Billionaire Romance Boxed Set (9 Book Bundle) (45 page)

In
legends, nobody dies peacefully. Villains die violently, heroes die unluckily,
and if it isn
’t arrows or spears it’s poison or drowning.

My mother died violently, and
that
’s all anyone ever told me. She went to Hungary to take
care of my grandmother who had hurt her back, and one day when she was walking
down the streets of Budapest someone killed her and threw her body into the
river.

My father went to identify
the body and see her buried, but he would not let me go. I was too young, he
said, and I had school to think of. Later, after he had come back, I begged him
to tell me what he had seen, but he never did. I had dreams where a hooded
figure would stab me over and over again, tear my body to pieces, throw me into
a dark river. My father didn’t know how to comfort me. Some nights I would wake
up screaming. Some nights we both would.

They say time heals all
wounds, but not always. Sometimes wounds pucker over and leave scars, and
sometimes they heal silently and secretly, so that only one person knows the
hurt was ever there. Sometimes they fester until another person comes along to
cut out the rot, and then they bleed clean and fresh again.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Eliot didn
’t
respond to anything I said, and the meeting at the academy with Mark was brief
and awkward. I sat on the other side of the table and listened as Eliot
explained a number of different options we had to explore now that we had
broken through the solution to the first, specific case. Occasionally he would
glance up at Mark, but never at me.

Then he left, and Mark and I
were alone in the university library. I began to gather up the papers to go,
but Mark put his hand on my arm.

“Brynn?”

I turned to see him only inches
away from me, his body so near mine that I could feel his breath on my skin.

“Mark—”

“I need to talk with you.” His
face was so serious that I almost laughed out of sheer nervousness.

“About what?”

“Come on, Brynn, you know about
what.” He leaned in as if to kiss me, and I stepped back.

A lump rose in my throat and I
coughed. I didn’t want to do this to Mark. He had been one of the best and
closest friends I’d ever had. But I didn’t feel the same way towards him, and
he deserved to know that.

“Mark,” I said carefully. “I
don’t think we should go any further with this.”

His face dropped into a mask of
apathy. He only looked like this when it hurt, I could tell. “Why?”

“I just— I don’t feel that
way towards you.”

“You kissed me back. Last
night.” His voice pleaded with me, and his careful mask began to crack.

“I’m sorry, Mark. I was excited
about the problem. We both were.”

“But I thought…look, Brynn, I
know we could be a good couple.”

“Mark, don’t.”

He forged ahead with the words
that I’m sure he’d been practicing all last night. “I really think there’s
something between us, Brynn. I’ve always felt it. You’re so special to me, and
you always have been. Just give me a chance to be that person for you, too.”

“Mark—”

“Don’t do this,” he said, his
voice cracking. “Please, Brynn, don’t throw this away without a shot.”

“I’m not throwing anything away.
I just don’t think we should be together. Not like that.”

Mark paused, his brow furrowed
deeply. He looked tortured, and I wished that there was something I could do to
console him. But any kindness I had in me was safely tamped down. If there was
one thing I didn’t want, it was to send mixed messages. No more hugs. No more
shared smiles. No more anything for a while.

“I don’t understand it.” His
voice turned hard, and he looked away from me. I didn’t know what to say, so I
just stood there, waiting.

“I don’t understand. Do you just
not care about me?” His eyes flashed dark and accusing at me.

“I care about you a lot, Mark.
Just not in that way.”

“So what?” He threw his hands up
in the air angrily. “Are you going to pine forever for him?”

“Who?” My face turned hot as I
realized what he was saying.

“You know who I’m talking about.
You light up whenever Herceg comes into the room.”

“So
?” Was it that obvious?

“He’s a
professor
,
Brynn.”

“So
?” I
shuffled the papers again in my hands, trying not to admit what Mark already
knew.
That’s not the least of it
, I thought.
He’s also a prince and
heir to a fortune. He lives in a castle, for god’s sake.

“So you think he would care
about some dumb student?”

“No!” I threw the papers down
onto the desk, and tears sprang to my eyes. “I know that! Of course he doesn’t
care! That’s not the point, Mark!” Fury raged in me. He had no right to talk
about Eliot in that way. I had never heard him speak so bluntly, so meanly.

“What’s the point?” he said.

“I don’t feel that way about
you, and that’s all there is to it.” A frisson of energy crackled between us,
and I could see that things wouldn’t go back to normal anytime soon. If ever.

“Okay.” Mark stacked my
scattered papers together and pushed them back towards me on the table. “I’m
sorry.”

I saw the rejection ripple
through him and sag his limbs, but I couldn’t do anything. Sorrow ran through
my, but I couldn’t fix this thing between us right now.

“Me, too,” I said.

