“You’re anything but a loser, duchess.”
“I just keep picking losers?” she asked, brow arched. She sipped her wine. “I’m not sure that makes me feel any better.”
“All right.” Byron moved on the couch, bracing himself. “To make you feel better...”
“Please.”
“I threw up on a woman once,” he admitted.
“During a date?” Roxie asked, eyes round.
“Not just that.” He grimaced. “It was after the date.”
She gasped. “Oh, no. Not during—”
He downed the rest of his wine in answer.
“Wow, you’re right,” she said. “That is bad.”
He sat forward over his knees and set the glass on the table with a clack. “Ah, it turned out okay. She was a friend.”
“Not Adrian,” Roxie said, alarmed.
“No, not Adrian,” Byron said. “This was before I moved to Fairhope, back in Atlanta about—” he squinted, counting back “—four and a half years ago? And it was my first time...or my first attempt at intimacy since...” He forced the words out. “Since I lost her.”
“Your friend?”
He let out a breath, feeling some nerves and a disturbed feeling in the pit of his stomach. “No. My wife.”
She stared at him. Her larkspur eyes went round as bonbons. “You were married?” When he nodded, she asked, “How did I not know this?”
“I’m not sure a lot of people do,” he considered. “That was the draw of Fairhope and life on the coast.”
“To get away.” Roxie nodded her understanding. Her throat moved on a swallow. “How did it happen? Can you talk about it?”
“Sure,” he said, though he had to roll his shoulders back to cast off the ready pall. “Her name was Dani. Daniella Rosales. We met in college, freshman year. I saw her and...I was done.”
A light wavered cautiously to life in Roxie’s eyes. “Just like that?” she whispered.
“Just like that,” he agreed. “When I was younger, around fourteen, my center of gravity couldn’t keep up with my growth. I got clumsy. Really clumsy, and angry, too, because I was this big, goofy guy who couldn’t walk across a room without knocking something over. It took me years to work out the clumsy and level the resentment. Then I got to college, I saw Dani and I tripped over her into the fountain outside our residence hall.”
The light in Roxie’s eyes strengthened. “That might be the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I would’ve disagreed,” he informed her. “On campus tours, the guides were adamant that nobody touch the water in the fountain. Because it was said that if you did, you’d never find true love.”
“Did you prove them wrong?”
He grinned. “I was irate with myself—until Dani fished me out, led me back to her room and dried me off. You remember odd things through the years. I remember how her towels smelled. Not like laundry, but like that unknown thing that’d been missing. Only I didn’t know it was missing until I found it...or smelled it.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s dumb—”
“No,” Roxie said with a quick shake of her head. “It’s not dumb.”
“It’s cheesy.”
“There’s nothing wrong with a little cheesy. It’s the sort of thing I used to believe in. That I used to have. Or I think I had.” A touch of confusion crossed her face. She dismissed it with a sweep and offered him a rueful grin. “It’s nice, being reminded that it does happen. That it can be real.”
“Real,” Byron echoed. He nodded. “Yeah. It was that.”
Roxie frowned. “You haven’t told me—what happened to her.”
Hadn’t he? Byron shifted on the cushion. He poured more wine and picked up the glass by the stem. He used the thumb and forefinger of each hand to hold the delicate crystal shoot, spinning it slowly, watching each facet flash in the lamplight. “When Dani was little, she had a heart condition. The doctors fixed it when she was thirteen. Or so they thought. As an adult, she was healthy. Active. She was a photographer, so she was never still—on the job or off. My friend Grim used to call her the Dervish. Nothing slowed her down. Then a few years after the wedding we decided it was time to start a family.”
Byron hesitated again. After a moment, Roxie reached out and touched his knee. He lifted one corner of his mouth, though he wasn’t sure it could be deemed a smile. When he spoke, he was subdued. “After her doctors signed off on it, we tried for a while before it took. She was three and a half months along when she collapsed. She went into a coma and it was four weeks before those same doctors informed me and the rest of her family that she’d never surface.”
Her hand stayed locked on his knee. He was grateful for the silence. He’d heard every condolence known to man. Before the move to Fairhope, it had seemed like he couldn’t go anywhere without hearing how sorry everyone was for his loss. Like his clumsiness in youth, the condolences had awakened his ire. It had taken a while for that ire to simmer and for him to confront Dani’s loss, and even longer for him to learn to wholly live life again.
He cleared his throat. “You know as well as I do that when you’re at the altar pledging your life to someone, it’s just that—your whole life. And even though you both say the words till death, you expect death to come later. Much later. It doesn’t enter your mind that death’s coming for you a mere six years, seven months and twenty-seven days later, or that it’s not you it’s coming for. It’s the person standing next to you, the one you’ve promised to love every day that life gives you. And learning to live without that person... It feels so backwards and wrong. It unravels every bit of who you are.”
“Your whole life,” she echoed. She released a ragged breath. “The baby? They couldn’t save it?”
He took a long glug of wine, shaking his head slightly as he did. As he lowered the glass back to the table, he ignored the bad feeling in his stomach that had grown into a full-on internal wail. “If she’d been further along, maybe. And when she fell...there was some internal damage.” He laid his arm over the back of the sofa. There was a knot in the wood trim. He circled it with the pad of his thumb. “It was a girl. We’d only just stopped arguing over what to call her.” At her questioning brow, he confided, “Maree Frances.”
For a full minute, she said nothing. Thoughtfully, she edged closer. Shifting toward him, she fit into the groove under his arm next to his chest. The wail inside him was on the verge of a banshee scream. The wave of lilacs stopped it from reaching fever pitch, beating it back down where it belonged.
She spoke low, almost inaudibly. “Nothing I tell you could ever be enough to say how sorry I am for what you’ve been through. I can’t imagine...” She sighed and pressed her cheek into his lapel. “So I’m just going to hug you.”
“Okay,” he said. It trembled out of him on a short laugh. It warmed him.
As he’d left the tavern after finishing his shift there, Byron had seen Bertie drop Roxie off. He hadn’t liked the look of him—a knee-jerk and instant assessment. The guy drove a luxury Mercedes but ground the transmission when he shifted into Park. And he wore a three-piece suit that screamed easy money.
Byron had taken a moment, studying Roxie from a distance. He’d felt the warmth gathering over his sternum, remembering the sound of her laugh from earlier in the day. Tinny bells. The best kind.
Then Byron had