Sinful Nights: Sinful Love Part 26

"What did he say when you told him you loved him?" her mother asked.

"I didn't say that. I said I was falling."

"Ah," her mother said, nodding sagely. "Therein lies the problem."

"How is that a problem?"

Her mother locked her fingers together, forming a bridge. "Falling in love and being in love are bedfellows, but they aren't the same. We often think they are, but they're truly not. Falling is just a way to float the idea, like a test of I love you. If you love him, you should tell him. Rea.s.sure him. He loves you so. Michael wears his heart on his sleeve for you, and a man needs to know he's special. He knows he's not the only one you've loved, but he wants to feel like he is." She unlaced her fingers and stared at Annalise, her eyes holding her captive, softly demanding. "Does he feel like he is? The only one?"

Her gut twisted. He was the only one for her now, but perhaps she hadn't exactly made that clear. "I really don't know."

Her mother patted her hand. "Make sure he knows."

That night, she wrote to him. She wasn't entirely convinced she wanted to say those three words in a letter, but there were other things to say. Things that were as important.

The truth of all her fears.

When she was through, she dropped it in FedEx. He would receive it in two days.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT.

Sometimes when you drive to a familiar home, you're not even sure how you got there. You stop at the lights when they're red, turn on the blinker when you take a left, and suddenly you're there, though you can't recall the drive. You know the route by heart. You've done it so many times it's a part of you.

As Michael walked across the gra.s.s with his sister, his feet guided him in that same fas.h.i.+on along the path they'd traveled many times-a winding stone walkway, over spongy gra.s.s, then through a row of headstones, guarded by oaks and elms.

Shannon clutched a bouquet of sunflowers.

She came here often, leaving these flowers on their father's grave each time. Today, he accompanied her. It wasn't the anniversary of their father's death, nor was it his birthday. It was just an average day, and that was why they came. To remember those who were gone. Both their father, and the baby Shannon had lost ten years ago.

"You hanging in there?" he asked, eyeing her belly.

She nodded. "I wish I could speed up time, though. Fast forward four more months and have the baby in my arms, to know he or she is safe and healthy, and alive."

He draped an arm around her shoulder. "Yeah, me too," he said, rather than giving her a plat.i.tude. Everything will be all right. He hoped it would, but both he and his sister had seen enough to know those sorts of statements were pointless.

The morning sun rose in the sky, and soon they reached their father's resting place. Michael read the engraved words out loud, as he always did when he came here with Shan. Thomas Darren Paige. Loving father.

"He was," his sister said.

"He was."

Shannon set the flowers at the base of the headstone, then kissed the granite. Michael's throat hitched, watching his sister. He kneeled down briefly and wrapped his arms around her, holding her close as tears streamed down her cheeks. She'd always been emotional; she was even more so these days while pregnant. Michael couldn't fault her for it, either.

Soon she rose, wiped her hands across her cheeks, and plastered on a smile. "I'm all better now."

He smiled back and tucked her hair behind her ear. "Course you are, Shannon bean."

"So tell me about Paris..."

"Ah...the elephant in the room."

But he found he needed to talk about this black hole in his heart, and Shan was precisely the person who'd understand best. As they stood by the grave, arms crossed over chests, a cool fall breeze rustling the leaves, he shared the fears that had bubbled to the surface the last night in Paris.

"And I think I might be a total a.s.shole who has no perspective, since I'm jealous of a dead guy," he said, with a forced laugh as he finished the story.

She rubbed his arm rea.s.suringly. "No, you're not. You're just in love, and it's hard, but I don't know why you're so worried she can never love anyone but her husband."

"How is it even possible for her to love like that?" He gripped his chest, as if grabbing at his heart. "I'm so f.u.c.king crazy for her I can't imagine ever feeling this way about anyone else. How can she do it? She is the great love of my life. How will I ever be anything to her that comes close?"

Shannon parked her hands on his shoulders. She was tiny, and he towered over her small frame, but in that moment, she was the strong one. "You are my big brother who I have always looked up to, leaned on, and relied on. You've been like a watchdog, looking out for all of us. But you've forgotten to take care of yourself."

