The Secret (The Evolution Of Sin Book 2) (7 page)

“Do you want to know what it taught me, Giselle?” His voice was deeper and his faintly accented words tingled like ice sliding down my spine.

He was so close that my cheek was almost pressed to his trouser clad thigh. I wanted to take off those pants with my teeth and use my mouth, hands and throat on him.

“It taught me the art of patience. Have you ever heard the saying, good things come to those who wait?”

I shook my head slightly even though I had heard it before.

His breath was warm and whiskey scented over my crown as he leaned down to gently tip my chin up with one finger so that my neck was craned and my eyes rested on his.

“Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace, Grace is a little girl who doesn’t wash her face,” I said.

I was close enough to see his features collapse, slowly at first like a loose domino tumbling a dozen more, into laughter.

When he was finished, he stared down at me with caged eyes filled with stars. “You always surprise me.”

The cell phone on the desk vibrated angrily and he swiftly turned away from me to answer it, leaving me mid-shrug. He picked up and listened without saying a word of greeting.

“I don’t care who his father is, get him
the fuck out of my club
.”

My eyebrows shot up at his harsh tone and less then formal language. I was pretty sure Sinclair
never
raised his voice. Triggered by his sudden mood change, the air in the room stiffened and pressed against me until I was locked into place.

He placed the phone back on the cradle with a slow calm but when he looked over at me his face was implacable, his eyes just a color.

“As I was saying, you always surprise me. But tonight, I was not happy with your behavior. Drunkenly dancing with men like that.” He shook his head. “I thought you would want to be more careful after the incident in Mexico.”

I flinched as his dart landed with deadly accuracy in my breastbone. “Don’t talk to me about Mexico. I was perfectly safe and aware tonight, Sinclair. And, if it appeals to your idiotic French misogyny, Cage was close by.”

“Still, I did not like it.” He wasn’t speaking sternly now, in fact, his accent had thickened slightly and he seemed more disturbed than angry.

I shrugged beautifully, as if I wasn’t affected by his concern, his potential jealousy. “You have no right to do anything about that.”

“I have the right, Giselle, and I will always have that right. I am closer to you than any other man has ever been or will ever be.”

“No.”

“
Mais oui
,” he confirmed with that infernal, casual arrogance of the French. “I know things about you, the dark places and the deep, that even you do not like to explore. I know the things you hate about yourself, and I? I nurture them because I know them to be beautiful.” 

“Stop it,” I breathed, suddenly aware of the slight tremor wracking my frame.

He lifted one shoulder insolently and tucked his hands in his pockets. “It is not something I can stop knowing.”

“What do you want from me?” A scalding tear rolled over my lid and slid down my cheek.

Sinclair reached out to sweep the burning trail with his thumb. “We could be friends.”

My laugh was soggy with my tears. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I can’t say anyone has every accused me of being
ridicule
before.”

“
Je le crois pas
,” I said wryly,
I don’t believe that.

“See, this is why we must be friends. You are the only person I have ever met that makes me feel like a boy.”

I frowned, unsure if that was a compliment or not.

“You know
le Petit Prince
? There is a quote, it goes ‘only children know what they are looking for.’”

I waited in silence for him to explain but he only stared at me with those inscrutable eyes.

It didn’t really matter what the motivation was behind his offer of friendship, I was desperate to grab it, to snare anything that represented time with him. Because he was right, of course. He knew me better then anyone. Even Cosima, who I loved devotedly and yet knew so little about, even Brenna, who hadn’t replied to my emails in over two weeks. A friendship with Sinclair meant that I could smile at him genuinely, that I could speak with him in front of our family like I knew him and spend time with him casually as if I had a right to.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes, I mean okay. I think we should be friends too.”

We stared at each other without smiling because our joy was concentrated in the eyes. I wrapped myself in the warm blue hues and stopped breathing. He reached out slowly and wrapped his long fingers around my hand, gently pulling me to my feet.

His eyes creased slightly with the effort of holding back his smile. “I’m taking you home.”

Desire plucked my strings like a puppet master, my mouth dropping open to gasp.

“Friends don’t let drunk friends drive or get into cabs alone,” he pointed out, stepping away to gather his wallet and keys from the desk.

I took the moment to suck in a deep, necessary breath.
Right
, friends. I had never needed to memorize and carry a piece of information so badly. I watched his lean form from the corner of my eye, the colored lights flashing against him like the light of a camera. I released the enormous breath and dragged in another to fill myself with my new mantra,
just friends
. 

I knew the minute we opened the door that Cosima wasn’t home, the air was cool and dark, unpunctuated by the habitual fire and music crooning from the surround sound speakers. I wasn’t sure if her absence was a blessing or a curse because the current of electricity that crackled constantly between Sinclair and me snapped with ferocity as soon as we understood our aloneness.

“Drink?” I murmured as we moved towards the kitchen at the back of the apartment.

Without waiting for an answer, I started to rifle through the fully stocked cupboards. I had no idea where Cosima kept the liquor and I was too frazzled to properly guess at where she may have placed it.

“You sit,” he demanded in that quiet, stern voice that made my bones shake with desire. “I’ll fix us both a drink.”

I nodded gratefully and slipped onto one of the stools at the large wooden island. I watched him maneuver about the kitchen gracefully, locating the ice, tumblers and whiskey as if he himself had placed them there.

“You come here a lot.”

“Yes.” He poured a perfect two fingers into each glass, one with ice and one without. “It is one of the reasons that we are able to have a friendship. Cosima was my friend before I even met Elena.”

