Killing Time (25 page)

I stood and walked towards him before I slid my arms around his waist and buried my head in his chest. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have acted the way I did earlier and I can only hope you won’t hold it against me. This is all so new to me. Real emotions with someone I care about and I don’t want it…sullied by false promises of love and forever. I don’t know if that makes any sense but we have a real chance at making this work and…I can’t screw it up again. I won’t be able to take that kind of heartbreak.”

He tilted my head up to his and I gazed into his mesmerizing aquamarine eyes. “Is that why you have been pulling away emotionally? You might have thought I didn’t notice but there isn’t much that escapes my attention. Is that why you can’t say you love me?”

“I pulled back emotionally because we will be burying my sister soon and I need some fucking closure,” I responded as we separated and I slowly backed away until I hit the wall. “I can’t say I love you because it’s too soon and I know that sounds like utter bullshit but it’s just how I work. To be honest, I don’t think I ever told Grayson I loved him. I admitted to being very fond of him but fondness isn’t love. He didn’t need to hear it so it worked between us because he respected my boundaries.”

Rory strode toward me and pushed my wrists against the wall with brute force. “Don’t you get it yet, Aurélie? You have no boundaries, no walls, no emotions I can’t penetrate? This isn’t your perfect
fake
relationship because everything between us is real and always has to be or there is no
us
—do you fucking understand me? I know everything about you physically but now you have to let me in emotionally and if you don’t do it with compliance then I will do it by force. Is
that
what
you
want?”

I felt the walls closing in on me and I began to panic. My eyes began to water but he was having none of it. He shook his head as if to say the moment I cried would be one of regret.

“I don’t know what you want from me, Rory.”

“It’s quite simple and we both know it. I want
everything
, not simply what you have to
offer
. I want you naked in front me not only physically but also emotionally and psychologically. I swear to God I don’t want to have to break you down to build you back up but I can and I will to keep you.”

He didn’t have to explain because I knew what he meant. He would take me to the depths of humiliation just to bring me back from the brink and although I was of sound body and mind, I would let him.

I had traveled down the rabbit hole because he’d made it so easy with sex and lots of lavish gifts and plenty of affection. I was already his yet he wanted me to prove it time and time again.

“They’re just words,” I finally managed to say. “Why are they so important? People say they love one another all the time and it means nothing. You should be able to feel my emotions and see them in my eyes. Must I also grovel to you vocally as well? Perhaps I’m not what you need and Severin is right . . . maybe we don’t belong together.”

Rory forced a brutal kiss against my lips and damn it but my body didn’t fight him and my lips opened on their own, allowing him full access to my mouth. He pulled away just as quickly. “Severin knows nothing about us. He knew nothing about my relationship with Trésor either but he thought he did. She should have known when she compared me to Jekyll and Hyde something was wrong but she couldn’t or really didn’t want to see. Maybe she thought I approved and wanted to share her with my brother but she couldn’t have been more wrong.

“I hate what he did to her and how she constantly doubted me even if she did love me. Perhaps that is why I could truly never fall in love with her because how could I when she didn’t even know the real me? She couldn’t see what I was and wasn’t capable of and I would have never humiliated her in the way Severin did because I know what it’s like and I could never do that to another human being ever again.”

Rory let go of me.

My body crushed against his despite no longer having any physical restraints to tie us together. “Are you trying to tell me you have done it before?”

“Yes, but we’ll save that for another day. Not here and not now.”

I stared into his eyes and sighed. “I care so much about you . . . but if you truly love me as much as you say you do then you have to let me in too. This can’t be a one sided affair, Rory. I could give all of myself to you but you have to share with me too. One day I won’t take ‘some other day’ for an answer and when you bring up painful events in your past, you are going to have to tell me about them.

“I’m not naïve and I know you have done some questionable shit in your past but I would rather find them out from you rather than someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? The moment you’re ready to open yourself to me will be the moment I declare true love to you but not before then. And yes, you can break me down but do you really want me that way? Is that how you envision our life together?”

“Not at all,” he whispered, “but often times desperate people are capable of extremely detrimental and irrational schemes which defy common sense. Rational behavior no longer applies when the need to hold on to something . . . or someone outweighs all thoughts including the consequences. I would rather have you here as a vegetable than not by my side at all.”

I had to talk him down as I felt we were playing one up and no one was going to win. It was just going to escalate until one of us said something we would live to regret.

However, Rory wasn’t like other men and what I would have said to a normal vanilla guy would have never worked. I finally replied, “I’m not going anywhere. Surely you must know that by now?”

“Should I?”

“Yes, in your heart you know you do.” I smiled genuinely. “I’m starving and I know you must be hungry too so why don’t we dig into that takeout you brought home?”

His aquamarine eyes glared into mine coldly before the moment of tension broke between us before he grabbed me by the waist and buried his face in my hair. “What are you doing to me? Most of the time I don’t recognize myself anymore or this pathetic, love-sick person I have allowed myself to become though I’m not sure if I could have stopped it—the events, they were so beyond my control. I desperately want to believe I am not in this alone. Why do I feel like I am the one bottoming out in this relationship?”