The space between us had grown
too dangerous to stay in. We couldn’t be friends, not like we had been before.
I wanted to throw myself into the river outside and freeze until I couldn’t
feel these emotions anymore. The pain of being rejected by Eliot was almost as
bad as the pain of hurting Mark. I could deal with being hurt. I had always
been the one who could handle pain. But dealing it out to someone else was too
much. The two people in my life who I felt closest to here, and they had both
been torn away from me. More alone than ever, I retreated back into the safety
of mathematics, and the dam inside of me that I thought had been torn down now
stood taller than ever, my protection from the messiness of he outside world.

Eliot
sat at his desk, reluctantly petting the gray ball of fur that sat purring on
his lap. As the phone rang again, he prayed for Marta to stop calling him.
After the tenth ring, he gave up pretending to be in the shower.

“Eliot? Finally!” Marta said,
her voice bright and enthusiastic. “I’ve called about that damned cat you
wanted to get rid of.”

“Oh!” Eliot breathed a sigh of
relief. “I’m so glad.”

“Did you think I was going to
ask about that girl of yours? I convinced the Lustigs to take her cat in a
couple of days. How is she?”

“The cat?”

“The girl.”

“Marta, the subject is over.”

“I was just asking how she was.”

“She’s doing well. She’s done
some good work on the project with another student.” His voice caught on the
last syllable, and he coughed to cover it up, but Marta didn’t miss anything.

“Another student? A boy? Eliot,
are you jealous?”

“It’s not my place to be
jealous.”

“You don’t have any
competition.” Marta seemed unworried. “She’ll come back around.”

“Thanks, Marta, but I’m really
not looking for any kind of relationship right now.”

“You’ve been saying that for ten
years, Eliot.”

The pause between them stretched
and curled across the phone connection. Eliot shifted uncomfortably back in his
chair, leaning his head on the hard leather. A burning desire flickered up in
his consciousness and he stamped it down.

“I can’t.”
I won’t.

“Why not?”

“She’s a student—”

“So what? Eliot, don’t think her
heart isn’t in the same place as yours.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’ve seen my share of
lovestruck maidens.” He could hear the wine being sipped at the end of her
sentence.

“You’re being absurd.” As
insightful as Marta was sometimes, she couldn’t help but insert herself into
drama. Or create it if none existed. And he was sure that none existed here.

Marta sighed, a heavy sigh meant
to chastise.

“If you think she doesn’t love
you, you’re either so stupid you can’t see the nose in front of your face or so
scared that you’re pulling back into your shell. And I
know
you’re not
stupid, Eliot.”

“I don’t believe she does love
me. If she ever did, I’m not convinced she does anymore.”

“I am.”

“Marta, even if we both wanted
something, I
can’t
.” Eliot stood up from his desk and began to pace from
shelf to shelf, the phone pressed to his ear.

“Whenever you say you can’t, it
usually means you’ve just gotten in your own way, Eliot. You always trip over
good intentions. Don’t let them get in the way of love.”

“I can’t—”

“Can’t what?”

“Love!” Eliot rested his head
against the wall. “I can’t love anymore. Not again.”

“You won’t let yourself. Eliot,
when was the last time you went to church?”

Eliot smiled wanly. Otto wasn’t
exactly the religious type, but Marta strove to get him to church every Sunday.
Whether for the publicity or for the moral salvation, Otto usually obliged.

“It’s been a while.” T
en
years is a while, isn’t it?

“Try it, maybe. You might learn
a little something about forgiveness.”

“I don’t deserve it. The
accident was my fault.”

“And it’s in the past. The long
past. You deserve a future.”

“Thank you for your concern,
Marta. Give my love to Otto.”

“I will. Forgive yourself,
Eliot.”

Eliot looked at the phone, then
hung up.

I don’t deserve a future
,
he thought.
And even if I did, she deserves a brighter one than I could give
her.

Weeks
passed. Eliot kept his distance from Brynn, and she kept hers. Her work,
already impressive, had become near-professional in its diligence, and she made
sure to document not only her successes, but the avenues of inquiry that led to
failure. She stayed late at the academy every night, or so his assistants told
him. He wasn
’t quite sure what happened between her and the Joseph
boy. Either she hid the relationship from him so well he couldn’t figure it, or
nothing had happened after that first night he caught them together.
Regardless, on the rare occasions he came to visit the academy and saw them
working together, he felt a tug of jealousy.

Why should he be jealous? It had
been his decision to stay out of her life, and the choice had been made for her
own good. Every time he saw her, though, he came closer and closer to ruing the
decision he had made. In her time at Budapest, he saw her grow and mature, not
only as a mathematician, but also as a woman. Each visit made him more aware of
her budding grace, her beauty that was no longer childlike. He began to make
excuses to come to the academy more often, every time knowing that he was
playing with fire.

The semester went on and on, and
his work made progress in leaps and bounds now that he was actively sharing
ideas with the interns and assistants. Each day brought him closer to the
answer to his problem, and at the same time closer to the day when Brynn would
leave and go back to America to graduate, find a job, marry someone else. Eliot
tortured himself with imagining her future husband, her future family, her
future life without him. He was no idiot. She was young and had the rest of her
future in front of her, and he was sure her brief experiences with him had
disillusioned her about the possibility of staying with him. No, that chance
had come and gone, if it ever existed.

