On the Steamy Side - Louisa Edwards [113]
When she finally spoke, he caught himself flinching at the soft sound. “Maybe I was building castles in the clouds, dreaming on you and me and Tucker all living happily ever after. But if that’s truly how you see your life, how you see yourself? I’m sorry for you. Sorrier still for that boy of yours, who deserves better. But as sorry as I am, I won’t stick around to watch you burn my dream castle to the ground.”
He let her walk to the door, the same door his father had used to leave him. Devon’s arms and legs felt heavy, immovable.
“If you’re so determined to be miserable, Devon, I can’t stop you,” Lilah said, meeting his gaze dead-on. The tears she’d held back for so long finally spilled over, and she brushed at her cheeks with stiff, impatient hands. “I can’t stop you, but I will be damned if I let you make me miserable, too.”
Then she was gone. And Devon was alone.
The way he was always meant to be.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Lilah shivered in the chill air of the Park Avenue apartment and thought about asking to turn down the air conditioning, but didn’t.
She wouldn’t be here long enough for the temperature to matter.
As cold as she felt outside, Lilah was a hundred times more chilled at the bone.
The ride back to Devon’s apartment had felt like a hundred dismal lifetimes jammed into twenty minutes. Devon sat up front with his driver, while Lilah sat in the backseat watching Tucker stare out the window. The minute they got into the apartment, Tucker disappeared into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him.
Lilah sighed, heartsore and unsure if she was doing the right thing.
“Thank you for driving me back to pack up my things,” she said. It was easier than she would’ve thought to keep her voice polite. All that early training with Aunt Bertie had some use after all; Lilah found that in the midst of the worst disappointment of her life, she could take refuge in manners and at least pretend to a calm she certainly didn’t feel.
“Paolo drove,” Devon said, as distant as if they’d never stood in this exact same spot, this light, airy living room full of modern Italian furniture, and kissed until Lilah’s lips were swollen and hot.
“I know. I just meant . . . I could’ve called a cab.”
Devon shrugged and cast himself onto the lounge chair covered in black and white cowhide. Lilah had laughed at it once, and Devon had gotten all sniffy and offended, informing her that it was one of the most famous design pieces of the twentieth century.
She sure didn’t feel like giggling now.
“Go ahead and say it.” It was a clear challenge, issued in an almost bored undertone.
“I have nothing more to say to you,” Lilah informed him.
“Fuck that,” he said, his deliberate crudeness stiffening her spine like nothing else. “When have you ever held back on what you really think? You’re ditching out, anyway.”
Hurt and resentment ate away at her resolve. “You made it impossible for me to stay.”
“So you might as well tell me what you think of me on your way out the door.”
Lilah licked her lips, the temptation to lay into him and straighten him out, once and for all, overpowering and impossible. There was no straightening this one out. As Aunt Bertie would say, he was too twisted for color TV.
“I don’t see the point in lowering myself,” Lilah said, with withering formality.
Something blazed in Devon’s eyes, but was banked at once. “Aw, Lilah Jane,” he said softly, the sound of her name in that voice like a twist of the knife, “you’ve always seemed to like getting down and dirty with me.”
Anger flashed over to nuclear. Lilah had to squint to see him through the red mist. “You arrogant, unfeeling . . . absolute monster of a man. I can’t believe I ever saw anything good in you, can’t believe I fell for your poor-little-rich-guy act—and I can’t believe I told you all that stuff about my parents, and how my mother gave me up without a second thought, only to have you turn around and do the same exact thing to your own child. He needs his father in his life, Devon, for longer than