Loving Your Lies (32 page)

Hands touched me. Patted me. I was shoved,
pushed, yanked, and dragged. The dog barked, fleeing from the room,
knocking Marie over. Someone kicked the kettle to the corner.

And then Julian was with me.

Grabbing my shoulders, he shook me once,
forcing me to stare into his intense blue eyes. This alone stopped
my screams, even with the excruciating pain searing up my arm. Next
he closed his fingers gently around my burned hand.

And the pain eased.

My jaw dropped. I gaped at him. But he
didn’t give me a single second to gather myself. Ushering me to the
sink, he turned on the tap and held my hand underneath the stream
to cool my burn. But it wasn’t necessary. The pain had fully
vanished, and the way he’d wrapped his fingers around mine, the
water didn’t even touch my skin.

Breathing deep, I kept still in his hold but
focused on his tense face. After a long moment, he switched his
gaze to me.

“Marie, call an ambulance,” my mother
cried.

“No,” Julian commanded, without tearing his
gaze from my eyes. “I’ll drive her.”

I sniffed, completely dumbstruck, when he
wrapped a clean dish cloth around my hand that by now should have
started to blister. Probably just to cover up the evidence of a
sound skin from everyone’s eyes. I let him proceed and moved toward
the door at his firm urging.

Grabbing Marie’s car keys, which he’d
formerly placed on the credenza, Julian wrapped his arm around my
middle and made me walk outside at a resolute stride. My head
swarming, I had to watch my feet at his push. In the garage, he
opened the passenger door for me, helped me climb into the seat,
and leaned over to buckle me in.

Seconds later he pulled out. The tires
squealed as he sped off toward town.

The spinning of my mind ceased. I gave my
hand a test as I clenched it around the dish cloth. Nothing. No
pain, no tickle, no soreness. How was this possible? What was there
in Julian’s touch to make a second-degree burn heal in the blink of
an eye? As if it never happened.

I gave him two minutes—one hundred and
twenty flicks of the second hand on my watch precisely—during which
he could have come up with a reasonable explanation.

But he remained silent.

I removed the cloth and tossed it into his
lap. “You can stop now. We both know I don’t need to see a
doctor.”

A couple of heartbeats went by without a
change on his face. He just stared out the windshield. Then the car
skittered to a halt at the side of the street. Pressed by the seat
belt, all air whizzed from my lungs. When I could breathe again, I
waited for his reaction.

And he still said nothing. Gaze focused
front, his knuckles turned white.

“You’re going to break the steering wheel.”
Slowly, I reached out to touch his clamped hand, but he hissed as
if in deep pain and jerked it away. So did I.

“Julian, what is going on?” My voice cracked
on the last word.

He inhaled deeply, swept his finger and
thumb over his eyebrows, then pinched the bridge of his nose. All
of a sudden, he yanked the door open and climbed out, faster than I
could reach over to stop him. The bang of the door slamming shut
had my ears ringing.

After a long moment and a deep, encouraging
breath, I eased out, too. Julian kept up his angry pace, up and
down the street, kicking at stones in his path.

Scruples held me back, rooted. But the
moment he pivoted once more and I caught a glimpse of his torn
face, I realized it wasn’t wrath that drove him wild like this. It
was frustration.

He stopped a few feet away from the car.

“Julian, I need to know what’s going on
here.”

“Then tell me what you want to hear!” he
shouted, rounding the car.

“The truth, in God’s name,” I yelled back,
feeling cornered with the car at my back and his wild face in front
of me. “How about your last name, for starters? Or where exactly is
the agency located you apparently work for? And then, of course,
how the hell did you heal my hand?”

He braced himself against the roof of the
car, hemming me in between his muscular arms. His head dropped
between his shoulders. Silky blond strands fell over his forehead,
begging me to run my fingers through them.

My hands fisted at my sides. “Why won’t you
tell me?”

“I can’t.” He spoke through gritted
teeth.

He could answer none of my three questions?
Rage soared from my gut to my tightening chest. “You can’t, or you
don’t want to?”

