Years and years of struggling to forget, and my mind supplied the memories as if it was yesterday. Mal’s arm a bind around my stomach, crushing me breathless against him. The pungent scent of his sweat and favorite Creed cologne. His lips on my ear as he growled not to scream.
My eyes pinched shut as it all came back. “He backhanded you, slicing your cheek with his spiked ring. He was known for that back home. Most of his men walked around with scars on their faces—forever marking them... and you.”
“Who is he?” Carter rasped.
“What he is, simply and honestly, is my stalker. He’s pursued me for years. Followed me across the entire country and will stop at nothing to get me back. He’s sick, Carter. He believes he’s in love with me. Raised in blood and warped by violence, he’s gotten everything he’s ever wanted by taking it with force. Mal thinks I should be no different.”
His face crumpled. “In love with you? But we were attacked by a grown man.”
I said nothing. Just nodded.
“Oh my god.” Carter sunk his head in his hands, face bleaching whiter than the moonlight. “I don’t understand, Belle. Why did you lie?”
I couldn’t look at him. “He threw you and you smashed your head on the boulder. I saw you lying there still and bleeding, and I screamed. I screamed and screamed. The nanny heard me and called out for us.
“Mal panicked. He tried to run off with me, but I bit him and made him let go. He dropped me and I rushed to you. Mal came after me, skidding to a stop when Nanny called again, closer that time. He lost his chance to get away with me clean. He had to run before she saw him, and she didn’t. She walked into an empty clearing and found me crying over you. When they asked what happened, you told the truth, but I—”
“Told everyone I fell climbing the boulder, cut my cheek on a rock, and was lying to get out of trouble. You swore there was no man.”
I cried. Great, hiccupping sobs that made it almost impossible to speak. “I’m sorry, C-Carter. I’m so sorry.”
“Why?”
“I told you.” I stroked his cold cheek. “I did it because I loved you.
“I loved Hawk’s Bay. I loved my school, and my friends, and my life. If my parents had known he found me again, they’d have packed me up and moved the next day, and I couldn’t stand to lose you.
“In my stupid, selfish, twelve-year-old mind, my only option was to lie,” I said. “I lied to your parents. My parents. The police. The doctors. Everyone. I lied until I almost believed it myself... but you didn’t. I j-just wanted us to go back to how we were. I was so desperate to convince you your head trauma made you imagine him, that I argued and fought you. I called you crazy.
“By the time I truly understood what I’d done, I was afraid. The betrayal of a lie spreads deeper the longer you let it go on. Telling the truth would’ve broken my parents’ trust in me. It would have sealed your hatred. I was afraid, Carter, that once I told the truth, we couldn’t go back.”
I traveled down and gripped his hands. “Can we, Carter? Our love story”—I choked on a laugh that was part sob—“tell me it’s not over.”
“Can we come back from this?” Carter raised our hands, and my head with them. “My parents believed you, Belle. They always thought something was wrong with me. I was neurotic. Argumentative. Wouldn’t let things go. Now I was making up dangerous men in the woods. My refusal to admit it was fantasy was all the proof they needed to stick me in therapy. For months, people... you... tried to convince me I was crazy, and I couldn’t understand what I’d done so wrong. All I wanted to do was protect you.”
“Carter, please.” Wetness soaked me from head to toe. The ocean pulled and tugged to drag me in, and the strength to resist was leeching away. “I’ll do anything to make it up to you.”
“There’s no need. You were right, Belle.” And then he was gone. I fell on the sand, gazing up as he stood and turned away.
“We can’t come back from this.”
Chapter Eleven
“When are you two going to make up?”
I tucked my head under Preston’s neck, distracting him with kisses on his collarbone. Carter came out onto the private terrace, saw me, and turned right around. Nathan and Preston could still stand to touch me, so I assumed Carter didn’t share the rest of our story, but things had been frosty between us for the last two weeks.
“Carter has every right to be mad at me,” I said simply. “If he doesn’t want to make up, I have to accept it.”
“Wish you both would tell us what’s going on,” Nathan said. “The clown thing was cold, Belle, but it wouldn’t take him two weeks to get over it.”
You think using his fear of clowns against him is cold? Just wait until you hear about my cruel, targeted mission to cover up his brutal attack and make him question his sanity. I’m the worst kind of fucking scum. I deserve worse than the silent treatment.
It was what I deserved, and having known that, I still wished he would talk to me. It didn’t matter what he said. That he forgave me. That the engagement and his plans to make our wedded days a misery were still on. Or that our love story ended here—with my sacrifice. We had no more battles to fight. Carter Knight and Belle Adler were through.
I would’ve taken anything so long as he looked at me. Spoke to me. Whatever ended this crushing silence.
“I have to go, guys.” I kissed them both. “The boys are on party planning duty and Zion’s saddled with finding the entertainment. He wants to do it right and watch his picks play live. He needs the list of bands I checked out.”
“We’ll see you on the golf course.”
Another day. Another adventure on the good ole cove.
After the counseling session, we were piling onto the shuttle and being driven to the opposite end of the island where a country club and a round of golf awaited us.
Until then, Zion, Owen, and I hunted down gig times and worked up our place of attack. It was crazy but, if you asked me in a soundproof room with the music turned all the way up and the shades drawn, I would confess I liked— no, that I was loving my time in Citrine Cove.
Hanging out with Kelli, Zion, and Mila. Trying a new thing every day with the people I would have shared four years with if Mom and Dad weren’t worried about me alone in a boarding school with Mal on my tail. It felt like falling in with the friends I was supposed to have.
Then there was Preston and Nathan. Most days I forgot we only had the summer. A good thing because that knowledge would color the time we had together, and I indulged each kiss. Every stolen moment. Every night tangled in their sheets.
Nathan was right—as he was about a fair number of things. Life had been so terrible for so long. One more summer in love wasn’t too much to ask.
I grinned at my boys through the sliding glass. Sappy, siren-addled hypocrite I was, it didn’t change the fact that I was sinking deeper into my feelings for these men every day.
Who could blame me? Citrine Cove is where lovers find each other. The glittering ocean, dancing palms, sunny days, and warm nights were designed to hop us up on the happy drug and drive us to find someone to share it with.