He rolled his eyes. "Fine," he said, not denying it. "But what does that mean?"

"You've got it wrong, Michael. Because you understand love on this powerful, intense level. That's your strength, but it's also your weakness. To you, love is an all-or-nothing proposition." She moved her hand back and forth like a pendulum. "You love Dad; you don't love Mom."

He scoffed. "Of course I don't love her. How could I?"

She sighed and squeezed his arm. "All I'm saying is you feel everything in your bones, in your marrow. And it's not conceivable to you that love can be more than one person, more than one thing. Like how you felt about Brent and how angry you were with him."

Michael flashed back to his reaction when Shannon told him she was together again with Brent. He hadn't been happy, and he'd told Brent as much. But he'd softened eventually. He'd welcomed Brent into the family because of the man's deep love for his sister. "But we're good now. Brent and I get along."

"And I am so, so glad. But my point is this-right now with Annalise, you're stuck in All-or-Nothing Michael Land. You're the Michael who hated Brent and only saw him one way."

"And what way am I seeing things?"

"You think it's either you or Julien. But the fact that Annalise loved her husband is actually a d.a.m.n fine thing," Shannon said, staring pointedly at him. "It says something about her character that she never strayed from him, and had the strength to turn away from you and give him all she had during their marriage. But you've somehow twisted that positive into proof that her heart is finished, and she can't possibly care for you."

"Fine," he grumbled, flas.h.i.+ng back to what she'd told him about the photos of him. The alb.u.m of their days together long ago, and the new pictures too. And while Annalise had shared so many moments with her husband, she'd shared so much with him too. Michael had been her first love, her first kiss, the first person to make her soar in pleasure. "Maybe I have. But still..."

She raised a finger, stopping him. "You have, and what I hope you can start to see is that it's possible to love two people deeply, madly, and truly."

He narrowed his eyes. "How? How can you say that?"

Her next words came out in a soft breath. "I love two people deeply."

He arched an eyebrow in question. As far as he knew, Brent was it for her-her one and only. Her first love and her last love, and she hadn't fallen for anyone in between. "Who?"

"Brent," she said, raising her chin, saying his name matter-of-factly. "I loved Brent in college for who he was then-a goofball, a funny guy, my suns.h.i.+ne hero. He's the same man, and yet he's also completely different. And I fell in love with the man he is now. A strong man, the guy who makes me laugh, a soon-to-be great father, my biggest supporter. The one."

"But he's the same man," Michael said, trying to make sense of his sister's strange theory.

She nodded. "I know. Of course he's still the same person, and yet...he's also not. He's different now than he was the first time we were together, and I loved him then, and I also fell in love with him again. With the man he is today," she said, stopping for a beat.

In her silence, a bird chirped in a tree, and somewhere on the other side of the cemetery, footsteps crunched on stone, and he spotted others visiting headstones, too. These moments surrounding him-of life and death and love and memory-tugged at everything inside him, yanking on all his heartstrings. "Okay, so maybe that's similar to how I feel for her."

"And how she feels for you," Shannon added. "But you have to rethink your all-or-nothing view of her. Because she's falling in love with you now, too." She poked him in the chest for emphasis. "She loved you then, and she loves you now, and you're fixated on what came in between. You need to let it go, because it's foolish to think there's only one great love."

"There is for me," he protested, but it was fainter this time, and his words seemed to hold less weight than they had before. Was she right? Was he proving his own theory wrong by falling in love with her all over again, but with the woman she was today?

"The girl she was at sixteen and the woman she is today are the same, but they're different." She ran a hand across her round belly. "And look at me. I love both of my babies. I love the baby I lost and the baby inside me," she said in a broken whisper. Then she held his gaze. "We have so much more capacity for love than we let ourselves feel when we're grieving."

He exhaled, then inhaled, letting her words expand and dig roots inside him. He knew she was right. He knew she was onto something. And he knew he needed to get out of his own way and let this love take shape.

Later, he met Sophie and Ryan for a drink at the Chandelier Bar after a fundraiser for a children's charity.

"Did you ask Annalise to come to the wedding?" Sophie asked once they ordered.

Michael shook his head.