Suddenly, his eyes turned from their usual
brilliant blue to a misty gray. I sucked in a breath, and he
quickly shut his eyes.

“What are you?” I whispered, tears of
tension trying to win the battle. But I fought hard to keep them at
bay, because however alien Julian seemed to me at this moment, I
still wouldn’t cave in to my qualms. I wouldn’t be scared of
him.

There was a long pause in which his lips
compressed to a thin line. “Please, Jona, don’t do this to me.” The
softness of his tone failed to cover the torture he obviously went
through. His forehead lay in wrinkles, his eyes were squeezed shut.
Short breaths erupted fast from his chest.

To see so much torture in his gaze was hard
to bear. Cupping his face, I made him look at me again. I swallowed
hard at the fading light in his eyes that I had gotten so used to
since the first day we had met. “Why don’t you trust me?”

“I do.”

“But not enough.” I leaned forward to brush
my lips against his. “You broke through to me so easily. Now let me
know what I can do to get through to you.” Pressing my lips to the
corner of his mouth, I inhaled the scent of warm, wild wind and
ocean, feeling the need to get closer to him. Not physically. But
to reach for the part of him that he fought so hard to keep locked
away from me.

His stiff reaction told me he didn’t want me
to proceed with the kiss, but he didn’t pull away either. A deep
moan tore from him as he finally gave in to my urge. His hands slid
from the roof of the car to lock behind my waist. I cupped his
neck, stood on tiptoes and pressed hard against his chest. His
tongue swept over my lips, delved in between the seam, and began a
slow game of give and take.

With a sigh, I broke the kiss and gazed into
his eyes. The blue was shining through again. “You taught me how to
trust you. It’s time to return this trust, don’t you think?”

He shook his head. “This is not like me
helping you to step out on the balcony.”

“Then it’s what? Me jumping off a
cliff?”

His soft lips pressed against my brow,
infecting me with a new rush of relief and serenity. For the flash
of a second, I knew it would be wise to jerk out of his hold now.
To stay clear in my mind and stop whatever magic he was trying to
weave around me. Because—

Why again
?

Tension eased from my body and mind. I
didn’t react fast enough, and it took him only a heartbeat to make
me surrender. I sank into his embrace, reveled in his scent and
touch.

“In your case,” he whispered and his lips
brushed my hair. “It would be like sky diving.”

In spite of the unusual sleepiness that
crept over me, I heard myself say, “I would sky dive with you.” And
it was nothing but the truth.

It had to be the shock of my burn and the
argument with Julian that exhausted me. My eyes refused to stay
open, yawns kept breaking my train of thought.

“And yet, you wouldn’t trust me enough to
love me.” His voice came from far away as darkness closed in on
me.

24

HE CUT OUT A CHAPTER

I CAME AWAKE to the monotonous engine drone
of Marie’s car. My temple pressed against the cool glass of the
passenger side window. My head throbbed as the car rolled over the
cobble stone driveway and into the garage. A low moan of pain
escaped me as I turned toward the driver.

The sight of Julian confused me. I searched
my mind for a reason why we’d been out this late. It was already
dark, and no one was with us. In the little light the dashboard
provided, Julian’s face appeared tense.

“Did I fall asleep?” I rubbed my eyes and
noticed something was wrapped around my left hand, preventing my
fingers from spreading. A bandage. “What’s going on?”

Julian cut the engine, leaving us in the
dark, and turned to me. “You fainted.” His ominous tone made my
toes curl inside my boots.

“I fainted? Why? And where have we been
anyway?” I tried to go through the events of the day. Marie had
taken me to the cemetery. I cleaned windows all afternoon. Albert
tried to shoot me with an ancient pistol because I didn’t find any
useful information about Julian’s employer. And a huge potato
knocked me over.

Okay, something was seriously wrong with my
head.

“You burned your hand with boiling water
when you helped Marie in the kitchen. Don’t you remember?”

No.
And what was with that testing
edge to his voice?

I shook my head. The fog in my mind
irritated me no end. It seemed an entire chapter of today had gone
astray.

“I drove you to the local clinic to get your
hand examined,” he suggested.

