One Secret Night

“I’m too heavy for you,” he protested as she squeezed tight.

“I like this,” she replied as if the simplicity of the words themselves were fully sufficient.

He relaxed against her, and realized that maybe they were. He’d never felt the full acceptance of himself with another in the aftermath of lovemaking before. It had always been a release, often a deeply satisfying one, but never quite this sense of physical communion. He didn’t know what to think of it, so he took what was—for him—a very novel approach. He decided not to think at all. Not just yet. As his heart rate slowed, he rolled slightly to one side, pulling her along with him.

Isobel reached up a finger to trace the line of his lips, her touch leaving a tingle of longing in its wake. He gave in and leaned into her to kiss her—not a kiss with the flaming sensuality they’d shared before, but one of quiet intimacy. Of thanks. He finally forced himself to break away and moved to rid himself of the condom, returning to the bed as quickly as he could and scooping her against him. Isobel tangled her legs in his and rested her head on his chest. For all that he barely knew her it felt almost frighteningly right.

One night, he reminded himself. That was all this was. Just one night.

Three

Isobel traced a circular pattern with her index finger on Ethan’s chest. She’d been stunned by the force of their lovemaking, by their connection to one another. It almost seemed a shame that she’d be moving on to her next assignment tomorrow without ever seeing Ethan again, but she would live with that. She had to. It was the way she lived her life. Always fluid, always moving. Never staying still long enough to set down roots. It suited her.

And to her surprise, so had he.

She knew deep down that tonight had not been the type of thing a man like Ethan indulged in often, if at all. It piqued her curiosity. Why had he broken with what were probably very rigid personal boundaries to bring her home and share such profound intimacy? It was tempting to believe that it was just her influence that had him throwing caution to the wind, but she sensed that there was more to it than that. Her photographer’s instinct always knew when there was more at play than what could be immediately seen. Before she knew it, the question slid from her lips.

“Why me, Ethan?”

“Huh?”

He sounded sleepy, as if she’d dragged him from that in-between place in the middle of consciousness and slumber.

“What happened to you today?” she asked.

He sucked in a deep breath and his arm tightened around her. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

“Try me,” she coaxed. “You strike me as the kind of guy who doesn’t usually share what troubles you. Maybe you should try it sometime, like now, with me.”

She kept drawing the circles on his chest and waited in silence for him to make up his mind. She could almost hear the cogs turning in his brain as he weighed up the pros and cons of sharing with her. It never failed to surprise Isobel that people could share the most personal experiences together physically, yet reveal so little on an emotional level. Somehow it mattered to her to know why Ethan had overstepped his boundaries with her.

“I got some news today that I hadn’t anticipated,” he finally disclosed.

“Bad news?”

“Yes and no.”

“It upset you,” she stated firmly.

“Yeah, I don’t know how to deal with it.”

“It must have been really bad, then.”

She felt him nod. “You could say that. My dad died recently and I’ve been going over his records. I found some payments that didn’t marry up with the data I had before me, so I checked with the family accountant who referred me to our lawyer. That’s where I went today. Basically I discovered that my father hid the truth about our mother from my sister and me. We were told she died twenty-five years ago, but she didn’t. She left us and accepted his money to stay away.”

“Oh, that’s awful. You must have been devastated,” Isobel whispered in shock.

She knew what it was like to find out a parent had been lying to you. It was the deepest kind of betrayal.

“I don’t understand why he did it and now I can’t ask him, either.”

Tension radiated from his body as the frustration he’d been feeling wound tight inside of him.

“Maybe he just wanted to protect you and your sister. If it happened twenty-five years ago then you can’t have been all that old,” she said, trying to soothe him.

“I was six, my sister only three. I would have had some understanding of his decision not to tell us then, if my father had bothered to tell me the truth later, when I was an adult. It’s not as if he didn’t have ample opportunity. Even after he died, there was no letter, nothing in his will to let me know the truth. If I hadn’t started asking questions about the payments, I never would have known.”