Sophie pouted. "You're going to ask her, though?"

He shrugged but chased it with a probably. He needed to figure out what to say to her about so many things.

"Well, when are you seeing her again?"

"I honestly don't know. She doesn't get away much, since she helps take care of her mother. Unless it's for work."

Sophie raised an eyebrow. "Is that so?"

Michael tilted his head, trying to figure out what she meant, then decided he was tired of decoding. "Yeah, that's so."

When he returned home from work the next day, there was a delivery waiting for him at his building-a slim lavender envelope. Gripping it tightly, he rode the elevator up to the twentieth floor. His nerves were tense, tight, in case this was bad news, in case it was the end. If it was, he needed to be alone as he read it.

As soon as he entered his home, he leaned back against the door, slid his finger under the seal, and ripped it open.

Dear Michael, Sometimes, phone calls don't suffice, and email becomes insufficient for our hearts. But I worry I've been negligent with yours. That I've a.s.sumed too much, and said too little-that my fears of losing a love have held me back. Forgive me for not being as open as I wanted. Sometimes the possibility of losing someone I care deeply for is like a fist squeezing my voice, choking it.

So I turn to the written word. We've always been good with letters, haven't we? I can write down what is too hard to say at times. And that is this. You asked me something on your last night in Paris, and I gave you an answer you didn't like. But you need to know that a part of me also never stopped loving you. How could I? You were my first, and I wanted you to be my last. That part was quieter, of course, during the last decade, as it should be.

But now that part is an active part. And what I feel is so much more than a lingering fondness for a first love. It's an aching, hungry place in me, and a blissful, joyful one, too. I want you in my life, Michael. I want new experiences with you. I want pictures of you and of us, of the places we'll go, and the things we'll do. Together.

I'm trying to give you all I can. I said it badly in Paris, so I'll say it again and again.

I'm falling in love with you.

Will you please let me fall in love with you?

xoxo

Annalise

His heart beat furiously, like it had a thousand wings, trying to carry him away to her. When he called, her phone went straight to voicemail. He called a few more times but she didn't answer. That was unlike her.

At some point, he crashed on his couch, the lights of Vegas flickering brightly through the windows, watching over him.

His phone bleated sometime well after midnight. Blinking, he rubbed his eyes and hunted for it. He must have knocked it off the couch, since it sounded from the floor. He grabbed it, a slow smile spreading across his face when he saw her name.

Sliding his thumb over the screen, he answered, his voice still gravelly from sleep. "Hey you."

"Hi. Is there any chance your bed fits two?"

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.

Antic.i.p.ation skated across her flesh as she walked down the hallway on the twentieth floor, as she raised her fist, as she rapped on his door.

In less than five seconds, he opened it, looking sleep-rumpled and impossibly s.e.xy. His black hair was a mess, his jawline was thick with stubble, and his blue eyes twinkled.

He wore black pants and a striped b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt. The top two b.u.t.tons were undone, and the s.h.i.+rt was wrinkled. It was nearly one; her flight had been late. She was slated to have landed at nine, and while she'd toyed with emailing him from the plane, she'd opted for the surprise.

There was something both comforting and appealing in knowing the other person would like the surprise...of you.

A slow smile spread across his face as he drank her in, then before either one of them said a word, he tugged her inside, ran his fingers through her hair, and kissed her like crazy. She wanted to melt in his arms and spend the night like this.

When he broke the kiss, she nearly stumbled, woozy and drunk on him. He reached for her arm, steadying her, then he brushed a few loose strands of hair from her face, flas.h.i.+ng a casual grin. "So what brings you to town?"

She collected her thoughts, s.h.i.+fting away from his kiss. "Your soon-to-be sister-in-law hired me for a boudoir session. And she asked if I'd want to photograph her wedding, too. Seems she heard I don't get away from France much unless it's for work, so she arranged two jobs for me here. I don't usually do weddings, but I find jobs in Vegas have a particular appeal," she said with a sly grin.

Michael smiled, too. "She's a clever one."

"I'm excited to meet her," she said, then cast her eyes to her suitcase. "Is it presumptuous for me to not book a hotel room for the next few days?"