I shook my head again, nothing of what he
said made sense.

“They applied antibacterial ointment and
bandaged your wounds. You need to leave this gauze on for the next
forty-eight hours. Then your skin should be fine again. They said
there shouldn’t be any scarring.”

“Ah, okay.” If my hand was burned so badly,
I probably wouldn’t want to see it anyway. “And when exactly did I
pass out?”

“You collapsed on the way home. Aftermath of
the shock most likely.” He pulled the key from the ignition and
grabbed a dish towel that lay in a bundle on the middle console.
What this rag was doing in the car was, like the rest of his story,
a riddle to me.

“It’s normal that you don’t remember what
happened during the hours before you passed out.” Julian grimaced.
“The missing information might never return.”

The resoluteness in his tone was hard to
understand. I followed him when he climbed out of the car.

He waited for me at the entrance to the
house. “They gave you some medication, so at least you shouldn’t
feel any pain.”

He was right. My hand felt totally normal.
Just the pull of the bandage annoyed me a little bit. It might have
been easier to accept the gauze if my skin hurt, but then I was
better off with feeling nothing, of course.

Julian unlocked the front door, pushed it
open, and let me enter first. My entire family, all three members,
stormed toward me as soon as we crossed the threshold. Gathered
around me, Marie and Albert took turns at shooting questions. “Are
you all right? Is your hand all right? What did the doctors say?”
It was touching how much everyone cared.

But one person looked the most worried of
all. My mother stood next to her sister, not daring to touch me
like Marie did, but her terrified eyes captured me from three feet
away.

The vague memory of her and Julian entering
the kitchen this afternoon swam in my mind. I also recalled she’d
been seeing a doctor today. Strange how I could gaze at her face
and for once felt no hatred.

The cemetery.

Images of her name carved into white marble
danced up and lanced my heart. I shoved the disturbing thought
aside and focused on her pale face again. Looking like shit, she
shouldn’t be up. But like my aunt and uncle, she’d been staying
awake to await my return. In a way I was grateful.

“I’m fine,” I said before turning away from
her. “But as it seems, I fell over unconscious. Julian can fill you
in on the details. If you don’t mind, I’d rather go to bed
now.”

Everyone stepped aside to let me ascend the
stairs. Julian’s words, when he retold the story I’d heard a few
minutes ago, chased me upstairs. It still felt like he was talking
about someone else.

*

The blanket wrapped around my shoulders kept
me warm while sitting on the threshold of the open French door in
the late night hours. On my last check, it had been eleven fifteen.
The nagging feeling of having lost a however small part of the day
left me anxious for a chat with Julian. But he hadn’t come upstairs
yet.

My hand itched underneath the bandage. Since
I felt no pain at all, I played with the thought of taking the
white muslin off in spite of the doctor’s warning. But never being
a real fan of blood or wounds, I restrained and decided to go
looking for Julian instead.

My tailbone hurt from sitting on the floor
for so long. Rubbing my bum with one hand, I tossed the blanket
onto the bed and sneaked out into the dark hallway. No sounds
drifted from the ground floor. Most likely everyone had gone to bed
already. Why hadn’t Julian?

On my tiptoes, I took the flight of stairs,
sliding my hand on the rail. I turned left to peek into the parlor.
It was dark and empty, and so was the kitchen. The door to Albert’s
study was closed, no light shone underneath. My trip down here had
been in vain.

Then the sudden sound of Julian speaking
made me spin on my heel, kick-starting my heart into high gear. Of
course. I slapped my brow. Where else would he be than in my
mother’s room?

I drew closer, staying to the side and away
from the door in case one of them came out. Unlike the last times
when I accidentally eavesdropped on their conversations, this time
I deliberately chose to stay and listen. If Julian spoke to her
about my misfortune today, it was my bloody right to hear it.

And then there was the slight chance he
would talk to her about his little secrets…his dual life. I might
have forgotten part of today, but last night’s conversation with
him rang in my ears clear as Christmas bells. He wouldn’t get away
with
there’s nothing we need to talk about
.