I can’t be anything to you. Not anything more than a friend.” His words are careful, stilted. So painfully, gratingly unnatural. “But I will be a friend—I promise you that.”
My lids sink shut, as my throat closes over. I duck my head, hardly noticing as my forehead comes to rest on his thigh.
I can’t bear for him to see my face.
How did I not see this coming? How utterly I’ve just humiliated myself.
“Eden, I can’t go through it again, do you understand? I can’t fall for another person when we can’t be what we need for one another.” I hear him swallow, and his thigh quivers. “You will be happy with Lucien. With Beaumont, and Jaykob, and even Dominic. I meant it when I said you deserve happiness, Eden . . . it just won’t be with me.”
I feel the air change, lose its charge. Everything turns dull and flat.
“I’ve caused enough hurt,” he whispers. “The kindest thing I can do for you is to leave you in peace.”
How did I just spend the last hour questioning the lengths I would go to for us to be together and not realize he was explaining all the reasons why we couldn’t?
I wasn’t alone in an abyss with Jasper, after all.
I was just alone.
A fat, hot tear drops off my face and onto the fabric of his pants, and he falls utterly still.
How am I still such a foolish little girl?
I pull back from Jasper—too suddenly, but he’ll have to forgive me that. It doesn’t feel right, now, to be sitting here at his feet. Not when he doesn’t want to keep me. Not when this thing between us is shockingly, embarrassingly one sided. Once again, I feel fooled into thinking I’d found a home.
Standing, I brush down my dress, and my eye catches the board.
His gaze touches me everywhere.
The pieces come into sharp focus, and I shake my head. “You’ve won, then.”
When I look at him, finally, his eyes are humiliatingly compassionate. “You played exceedingly well. You have a mind for it.”
I bite the inside of my lip. Hard. The tears well anyway.
Moving to the game, I knock over my king.
“But in the end, I always lose.”
Chapter 23
Eden
SURVIVAL TIP #3
Fight for yourself.
No-one else will.
I ready the dining table with a dull ache. In my muscles. In my gut. I don’t know why it feels so wrong, really, like the planets are somehow out of alignment. I don’t know why it hurts so much to lose something that never existed in the first place.
Maybe I’m just embarrassed.
Does your heart usually hurt this much when you’re embarrassed?
Lucky brings in the rabbit and wild mushroom soup he made, and he’s been darting looks at me ever since I made my way down from my room—where I fled in embarrassment after the abysmal ending to the games played between me and Jasper.
To me and Jasper.
“Eden, are you okay?” Lucky asks, an anxious frown creasing his forehead. “What happened with . . . him?”
Tanned arms wrap around my waist from behind, and my breath catches in surprise.
“Jasper didn’t scare you off, did he?” Beau asks. Lips press to my temple, and he takes a deep inhale, breathing me in. “I didn’t expect to see you down here tonight.”
My insides sting hotly. Maybe Jasper did whip me, after all—and he didn’t even need the flogger.
“No. It’s— I’m fine.” I try to pull out of his arms, uncomfortable in my own skin right in this moment, let alone against someone else’s.
Beau only lets me pull back slightly, face dimming. He hesitates. “Eden, are we okay? The other day . . . we left things in a weird place.”