He lectured at the front of the
classroom, but his lectures were directed solely towards her, and although she
never raised her hand to ask a question, he tried to read her expression to
know what parts he needed to explain more thoroughly. And although she stayed
quiet, the last words she had directed his way echoed incessantly through his
mind:

When will you go to visit
your wife?

It was a beautiful spring day,
only a few weeks before the semester was due to be over, and driving down to
the academy he opened the windows and breathed in the fresh cool air. Normally
he would have turned off of the main road to the academy to avoid passing the
cemetery, but for some reason that day he didn’t; not a conscious decision, no,
not at all. When his car passed by the cemetery he braked hard and pulled over
to the curb. Sitting at the wheel, his throat choked with tension, and he
willed himself to relax. He looked up to the front of the cemetery, and the
open doors seemed to call him inside, the sun shining brightly above.

When will you go visit your
wife?

He left the car at the curb and
walked through the iron gate. The grass underneath his feet squished wetly with
the dampness from the thawed winter frosts, and everything grew bright and
green between the stone graves. In places where the caretaker had forgotten to
mow tiny alyssum blossoms had taken hold and spread their white petals in the
shade of gravestones. His feet took him quickly to the family plot, though he
paused before opening the gate and walking over.

His mother had not wanted Clare
buried in the same plot, but Eliot had insisted that she was just as much a
part of the Herceg family as any other. They had only been married less than a
year before she died. Before he killed her.

Drawing closer to the gravestone,
Eliot blinked hard. The stone was surrounded by grass but right in front of
Clare’s stone lay a small bouquet of white roses. He bent down and picked them
up, brought them to his nose and inhaled. The smell was still fresh, the roses
new and alive. His eyes turned to the gravestone, reading the words engraved
there.

“Clare, oh Clare.” He fell to
his knees and pressed his forehead to the cold stone, his eyes closed. He began
to talk, haltingly at first, in a low whisper that couldn’t be heard by any
living soul.

“I miss you Clare. I see
you—god, I see you every day, everywhere. It’s a beautiful day today.
Sunny and cold, your perfect day. I’m sorry you can’t be here to see it. The
ice is melting and the stream has come up in the back. I go out and sit there
and think about you.

“The problem is going well. We
just solved another specific case; this one was much harder, but I think I can
generalize it—of course, don’t let me go on and on about math. You always
let me go on for far too long. There’s someone helping me—”

Eliot breathed in deeply before
continuing.

“She’s lovely. You told me that
if anything happened to either of us, we should find happiness.”

Eliot’s voice shattered on the
last word, and tears streamed down his cheeks. The guilt he carried inside of
him flared up and made his skin burn with shame.

“I haven’t been happy, Clare. I
haven’t. I haven’t ever let myself be happy. And I know—I know you would
want me to let go, but I can’t. I just can’t. I miss you so much and I’m sorry
I hurt you. I wish I could go back and live through it again. I would—”

He stopped. He thought of what
he would say—that he would never have tried to woo her, never taken her
away from her life and put her in a place where she would die so meaninglessly.
But that wasn’t right. He couldn’t erase the past like that. Every beautiful
moment spent with Clare taken away? No. No. He did not know what he wanted, but
it was not that.

As he opened his eyes he
realized his tears had stopped. His fingers moved over the letters of her name
and he whispered to himself.

“You’re right, Clare. As
always.”

There was nothing he could do
now, nothing that would reverse the chain of motion that led to her death.
There was only the here and now, a sunny day that she could not see. He looked
down to the bouquet of roses. He had clutched the stems too tightly, and the
thorns had pierced his hand. He opened his hand slowly, watching the beads of
red appear in the punctures. He was alive, this proved it. The ache that shot
through his hand as he flexed it open proved it. He breathed slowly and let the
pain ride through his body, his palm throbbing with his heartbeat. Blood
smeared the petals of the roses, red on white. They looked beautiful, like the
hybrid varieties that bloomed at this time of the year in the gardens of his
estate.

She would never come back, and
he would have to keep on living.

He stood, and placed the
blood-smeared roses on top of the stone carefully, smoothing the petals. He
bent down to wipe his hand on the dew of the grass. The blades of grass were
wet and cold, and his fingers grew chilly as he wiped his wounds clean. He
pressed the tips of his fingers to his lips, then to the stone.

“Goodbye, Clare. I love you
always.”

He felt love surge through him,
and he was crying again, softly, for he knew that the love would stay with him
even though he must leave her there, dead in the ground. He closed the wrought
iron gate behind him and turned to leave the cemetery. Looking up, he saw Brynn
standing in the path ahead of him, looking back.

The sunlight haloed her hair,
tinging it red, and for a moment Eliot thought he would see Clare again. Then
he blinked hard and there was only Brynn, nobody else.

“Hello, Eliot,” she said.