Then Luke let her go, easing away from her, and struck out towards the falls. ‘Come see this,’ he called over his shoulder, and Aurelie felt a flicker of disappointment. Had she wanted him to kiss her?
Yes, she had.
How novel. How exciting. How disappointing that he hadn’t.
With a little shake of her head, she swam over to join him at the waterfall.
‘There’s a little cave behind the falls,’ Luke explained. ‘Just swim underneath the waterfall and you’ll come up right into it.’
‘Okay.’
Luke dived down first and Aurelie followed him, surfacing a few seconds later into a shallow fern-covered overhang, the waterfall a sparkling crystalline curtain hiding them from the world. Luke hauled himself up onto a ledge and extended a hand to her.
They sat side by side in silence for a moment, and to Aurelie it seemed completely relaxed, completely wonderful. She’d never felt so much in accord with another human being before, and she knew she wanted to tell him. Forget the fear. Screw rejection. This was too incredible, too important.
She turned to him with a smile. ‘It’s amazing. This whole day has been amazing.’
Luke touched her cheek, no more than a brush of his fingers. ‘It has been for me too.’ His gaze was tender and yet intent on hers, the curve of his mouth so close—
‘Luke—’ She wasn’t sure what she was going to say. Kiss me, maybe, because she wanted him to. Desperately. But he didn’t. Didn’t even let her finish, just slipped off the ledge and swam underneath the falls once more.
With a little sigh Aurelie followed him.
They swam a bit more in the shallows of the pool, splashing, teasing and laughing and finally they got out and returned to the sun-warmed rock to dry.
Aurelie sat there, her arms braced behind her, her legs stretched out, wearing only her underwear. And felt completely natural, no Aurelie artifice or armour. She was, she knew, being herself; she’d been herself for nearly the whole day. There was something there, underneath all the posing, and she’d needed Luke to show her.
‘So if your mother was dragging you around in pursuit of her deadbeats, how did you actually become famous?’ Luke asked after they’d sat in a comfortable silence for a little while.
‘At a karaoke night at a bar in Kansas, if you can believe it,’ Aurelie answered.
‘You sang karaoke?’
‘We both did. It was a mother-daughter thing.’
‘Ah.’
‘What do you mean, ah?’ she asked, because he sounded as if she’d just said something significant.
‘Well, your mother isn’t famous, is she?’
‘No—’
‘I’ll bet she wasn’t pleased that her teenage daughter—how old were you, sixteen?’
‘Fifteen,’ Aurelie said softly. ‘It was a month before my sixteenth birthday.’
‘Young and gorgeous,’ Luke stated, ‘and about to be famous. And your mother wasn’t any of those things.’
Strange, she’d never thought of it that way. She’d never considered that her mother might have been jealous of her. Yet now, looking back on that fateful, life-altering night, she remembered how quiet her mother had been. Of course, Pete had done all the talking, made his promises, told Aurelie she was going to be a star. She swallowed, willing the memories away. It had begun right there, she knew, the destruction of herself. The building up of Aurelie.
‘It’s hard to remember, isn’t it,’ Luke said quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’
She shook her head, her throat tight. ‘In some ways it was the happiest—well, I felt the happiest then than I had in such a long time. But if I’d known, if anyone could have told me—’
‘Told you what?’
She swallowed. Here was the honesty that hurt. ‘That I’d lose my soul. That I’d sell it, because I didn’t even know what I was giving away.’
Luke frowned. ‘I suppose fame will do that to you.’
‘It wasn’t fame. It was—’ She stopped because she didn’t want to tell him, didn’t even know how. ‘It was awful,’ she finished quietly.
He was silent for a long moment. ‘“Never give your heart away,”’ he quoted her song softly. ‘Is that what happened, Aurelie? Someone broke your heart?’
She swallowed. ‘Yes.’
He nodded, sorrowfully understanding. ‘Three years is a long time. It must have hurt when it was over.’
She let out a sudden, hard laugh because Luke had completely the wrong idea and she didn’t want to have to correct him. ‘It felt like forever,’ she agreed after a moment. ‘But my heart didn’t break when it was over, Luke. It broke when it began.’
IT BROKE WHEN it began.
Aurelie had said the words with such flat finality, such aching sorrow, that Luke knew she meant them. He just didn’t know what they meant.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said quietly, but she shook her head.
‘I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to ruin this perfect day by bringing all that up. And it has been perfect, Luke. Everything.’ She gazed at him with those wide rain-washed eyes and Luke felt everything in him twist and yearn.
He’d wanted to kiss her so many times today. When she’d planted her hands on her hips and given him an impish look, when she’d tossed him a teasing glance, when he’d held her in the water and longed to pull her close, their wet limbs sliding over each other, twining around.
Hell, he’d been in a permanent state of arousal, it seemed, for half the day. Yet he’d kept his distance, and he would now, because this wasn’t about desire.
It was about trust.
He’d meant what he said about earning it. He’d let her down before, but he wouldn’t again. He had, despite his instinct which insisted there was so much more, taken her at face value. Aurelie the go-to-hell pop star. And he’d allowed her to seduce him, allowed himself to give in to his own need because the desire had been so strong. Only when he had seen the pain on her face, written on her heart, and known he’d shown her he was just like all the others, had he been able to stop. Yet he feared the damage had been done.
It broke when it began.
What did she mean? Had some bastard abused her? The sudden strong urge to kill such a man with his bare hands surprised him. Aurelie aroused all sorts of feelings in him, feelings he hadn’t had in a long time. He had, he saw now, been skimming through life, never going too deep, using work as an excuse because this—this emotion, this intensity—was frightening. Reminded him of how much you could lose, how much risk and pain was involved in any real relationship.
Not pain for him—he didn’t care about that—but pain for her. He didn’t want to hurt her, and he was so afraid that he might.
How did your parents die?
For a second, no more, he’d wanted to tell her the truth. Yet honesty only went so far, and that secret was buried so deep inside him he didn’t think he could let it out if he tried. He tried not to think about it, yet being with this woman brought his own secrets swimming upwards to the light, just like