From Darkest Seas by Rosalind Chase

Author:Rosalind Chase [Chase, Rosalind]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Under Hill Press
Published: 2019-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Greg’s heart drops through his gut when he turns to see Rhona, wild-eyed, her face gray and delicate as the paper-thin dress she’s been wearing all night. The dress had seemed so effortlessly sexy before but now it feels painfully inadequate. She seems raw and naked as she stares past him, as her eyes fill with the kind of numbing terror of a rabbit facing down a wolf.

Tears streak her cheeks. It seems impossible. And yet here it is. The invulnerable Rhona Leith stands before him trembling, crying, silent, and still. He wants to reach for her, hold her, guard her against this pain and yet he cannot move. He has caused the pain. He must have. He has done this. A cold horror spirals out from his heart at the realization that he has hurt her so deeply without even really knowing his crime.

“Rhona? What’s going on?”

She bites her lip, stares at the painting behind him.

“Elodie,” she whispers.

He had turned the canvas around, absently, as they talked. He’d only been having a look around.

“Rhona, I’m sorry. I just—” he stumbles, stammers, not sure what he’s trying to say. Except that he is sorry. He does not understand what he’s done, only that he’s made a mistake. He apologizes, rambling meaningless words into the space between them and they are swallowed up by an awful, gut-churning silence.

Finally, she shakes her head.

“It… it had to happen eventually.”

She walks past him to the canvas. It is life size. A woman, tall and voluptuous and brown-skinned with black, curling hair that trails all the way down her back, stands, half-turned away, looking over her naked shoulder. The barest hint of a silk robe drapes from her opposite shoulder and around so that only the top of the cleft between her full buttocks is visible.

He watches, powerless, as Rhona reaches out and touches a pale hand to the woman’s face. More tears come. They slide down her cheeks and drop off her chin.

“Oh, Elodie…” Rhona whispers, caressing the line of the woman’s jaw. “So perfect.”

Greg finally pulls himself together enough to reach for an old, paint covered, sheet. He drapes it around Rhona’s shivering shoulders, closing it in front of her. He slides his hands up and down her arms. Warming her. Bringing her back to life. She is a shock victim. Her words stolen. Her heart thundering but barely supplying her mind with oxygen.

He knows the look. The feel.

He’s seen it often enough, hasn’t he? He’s looked in the mirror and seen it most mornings. Most mornings he woke up and Laurie wasn’t beside him.

“Who was she?”

Rhona sniffs and scrapes at her cheeks with the backs of her free hand. She tugs the sheet closed in front of her.

“She was my wife. She’s gone now.”

“Oh… Rhona. I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I—”

She smiles up at him. The smile etches a hairline crack down the center of his heart and Greg knows immediately that it will never heal. This is a wound he can never fix and he isn’t sure he’d want to.

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