“Maybe because you are but I’m there with you. I’ve always been there with you and that won’t ever change,” I responded in a soft tone as I wrapped my arms around his neck.

“Fine, you win. Let’s eat.”

I glanced at him seductively as we looked at one another. “I thought you would say that.”

Chapter Fifteen

I’D NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD
be happier than when my mother called and told me the New York Police Department had given the okay and released Trésor’s body into their care. Finally, we could mourn her properly and hold a funeral for her. Rory took care of all the arrangements and had the body shipped to France. The following day, he came home with airline tickets and promptly told me we would be leaving the following afternoon.

I had good news as well but I wasn’t sure how well it would go over with Rory. He knew I had something to tell him but I didn’t know if it was the right time or perhaps I should wait.

“Go on then, tell me what’s on your mind?” he inquired in a probing tone.

“Well, I started to read Trésor’s journals and they are fascinating. I have thought long and hard about it . . . there is way too much information here for a simple article. I want to give my sister something she would have always wanted but never could have gotten on her own. I want to write a book.”

His facial expression spoke volumes when it changed from pleasant do downright hostile. “Are you crazy? You can’t do that and . . . you can’t talk about what Severin and I do or what happened to your sister. Don’t you understand the police results were inconclusive? They can’t prove she killed herself but at the same time they can’t
disprove
it either. All it takes is one crazy District Attorney to come in and decide to re-open the case and there is no telling where this could lead. There isn’t a statute of limitations for murder.”

It was my turn to feel somewhat indignant. “Yes, I know that. I would change the names of people and places that I would write about so no one would know I was specifically talking about the club. I’m not trying to bankrupt your business or shed light on the people who frequent your establishments—”

“That’s not enough. The right people would know and that would put a target on your head. Have you not forgotten that if your sister was in fact slaughtered by someone, they are still out there? If they did it that time and got away with it, don’t you feel you’re being a bit naïve to think they wouldn’t come after you? And I am not talking about after the book has been published; I am talking about while you are writing the book.

“You’re putting your life in danger and I cannot allow you to do that. Trésor is dead but you are very much alive and if anything happened to you . . . it would destroy not only me but your parents as well. For once, think about someone else other than yourself and your precious career. Are the lives of everyone else of so little importance to you that you feel like this book
has
to be written to exonerate your sister? She didn’t do
anything
wrong.”

I had never felt so selfish in my life but I couldn’t give up my brilliant plan without a fight. I had spent too many restless days and sleepless nights thinking about it.

“Okay, what about if I only focus on her career? I think it would still make a great book! She would have had a fabulous career if she’d lived and we both know it. For God’s sake, she had a photo shoot with
Vogue
and they are going to feature her on the December cover. Does that not mean anything to you? They called up my parents and specifically asked permission. Can you imagine my mother’s shock when she answered the phone and personally spoke to Editor-in-Chief who offered her condolences?”

“If you wanted the Editor-in-Chief to call your mother, you could have asked me. My parents know her and I would have been quite happy to make the call,” Rory said as he played with his personal phone,
the
ridiculously expensive Ulysse Nardin.

He’d bought me one too and I was so embarrassed of a phone that was worth more than the average American made in a year, I refused to take it out of my purse in public unless he was calling. He called me a “silly little fool” who was “not ashamed to carry around an eighty-thousand-dollar Hermès Birkin but too afraid to pull out my fifty-thousand-dollar phone.”

Yes, he had turned me into a walking cliché with all his fucking money and endless presents but at the heart of it all, I was still the woman who was amazed my mother had finally treated Trésor’s career with some respect now that she was dead. It was entirely what my sister wanted when she’d been alive but better late than never.

I decided to change tactics. “If I promise to stick to her career, will you at least think about it? All the private research I do about her death will be stored somewhere else and I won’t broach the subject in the book except to say she used to date you. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.”

Rory set his phone down on the elegant coffee table in front of the sofa before his blue-green eyes drifted my way with an air of exasperation. “You keep forgetting something very important and the heart of this matter. How will you get around her death? She might have killed herself—according to the Medical Examiner—but she was still found by the NYPD and the Coroner in a locked cage, naked save for a bizarre chastity belt and her throat slit. What was she doing in that cage in my home? How will you answer the questions people want to read about her sex life? They don’t give a shit about the modeling stuff, they’ll buy it for the titillation and you’ll be panned by the critics for misleading people about the real aim of your sister’s biography when all they will want is salacious gossip and outrageous supposition. Meanwhile, the publisher will be upset because you failed to deliver the tabloid biography they expected to make megabucks on instead of some kind of dreamy non-fiction masterpiece.”

“Is that fair? I’m hardly a tabloid journalist and this is my sister we are talking about. Maybe I don’t want to
explore
her love life—”

“Could that be perhaps because you’re fucking her lover? You don’t think they will find that the least bit strange? You and I? How we’ve been shacking up together? And if I did all that shit to Trésor, what’s to say I am not doing it to you?”

“Okay, you’ve got a point.” I pulled my hair off my shoulders and held it with both hands against the nape of my neck with prolonged frustration. “I’m not doing this for the money, Rory. I want her story to be told. That’s all. What if I elect to do it for a small French publishing house? I can write it in French and I will never write or publish an English language version.”