“Easy? You want to talk to me about easy? I’ve run my reputation into the ground for you, and I’d do the same again. And you were looking for easy?”
“You’re to be married. This was never anything other than a fling,” I say, repeating the sentiments as though the sound of them will finally lodge themselves into my thick brain.
“Why can’t it be more? I love you.”
For a moment, everything comes to a screeching halt.
Nick takes a deep breath. “I love you, and it’s driving me mad, and if you want more, just say the word.”
We’ve been so careful for so long to dance around the word, as though it is a red line we cannot afford to cross. It was easier to pretend it was just sex. And yet, here we are.
And still, “love” isn’t the magic word I thought it was when I was a young girl.
Mistress, wife, at the moment they don’t feel all that different. Neither one means he will see me as an equal. He wants me to abandon the only thing that has given me a sense of purpose in my life; he cannot have the political career he envisions with someone like me by his side.
“I was honest with you from the beginning,” I reply, a tremor in my voice. “I’m not looking to raise a family and have a quiet life. I won’t be a political asset and host dinner parties for you. That’s not who I am, not someone I care to be. I didn’t want to be that girl when I was a debutante living in Cuba, and now that everything has changed, I can’t be that girl.”
“Fine. I don’t care about any of that. Be yourself. Just be you and be mine.”
“Don’t.” I swallow, my heart breaking as I do the kind thing, the right thing, even as it tears me apart. “You should go back to Washington.”
He hesitates, as though there’s more he can say, as if he can convince me somehow, his gaze searching.
“So this is it, then?” he asks, finally.
I nod.
There are so many things I want to say, so many feelings pushing inside me, but at the end of the day, it’s the urge to run that drives me. I’ve never been a coward before, but this time, I make an exception.
I’ve never been in love before, either.
We are truly, irrevocably over.
chapter twenty-one
I’m sitting in the living room curled up with a book when Isabel enters the room, her heels tapping the marble floor in a distinctive cadence that indicates one thing and one thing only—she’s in a tizzy.
“How could you?” Isabel snaps by way of greeting.
I look up from the book, reading becoming my refuge in the days following Nick and I ending things between us.
“What have I done this time?” I ask.
With sisters, you never know—it could be a dress that was borrowed and never returned, a scuffed pair of sandals, a stolen boyfriend—the possibilities are endless, really. Isabel has been even more on edge lately with her impending wedding, and where I thought the notion of becoming Mrs. Thomas Tinsley would fill her with nuptial bliss, it seems to have done the opposite and made her more irritable than ever.
“I just got off the phone with Thomas,” she answers.
“And?”
Isabel can be so dramatic sometimes.
“Diane Stanhope saw you going into that house Nick Preston bought on the beach the other day.”
My fingers curl around the spine of my book.
“Everyone is talking about it. Thomas doesn’t know if he wants to be associated with our family now.”
Her words come out with a strangled sob, the utter panic in Isabel’s voice eliciting a stab of pity. In Cuba, marriage was expected of us, but here with our fortunes and future much less certain, marriage has become a much more serious endeavor considering the alternatives before us.
“I didn’t realize Thomas was so concerned with my love life,” I say carefully.
Eduardo warned me about this. So did Isabel.
“Lianne Reynolds saw you embracing under a palm tree on the beach.”
“We weren’t embracing.”
“But you are his mistress. All those things people have been saying about the two of you are true, aren’t they? He gave you that diamond bracelet. Bought the house on the beach so you could, what, meet up and have sex?”
If the situation weren’t so dire, I would almost laugh at the outrage in Isabel’s voice at the word “sex.” If the situation weren’t so dire, and my mother weren’t standing in the doorway of the living room.
My mother’s gaze is pinned on me. “Isabel, leave us,” she says, her voice filled with ice. When my father loses his temper, it’s a heady explosion. When my mother loses hers, it’s a brutal freeze.
Isabel’s face pales as it likely hits her that she’s broken the cardinal rule between siblings—never air our dirty laundry before our parents.
“Beatriz—” Isabel whispers, an unspoken plea of apology in her eyes.
I ignore it.
There will be no undoing what has been done.
Isabel leaves us, and it’s just my mother and me squaring off in the living room. We’re practically mirror images, down to the style of dresses we wear, the only obvious distinction between us the intervening years, and even then, my mother has aged quite well, time clearly bending to her will.
“You won’t see him again.”
I don’t respond.
“How could you do this, Beatriz? To your sisters, to your father, to me? After everything we’ve been through? After everything you’ve put us through? I knew you could be reckless, but I didn’t think you could be stupid. He’s engaged. His fiancée’s family is wealthy, powerful, established. So is his family. He’s a U.S. senator. What did you think would happen? You’ve ruined everything.”
“Don’t you mean I’ve ruined myself?”
There’s no pleasure to be had in arguing with my mother, and any points scored never feel like a victory. It would be so much easier if we got along, if our temperaments weren’t so different—or are they too similar? I could never tell the difference.
“What do you want from me? Is it the husband? The big house? The child? Do you want me to be like Elisa? Or Isabel? Just tell me what you want from me so I can be that.”
“I want you to succeed. To marry better than your sisters have. To do what is expected of you.”
“And what if I don’t want to marry for social status? What if I just want to be happy? What then? What if I don’t need some man to pay my way? If I want to be able to support myself?”