The bitterness in his voice hung in the air.

Isobel sighed. “It isn’t easy to understand the choices our parents make.” That much, she knew from personal experience. “Usually, I guess they think they’re protecting us.”

“Why would I need to be protected from the truth? Don’t I deserve to know why he thought my sister and I would be better off without our mother in our lives?”

“Maybe it wasn’t as clear-cut as that.”

Ethan shook his head. “It must have been. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to get the rest of our family to support him in his lie. My aunt and my uncle and his wife, they all knew the truth. They’ve all kept the secret for all these years.”

“Are they still alive?”

“Yeah, we all live on the family property. We see each other pretty much every day.”

“Then maybe you can find out from them,” she suggested. “Whatever the outcome, though, Ethan, there’s no point in holding a grudge against a dead man. Right or wrong, your father made his decisions. They can’t be undone or the past changed. The only thing you can do is move forward.”

“Is that what you do?” he asked. “Move forward and not ask questions?”

She smiled and lifted her head and met his serious dark brown gaze. “Except for right now, yeah, something like that. It saves on baggage.”

Ethan shook his head slightly. “I can’t imagine living like that.”

Isobel shrugged. “It’s not for everyone. Certainly not for someone like your father, for example. For whatever reason, he kept those payments going for years, got your whole family involved, with the idea that he was protecting you and your sister. I imagine you’re probably very much like he was. Strong.” She coasted her fingertips over his shoulders and down his arm. “Intelligent.” She ran her fingers back up his arm and lightly touched his forehead. “And protective.” Her fingertips traveled back down to his chest and she rested her full palm against it. “Those are the qualities about your father you should remember him by. And how much he must have loved you.”

Ethan remained silent for a while before speaking. “You have an interesting insight for someone who never met my father and who never met me before tonight.”

“You think I’m being presumptuous, offering you my opinion?”

“No, not that. If anything, you probably described my father to a tee. I suppose that coming to terms with everything, losing him as suddenly as we did, I had briefly lost sight of that. I still want to know why he never told me about our mother, though.”

“Is tomorrow soon enough for that?” Isobel asked, raising onto her knees and straddling him as she’d done earlier. “Because I think, for now, it might be fun to distract you with other things.”

Four

Isobel woke as the sun was beginning to cast a corona around the edges of the heavy floor-length drapes at the window. For a moment she was disoriented, but soon remembrance flooded her mind. She lay motionless next to Ethan’s sleeping body, listening to his steady breathing, reveling in the warmth that radiated from him. Wow, she thought, that had been quite a night. Who would have thought that Mr. Buttoned-Up would be quite so skilled in the bedroom? She smiled to herself. It was true what they said. It was the quiet ones you had to watch.

Her body still tingled and she felt wonderfully alive. Last night had been special. Very special. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at Ethan in the half light. His beard had grown, dusting his jaw with an even darker haze than had been apparent at dinner. That, and his mussed-up hair, made him look more untamed and approachable than he’d been before. It was as if he was two people. A public, reserved Ethan and a private one. She liked that she’d gotten a chance to spend time with both.

Her fingers itched to reach out and touch him. To awaken him both mentally and physically. But caution stilled her hand. If she was going to leave, best to leave now, while he was still sleeping. That way, they could avoid the awkward goodbye that would come after she told him she’d rather not keep in touch. She wasn’t prepared to invest time into any type of commitment. It wasn’t her way. And this guy, well, he had commitment written all over him. In fact, she didn’t doubt that she’d been an aberration for him.

She slid carefully from the bed and found her dress and shoes on the floor at the end of the bed. Her panties were a lost cause, she decided, after silently scanning the carpet for a minute. Besides, she had clean pairs in her pack. Giving a mental shrug, she held her things to her and carefully made her way to the door, thanking the efficiency of modern maintenance that the door opened and closed silently, allowing her to exit the bedroom without making a sound.