“Now do you regret our affair?” he said quietly.
“No.” She turned away. “It’s just…”
“Just?”
“When I meet the man I marry,” she said in a small voice, “what if he asks me why I didn’t wait for him? What if he asks why I didn’t have faith?”
“Rose!” he growled.
“But the thing is, I did wait,” she whispered. “I waited so long. And he never came. The only man who seemed remotely like a prince turned out to be a massive frog.”
Xerxes looked at her and envied—no, hated—the man she would someday marry. “He won’t ask you any stupid questions like that. He’ll just get down on his knees and thank God you are his wife.”
She gave him a tremulous smile. “Really?”
“Yes.” He found a parking spot near the marina. Turning off the car engine, he turned to face her beneath the warm lights of the town and took her hands in his own.
“I wonder if you have any idea how truly rare you are,” he said. “How you make life beautiful wherever you go. To everyone around you. Even me.”
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He saw the emotion in her face, but her voice seemed purposefully light as she said, “Well, you were a hard case.”
He snorted a laugh, but as he leaned forward to kiss her, his phone rang. He was still smiling when he answered, “Novros.”
“We’re divorced.”
Växborg’s voice was full of repressed fury.
Xerxes turned away from Rose, speaking in a low voice. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“The filing is complete?”
“Yes. I’ve used your connections to push it through. Tomorrow morning, it will be registered as final.”
“Then call me tomorrow,” Xerxes said shortly, but his eyes traced over Rose, who was watching him with big eyes. Tomorrow. He would have to give her up so soon?
“Wait!” Växborg said. “I need to talk to Rose.”
“No.”
“Her father just called. Her grandmother has had a heart attack and might not last the night. You have to let me take Rose home.”
“You think I’ll fall for that?” Xerxes said with a snort.
“Have a heart, you bastard. It’s her family!”
Xerxes looked at Rose’s face, so sweet and trusting. Family meant everything to her.
His jaw hardened. “I don’t have a heart, Växborg,” he replied coldly. “Haven’t you learned that by now?”
“Was it Lars?” Rose asked after he’d hung up.
He gave a grim nod.
“And?”
“The divorce will be final in the morning.”
“Oh,” she said in a small voice. He saw the tremble of her delicate swanlike throat as she said, “So tonight’s our last night.”
They’d both known, all along, that their affair would soon end. What he hadn’t realized was how completely and utterly he would hate the thought of ever letting her go. He gave a single unsteady nod.
“You’ll still trade me,” she whispered. “Won’t you?”
He’d made a promise. He had no choice. “Yes.”
She gave him a trembling smile. “Then tonight is a celebration, I guess. Tomorrow, we’ll both get what we want. I’ll go home to my family, and you’ll get Laetitia back.”
Staring at her, Xerxes set his jaw. He abruptly turned away, dialing his phone and speaking into it in rapid Greek. When he hung up his phone, his suspicions had been confirmed. Växborg hadn’t lied.
“Where shall we go first?” Rose said, visibly forcing a smile. “Shall we go dancing, as you said?”
“The airport.”
“The airport?” She sucked in her breath, then sounded near tears as she said, “We can’t even have one last night?”
“I’m taking you to San Francisco,” he said quietly.
“San Francisco? Not Las Vegas?”
Looking down at her, he placed his hands gently over hers. “You’re going to need to be strong, Rose. I have some bad news. Your grandmother’s had a heart attack.”
Rose gasped, falling back against her car seat. He grabbed her, cradling her against his chest.
“I’ll get her the best care, Rose,” he vowed. “She’ll be all right. I promise you.”
She stared up at him, her brow furrowed. Then she embraced him in a flood of tears.
“Thank you,” she wept.
Xerxes held her to his chest, stroking her back, murmuring words of nonsensical comfort. All he could think about was that he would do anything, absolutely anything, to make her grandmother well. Anything to make Rose happy.
When she finally pulled away to look up at him, tears were streaming down her face. “Why are you being so good to us?” she whispered. “You don’t even know her.”
“No,” Xerxes said quietly. Looking down at her, he stroked her beautiful face and felt a lump in his throat as he said, “But I know you love her. That’s all I need to know.”
IT WAS almost midnight when Rose finally collapsed in her old childhood bedroom.
Trembling with exhaustion, clasping the same pink cardigan she’d worn in Mexico more tightly over her arms, she sank down on her small single bed, staring blankly at old posters of rock stars she’d pasted as a teenager over the peeling, faded floral wallpaper. A beloved old teddy bear looked down from her bookshelves, next to baking trophies she’d won at the local fair in high school. Downstairs, she could hear her family talking in low voices as they moved over the creaky floorboards. She could smell her mother’s clam chowder bubbling on the stove.
She was home. Nothing had changed. And yet—Rose looked at Xerxes’s dark form in front of her window—everything had changed.
They’d both changed on the jet into clothes more appropriate for the cold rain of northern California. Now wearing black pants, a white shirt and a black woolen coat, he looked out at the lights twinkling in the distance. “Is that your family’s old factory?”
Rose had spent most of her childhood sitting in that window, reading books and staring out dreamily at the rainy gray surf beneath the ocean cliff. She knew every view from the rambling Victorian house by heart. “Yes.”
A few dim lights still illuminated the old hollow shell of her grandfather’s factory, which had once employed half this small town making chewy taffies in the heyday of the 1950s and 1960s. But Rose didn’t want to talk about the factory. She didn’t want to hear Xerxes tell her yet again that it was a hopeless situation and she should let it go.
Instead, she wanted to breathe in this moment and just be grateful. Grateful that her grandmother had lived and was getting better. Grateful that she herself was finally home.
Crossing her ankles and tucking her black jeanclad legs beneath her, Rose looked up at him. “Thank you.”
Blinking, he glanced back at