The Secret (The Evolution Of Sin Book 2) (21 page)

Once, making the comparison between the perfection that was Elena and little old me would have induced coma-like melancholy and self-doubt but I knew myself better now. I loved myself more. And I knew that despite our imperfect origins, Sin was inexplicably drawn to
me
.

For the first time since I found out who he really was, I wondered if that was enough to make him choose me over her.

“Oh by the way, we have an appointment with Miss Hertz this weekend. One o’clock on Saturday. I already let Margot know and she said it wouldn’t be a problem with your schedule,” Elena said.

Sinclair grew exceptionally still beside me, the kind of immobility that somehow seems more obvious than a shout in an empty room. I found myself unconsciously clenching my muscles, freezing in the act of bringing my wine glass to my lips. The air grew static as a storm began to brew.

“Elena,” Sinclair said softly. “I thought we spoke about this.”

As if to make up for his lack of movement, Elena stood up and became a flurry of activity, placing coasters under our glasses and fluffing already plumped pillows.

She didn’t look at him when she said, “I know we did, but one conversation that came from absolutely nowhere should not derail our plans to have a family.”

Oh,
my God
. I was paralyzed by my urge to flee, the rush of adrenaline through my blood causing some kind of overload in my nervous system. I prayed fervently, with a passion that would have rivaled Mama’s, to any God that would hear me, that they wouldn’t talk about this in front of me.

I’d never been a very lucky woman.

“We should discuss this later when we can be alone. For now, please call Miss Hertz and cancel the appointment,” Sinclair said, so reasonably that even I wanted to punch him.

But Elena didn’t rage against his condescension. Instead, she retracted into herself like a threatened sea anemone. It was almost amazing to watch her grow cold and distant, mostly because it was exactly the way Sinclair reacted to conflict. I wondered, horrified, how they ever overcame difficulties when both of them gave into the urge to flee instead of fight.

“I will not. It took us months to get this far, Daniel, and I will not cancel this appointment on one of your whims.”

“One of my whims?” Sinclair asked, with one eyebrow raised.

Elena stuck out her delicate chin.

Slowly he rose out of the chair, with such controlled discipline that I imagined his joints clicking into place like an automaton. There was something so absurdly terrifying about the calculated movements, the way he cocked his head just slightly to the side to study her. This was the businessman, the Dom, the predator. Someone that dared you to fuck with them just so that they could have the pleasure of ripping you to shreds.

Suddenly, I felt terribly for Elena.

“We aren’t happy, Elena. That is no atmosphere to bring a child into,” he said.

“Speak for yourself,” she snapped, hands on hips. “I am happy.”

He only stared at her. I’d never met anyone who could use silence as a weapon like Sinclair could.

“I want a baby.”

“Do you want me to say yes only to please you?” he asked, in that cool, quiet voice.

My heart was beating so loudly, I wondered that they didn’t hear it.

“You agreed, Daniel. You agreed years ago when,” she paused and sadness flared across her features, “when we first got together. You promised that one day we would have kids. It’s important, isn’t it? That you agreed? I know you never wanted them. You don’t think I don’t know that? You do not want kids, you do not want marriage, but you want me, don’t you? And I
need
this.”

My eyes swiveled in my frozen face just in time to see Sinclair deflate. His features softened and his eyes took on that electric glow that I had once thought was reserved only for me. Wordlessly, he breached the space between them and took Elena into his arms, one hand locked firmly on her neck as he tucked it into his shoulder. Almost immediately, she let out a gusty sigh and wilted into his arms.

I stared at their embrace for a long moment, cataloguing the way she fit to him like a tailored suit, how beautifully and tenderly they clutched each other. When I finally wrenched my gaze away from my worst nightmare, my eyes over corrected and flew to the opposite wall of the room where a portrait picture of Éclair hung over the mantle. In it, Elena sat in a rigid chair with Sinclair standing behind her, one hand on her shoulder. It was the kind of painting I expected to find in a royal museum and the sight of it punched me right between the eyes.

I may have murmured something as I peeled myself off the couch and zombie-walked down the hallway to my bedroom for the night, but I couldn’t be sure and either way, they didn’t notice me leave. I closed the door softly behind me and felt my way towards the bed in the pitch dark. I flopped on top of the many-pillowed bed and stared into the darkness as if it was a prophet, sent to deliver answers. When none proved to be forthcoming, I turned on my side, clutched my knees to my chest, and cried and cried and cried.

Chapter Sixteen.

The next morning, after finally falling into a tear-soaked coma, I woke up before the crack of dawn in order to escape the apartment without having to face either my sister or her boyfriend.

Her boyfriend
. That was how I was going to refer to Sinclair as from now on. Not my Frenchman, not my friend, not even Sinclair but as Daniel, Elena’s boyfriend. If I could force myself to think of him as this other person, as I might have known him had I met him properly, I might have a chance in hell of getting over him. I imagined meeting him for the first time at a family dinner and found it easy to believe I would have found him haughty and remote, condescending and one-dimensional. His beauty would have imprinted itself on my psyche – it simply couldn’t be helped – but I wondered if the chemistry between us would have remained caged and hidden behind the bars of acceptable social norms.

