She loved him.
Oh, no.
As she took in the dizzying view from what felt like the top of the world, fingers clinging to the rail, everything fell away below her. It was nothing but down, down, down.
Which was how far she had fallen for Ramon. Not a crush this time. The real thing. The most devastating kind of love. The all-in, heart-surrendered kind of love.
Oh, no.
Ramon's warm hand settled beneath her clipped hair, finding the crook of her shoulder at the back of her neck. "Good thinking-"
She knew immediately it was him, but was so deep in thought, instantly so fearful of him finding out, she reacted with a flinch and a startled gasp.
He gave her a little frown. "I only wanted to say it was good thinking to arrange this as a thank-you. They're all taking selfies and posting to social media, exactly the sort of excitement we want to convey. Are you all right? You're pale."
"Vertigo." She turned away from the view of paradise, stomach still plummeting into the abyss. "That was the idea when I suggested it," she murmured, feeling like that day he had proposed to her in front of the cameras was a million years ago. So much had changed, yet nothing had. "I didn't expect to be here enjoying it with them, though."
"I'm glad you are. Here, I brought you one."
Was he glad to be with her? Or had she been conjuring happiness all week, wanting to believe in a mirage?
She accepted the mug he held and watched him pick up one he'd set on the rail. She sipped, needing the rush of sugar and caffeine to help her get a grip on her composure.
"I don't know if I'll be able to go back to my French press after this."
"I only drink cafezinho when I'm here. It doesn't taste right anywhere else."
"Ah. Well, since this is our last day, and I probably won't be back, I'll have to appreciate this last taste, won't I?"
A beat of silence followed. She went over her words in her head, wondering if he heard the parallel. How much longer would she enjoy him and then never taste him again?
"I was thinking about extending our stay again. Would you like that?" He squinted into the view. A muscle pulsed in his jaw. "You haven't seen the statue."
Christ the Redeemer, he meant.
Her pulse skipped and she was windmilling her arms over the gorge again, anxious to latch on to what sounded like feelings of being equally enamored on his side.
"That's up to you, isn't it?" She stung as she said it. She had completely handed him the keys to their relationship. He steered it. He decided how far they went. Now she really did feel sick and heavy, the ground rushing up at her.
She opened her mouth, not sure what to say, how to recover, when an unusually loud jangle brought his hand to his chest pocket and a fierce, terrifying look to his face.
"What-?"
"That's the emergency ringtone." His hand slid to her upper arm and he drew her toward a quiet space away from the edge, where they had a semblance of privacy while he flicked through his phone.
His teeth bared. "Every. Damn. Time."
"What's wrong?"
"The prince of Elazar has Trella."
CHAPTER TEN
RAMON COULDN'T BELIEVE he'd let himself become so distracted. Lingering an extra two days was bad enough, but he'd been on the brink of adding to that shirking of responsibility. He was furious with himself.
In silence, he got them back to the penthouse, where they gathered their things for the flight he'd just moved up. They would take off the minute they could get themselves to the tarmac.
He packed light at the best of times and had been coming and going from this penthouse for twenty-four months. He was ready in minutes, but Isidora had managed to imprint herself all over the place. A pair of shoes here, a lipstick there.
As he moved around, picking up various items, he tried not to think of his participation in littering them about. He had pulled that hair clip from her tidy daytime chignon as she had shyly taken him in her mouth. That scarf on the end table had made a loose figure eight around his wrists as she straddled him and playfully took control for an erotic hour. He had even left a pair of her silk cheekies in the pocket of his suit, when she had let him bend her over his desk the other day at the office. They had fought groaning aloud so they wouldn't be heard and he had to bite back a mixture of frustration and renewed desire now.
This had to stop.
He found the scrap of lace in the jacket in the closet and threw everything he'd collected into the open suitcase.
"Thanks." Her mouth quirked and she blushed self-consciously, turning away to gather tubes and small color palettes off the dresser to put into a cosmetic bag. "Were you able to reach Trella?"
"No." Trella had given Henri her security code herself and seemed to be staying with the prince voluntarily, but she was having an attack, according to Gili.
Isidora glanced at him. "Is Angelique going to her?"
"No. And she shouldn't have to. She's the queen of Zhamair. I'm the one who should be on hand for that."
Isidora paused in pulling the drawstring on a shoe bag. Her lashes swept low across cheekbones that darkened with color.
"Am I being blamed for that?" She threw the bag into the suitcase and closed it.
"Not directly."
"Ah." She smiled flatly as she reached to zip the case. "I'm the enabler."
"I shouldn't have let my libido do my thinking. I know better."
She breathed out sharply, as if she'd taken a hit to the solar plexus. "Look, I know you're upset, but-"
"You don't know. This is why I will never have a woman in my life. This-" He motioned to the space between and around them, the crackling physical connection that had been so enthralling he had ignored the world outside it. "This ends now."
Her head went back, taking it on the chin with a flare of shock in her gray eyes.
He braced himself for an argument. Wheedling. Some kind of resistance.
She only offered a slow blink of acceptance, and somehow that was worse.
"Bueno," she said softly and turned to lift her case off the bed.
He was so shocked, he didn't move. He listened as she took it to the door herself, the rolling wheels loud across the ceramic tiles. When he finally moved to join her at the door, his joints felt stiff, words jammed sideways in his throat.
The silence wasn't an angry one, but it blistered as they traveled with their security detail to the airport and boarded his private plane.
He told himself not to dwell on whether he had stepped on her feelings. She understood. She had gone into this with her eyes open. His fixation on her was the root of his problem right now. He shouldn't have started their affair.
The flight was twelve hours. They both dozed in their seats rather than moving into the state room, as they'd done on the way over. No lovemaking this time.
As they touched down in Paris, Ramon arranged for Isidora to be taken to his apartment while he continued to Elazar alone. He didn't ask her if she minded. Her reaction was a quiet "Please call me if there's anything I can do."
There wasn't. He saw her off the plane, then carried on to see his sister, aware of the empty seat beside him. Isidora's presence had been strangely calming, he realized. She hadn't intruded overtly. She didn't pretend to understand the monsters in his emotional closet. No one except those as deeply affected by his past really understood that part of him, but Isidora had still been sincere in her concern. She had been a quiet light, keeping him from losing himself to the dark scenarios exploding in his mind.
Those grim thoughts threatened to overtake him as he arrived at the palace in Lirona, the capital of Elazar, where he had to wait thirty minutes for security clearance. It was another twenty before someone escorted him to a private suite, where his sister was curled on the end of a sofa, looking like hell.
Failure coalesced in a metallic taste on his tongue.
"Why are you here?"
That took him aback. He studied the ravages of a bad attack. Her cheeks were hollow beneath swollen eyelids. Her lips were chapped where she tended to lick and chew them as she waited out her symptoms. She wore a thick, man's cardigan over a pair of loose silk pants and ballet slippers. She always retained a cloak of insecurity and low body temperature after coming down from the worst of it. She hugged her arms tight across herself, seeming pale and slight despite the bump at her middle.
"What do you mean, 'why am I here'? I'm here to get you."
"I told you not to come."
"You told Henri and Gili not to come."
"Well, I didn't expect you to drop everything, did I? You were in South America, screwing your brains out with Izzy."
He balked at having his affair with Isidora described in such base terms, and was shocked enough by Trella knowing they had been sleeping together to ask "You talked to her? When?"