An arrow of hatred painted with the name of my eldest sister found its home in the center of my heart. I cemented it there with guilt and shame and felt it throb.

“You know, I would say that I can’t see you and Cosima being friends but,” I laughed lightly, “she is infectious, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

He handed me the glass with ice and watched me intently as I lifted it to my lips and touched the burning liquid to my tongue. I watched his eyes but he was either unaffected or being very careful.

“How did you meet her?” Talking about Cosima seemed as good a topic as any. In fact, it seemed to be one of the
only
topics I could even begin to feel comfortable talking about with Sinclair.

He stepped back to lean against the counter across from the island, giving me a full view of his beautiful suit clad physique.

“Willa signed her.” I recognized his adopted mother’s name and noted that he didn’t call her something affectionate like mom. “When she was nineteen. I was in Italy with Willa when she discovered her, standing in the rain wearing a long black dress. You couldn’t tell where her hair ended and the dress began. She looked like something from Dante’s
Inferno
.”

He shook his head and stared into his glass as if divining a memory. I waited for him to continue but he remained silent. Cosima never spoke about her time away from home and honestly, I think the rest of us were too afraid to press her into confessing. What exactly did an eighteen-year-old girl have to do to pull her family out of destitution?

I shivered, pulling Sinclair from his reverie. His lips compressed into a flat line. “She was too young to have such sad eyes. I didn’t want her living with my parents – she had obviously already been through a lot – so I offered to host her here in New York.”

“Wow,” I blinked a few times as I tried to process the picture of my vivacious sister inhabiting the same space as the fiercely private and enigmatic Frenchman.

A tiny smile twitched his lips. “It was an interesting experience to say the least. It was just for a short time; within the year, she had enough money to bring over Elena and Mama. Sebastian arrived from Los Angeles soon after.”

And you met
her.

What would have happened if I had stayed in Italy? If I had moved to New York with my family and Sinclair had met both Elena and I at the same time?

The hypothetical made my teeth ache.

“You know,” I said, to distract myself from that destructive line of thought, “I don’t know very much about what happened to my family during the last five years. Cosima and Sebastian never talk about it and, as you know, I am not very close with Elena.” I sighed and took a long sip of the burning whiskey. “We all used to be so close.”

Sinclair crossed his arms and inclined his head, waiting for me to go on. I was surprised by his readiness to talk about my family when they were the cause of the mile wide distance between us, but I was even more surprised by my relief at having someone to talk to who would understand.

“Have you been to Napoli?” He hesitated but shook his head. “Well, I can understand why not. Tourists go for the pizza and the history but they never leave as enchanted as they were with Florence or Rome, Venice or Umbria. Napoli is a deeply dirty place, especially if you are poor.”

Sinclair nodded to convey that he was still listening before turning around to grab a few things from the fridge and cupboards. I watched him assemble the ingredients for crepes with a slight smile.

“You need to eat,” he explained, without facing me.

On cue, my alcohol weighted stomach sloshed and turned over nauseously. “Okay.”

“Continue.”

I watched the ice in my glass swirl and tried to collect my thoughts.

“I’m sure you’ve heard about Seamus? He was an English professor at the university but by the time the twins were born, he had basically been forced out due to his gambling and drinking problem. He loved Italy, every single thing about it and it had been his goal growing up as an Irish Catholic in Boston to move to the country.” My laugh was forced. “He was ridiculed by his family about it and when he finally made the move, they basically disowned them. I don’t even know their names.”

“Would you like to?”

His question surprised me into answering honestly. “Yes, but only because I’d like to know how Seamus turned out the way he did. What made him decide to bury his family in debt to the mafia and disappear without a trace.”

Sinclair nodded and I paused for a minute to watch the surprisingly erotic sight of his strong wrist whisking the crepe batter.

“He disappeared after Cosima moved away. Sebastian moved to America a few months after that. We were almost destitute and so lonely.” I could remember the dull vibration of too much silence in our small Neapolitan home and the collapsed look to Mama’s handsome face, how her smile dragged and her soft hands trembled.

“It would be understandable if you resented them.” He competently swirled the runny batter evenly over the surface of the pan while his eyes remained bolted to mine.

“I don’t resent the twins, I never have and I never could. They did everything to get us out of there, things that I don’t know and probably never should.” I hesitated, unsure if I should tell him the truth.

He flipped the completed crepe onto a waiting plate, moving with machine-like efficiency. His silence was a gift. I knew he wouldn’t judge me because when it came down to the two of us, Sinclair was my musician, skillfully plucking and strumming until I produced just the right tune. I may make the sound, but how could he blame me when he had orchestrated it?

“I resent Elena and Mama sometimes.”

Flip, slip, and the sizzle as butter landed in the pan.

“Mama for staying with Seamus for so long, for loving him when she should have left him. And Elena… We stopped being sisters when the twins left.”

I wanted to tell him about Christopher, about what had happened between the three of us, how Elena had never forgiven me. But it wasn’t really my story to tell, at least not to Elena’s present partner, whatever he may have meant to me.

Sinclair sprinkled brown sugar over a perfectly cooked crepe, folded it and squeezed a sliced lemon easily in his fist over the top. He placed the plate in front of me but snagged my wrist before I could pick up the fork. With nimble fingers, he plucked the elastic off my wrist and moved behind me to gently gather my messy, still slightly damp hair between his hands. I shivered when cool fingers dragged over my heavy pulse. When my hair was secure in a ponytail, he still lingered and the only sound in the entire apartment was my heavy breathing. My head spun and I realized that I was still pretty intoxicated.