As of this morning, I was turning over a new leaf. It didn’t erase the sins I had already committed but it would keep Elena happy, my family intact and Sinclair firmly imbedded in the kind of lifestyle he coveted. As I straightened the bed and vainly tried to smooth the wrinkles from my slept-in clothes, I considered moving back to Paris. Christopher had found me there but by now, he might have moved on.

My thoughts were still spinning with possibilities as I tiptoed out of the bedroom and into the living room. I was just peeling open the front door when the overhead light flicked on, freezing me like a thief in the spotlight.

To my surprise, when I turned around it wasn’t Sinclair who stood there, silently contemplating me, but Elena.

She wore beautiful black silk pajamas with white piping and a matching facemask pushed back her softly tousled curls. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes and she wrung her hands in an unusual display of nervousness.

“Morning,” I said into the awkward silence.

She blinked. “You look like you are getting ready to do the walk of shame. If you have to leave right now, at least borrow a jacket.”

My spine straightened painfully under her casual censure. “I’m fine like this, Elena, but thank you.”

“You look like a siren. Do you want men propositioning you on the street?” she snapped.

You look like a siren
. It took monumental effort not to collapse into tears right there on my sister’s living room floor.

“Fine, if you don’t mind then I would love to borrow a jacket.”

Elena nodded curtly and went to the closet to pull out a long Burberry trench coat, the same one she had been wearing the night of my welcome home party. I let her help me into it and tried to breath through my mouth to avoid the aroma of her Chanel Number 5 perfume. She lingered over the collar, turning it up against my throat and smoothing my wayward hair around my cheeks.

“You are very beautiful,” she said, almost as if it pained her.

“We have good genes.”

To my utter surprise and dismay, Elena’s lower lip curled into a pout and wobbled.

“Daniel doesn’t want to be with me anymore,” she whispered so quietly that I was almost sure I had imagined it.

“
Scusi
?” I asked, my muddled brain devolving back to Italian.

Her dark eyes shone like polished graphite. “He doesn’t love me anymore.”

My heart hiccoughed in my chest but I fought down my own feelings with a Herculean effort and gently took hold of her limp hand in order to lead her to the couch.

“First of all, where is he now?” I asked.

“Work. He went in around four thirty this morning. To get away from me.” She sniffed wetly and tugged her knees to her chest like a little girl in need of comfort.

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“It is. He always goes into work when he needs to get away. Even on Thanksgiving.”

I actually knew that was the truth but I kept my mouth shut.

She placed her pert little chin on her knees and looked down at her perfectly painted toes. “Things were fine before he went to Mexico. I swear. I mean, we weren’t having sex much but he never seemed to mind before.”

“What,” I cleared my throat and fought to be there for my sister despite the absurdity of the situation. “Why do you think things changed?”

She shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Have you asked him?” It was too surreal, to be having this conversation with her, my sister and his Darling. A small nefarious part of me wondered what would happen if she ever found out that it was
me
, that her belittled younger sister was the one that had changed things between them. Would she think back to this conversation and hate me even more for guiding her through a storm of my own making?

The obvious answer was a resounding
fuck yes
.

“He said Mexico woke him up, that he had been numb for years and he missed pain.” Elena scrunched up her perfect nose. “Who misses pain?”

I shrugged as if I didn’t understand. “Some people think that pain amplifies life, that it heightens pleasures that would otherwise seem mundane.”

My elegant sister snorted.

“If you think about it for a second, it makes sense,” I tried to explain, suddenly eager to make her realize how pivotal hurting was, that it was an essential part of the human experience. Maybe if I was eloquent enough, she could finally understand me. “Why would God give us so much misery if it wasn’t for a reason?”

“We aren’t religious,” she argued, with the second-nature exactitude of a lawyer.

“I was just trying to help.”

“Yes, well, as pretty as the words are, they don’t work. Not when I’m in so much…” She waved her hand around, unable to even articulate the messy, passionate mass of feelings clogging her systems like so much hair in a drain.

“I think you should call Cosima or maybe even Mama.”

I clearly wasn’t the one to talk with her about this.

She looked off over her shoulder into the city beyond the windows. The apartment over looked the meticulously maintained Gramercy Park, a private garden accessed by fewer than 350 keys and one of New York’s first attempts at city planning. It was the reason Elena had been drawn to the house, I knew even though she hadn’t told me. The beautifully tempered greenery and exclusivity of the place would have appealed to her obsession with prestige and control.

“I want you to paint me.”

“Pardon me?”

“I want you to paint me,” Elena reiterated, turning to face me with a face made of granite. “I want you to paint me like this, like I am right now.”

“Elena…” I hesitated, not only because of the space she was in at the moment but also because I didn’t know how to depict this sister on canvas. She was an enigma to me, something unknown and frankly terrifying. I could paint her in four hundred different ways and it still would not do justice to the contrary nature of her personality. I only understood one thing about Elena and it was this, she was so desperate to be everything at once, perfect in all ways, that she had no definitive identity.

She visibly deflated at my hesitation but my sympathy, my
villainy
, wasn’t enough to make me paint her. I refused to dishonor my art and us both by combining the three.

“One day soon,” I promised. “When you are feeling better. You obviously had a terrible sleep and I would need you to hold a pose for hours.”

She pursed her lips but seemed to believe me, sagging back into the couch cushions like a discarded wind-up doll. My heart throbbed with the echo of hers, a sympathy beat that made it difficult to catch my breath.

“Are you all set for Thanksgiving tonight?” I asked, fully expecting Miss Organized to have everything ready to go.

“I ordered everything from Dean & Deluca, they should be here by four o’clock to deliver it.”

“Did you order desert?”

“A pumpkin pie. Why?”

I stood up and walked over to her, offering my hand with a smile. “Come on, why don’t we make tiramisu?”

Her lips wobbled before forming a smile. “We haven’t made one of those since we were teenagers.”

“Exactly,” I said, strangely happy with the idea of spending the morning baking with my sister. “Why don’t I call Mama and we can make one together?”

Elena took my hand, coming to her feet before me. We smiled shyly at each other for a moment with our hands clasped.

Thank you
, she mouthed.

I’m sorry
, I wanted to say but instead, I squeezed her hand and asked, “Do you remember the recipe for the homemade lady fingers?”

When Sinclair entered the kitchen Cage and Santiago were close at his heels and the morning had passed into the late evening. The gorgeous mahogany dining table, which I couldn’t help but notice was the same shade as Sinclair’s hair, was laden with flower arrangements stuffed into pumpkins Elena, Mama and I had carved ourselves that morning. Lindi Ortega’s bluesy country music threaded through the speakers, lending itself to the candle lit atmosphere and the heady scent of Dean & Deluca’s Thanksgiving dinner warming in Elena’s underutilized double-wide ovens.

I knew he was in the kitchen the moment he crossed the threshold even though we hadn’t heard the front door open over the swell of our voices raised to sing along to Desperado. Elena froze beside me a few seconds later, bent over the open oven to check on the turkey. She shot me a frantic look as Mama warmly greeted the men and I nodded at her because I didn’t know what else to do. She took comfort from the gesture and straightened, self-consciously patting her frilled apron. She hadn’t changed into something formal yet and I knew that bothered her.

“Daniel,” she greeted quietly before going to place a soft kiss on his cheek.

He wound his arm around her waist and tugged her into a quick hug. “The place looks beautiful.”

“Thank you.” She blushed. “Mama, Giselle and I spent all day decorating.”

“We made also tiramisu,” Mama said, beaming proudly at the sight of Elena and Sinclair together.

“Oh, where?” Cage asked, darting forward to open the fridge in search of the treat.

Mama
tsk
ed him and slapped at his hand as it shot forward to taste the cocoa covered mascarpone top. “You wait!”

He pouted dramatically, batting his eyelashes at her. “But I promise to share with Iago. You know, Caprice, he has never had the privilege of your cooking.”

“We helped too,” I reminded him.

He made a disgusted face. “In that case, I hope you ordered something else for dessert too. Just in case, of course.”

“Of course,” I repeated mildly.

I squealed when he lunged at me, pulling me into his arms for a smacking kiss on the lips.

“In any case, you look good enough to eat so I could always have you for the last course,” he growled lasciviously.

I laughed and tugged at his thickly braided hair. “You rogue.”

“You flatterer.”

“Put her down, Cage,” Sinclair ordered with his arm still looped around Elena. “And try to behave tonight, will you?”

Cage pursed his lips and stared at me with sparkling eyes as he lowered me slowly to the ground, so that our bodies brushed intimately. My eyes flicked over his shoulder to Sinclair, whose jaw was clenched as he played with the ends of Elena’s hair.

“Stop it,” I whispered to Cage. “Don’t make this harder than it already is.”

“It’s not nearly hard enough or one of you would have made a change,” he retorted but he let go of me nonetheless.

“What time will the others be here?” Santiago asked me as he came forward to press a kiss to my cheek.

His fingers brushed lightly over my neck, reminding me of our conversation yesterday about how pretty I would look in a collar. I shivered.

“Cosima should arrive around eight,” Elena said. 

“This is quite late for Thanksgiving dinner, no?” Sinclair asked.

“We’re European, Sin,” I reminded him. “It’s basically blasphemous to eat before eight.”

Humor tightened his lips but he didn’t smile and I wondered if it was because he could feel Elena’s anxious energy pulsing like a warning beacon.

“You’re right, of course, Daniel. Happily though, Sebastian should be here shortly and we can start with some drinks and appetizers,” Elena said. “I’ll just go change.”

“Boys you follow me into the living room for drinks,” Mama ordered with the grace and confidence of a woman who has been beautiful all her life.

Santiago and Cage happily complied, each already trying to charm her with stories from their childhoods living abroad.

When I turned around, Sinclair was leaning against the island counter, his shirt stretched taut between his lean shoulders and his russet head hanging low. I stepped up behind him to place a gentle hand on his back.

“It will be okay,” I said, despite my nerves and despite my resolve to treat him with indifference.

“
On a des casseroles au cul
,” he muttered without turning around.

I pursed my lips to buckle in the pain. “You really think our affair is haunting you?”