He rubs a hand angrily over his face, letting out an immensely loud sigh. “Hearts aren’t bloody buildings, Nicola!” He throws the covers off of him and gets out of bed, pacing back and forth. He’s nude but for once, my eyes are drawn to the tension in his face. I don’t even think to look at his dick.

“I’m sorry,” I hiss at him, sitting up in bed. “I know they aren’t but, God, I wish you knew what it was like to be me. To just know what it’s like to be dealt the shitty hand.”

He stops and gives me an incredulous look. I regret saying anything. He’s that wide-eyed, his brow knitting with anger. “You think you’re the only one who has been dealt the shitty hand in life?” He leans forward with his hands on the mattress, looking me dead in the eye. “My mother never told me she loved me growing up. My father was never proud of me, no matter what I did. I had to live with that, deal with that. I was shipped off to boarding schools half the time because no one in my family knew what to do with me. You want to talk about the shitty hand, well I got it. I was fucking unwanted. And yes, I had money and I had everything else at my fingertips. But that doesn’t mean dickshit when you don’t have someone to tell you they love you.”

My breath is caught in my lungs. I can see his pulse ticking along in his throat, the desperation in his eyes that want so much for me to see him, the real him, to understand. And I do. Not in the exact same way, but I do.

He swallows and looks away for a moment. “Hey,” he says, his voice low. He climbs on top of the mattress toward me and I’m reminded of the first time we made love. But instead of that carnal desire as he approached me, there’s something else. That extra level of connection that I thought may have been only in my head.

“Nicola,” he says, placing both his hands on either side of my face, gazing into my eyes with such deep focus. “I know you’ve been burned. But I’ve been burned too. Maybe our ashes can make something beautiful together.”

He kisses me then with such force, such passion, I feel like the wind has literally been sucked out of me. I want nothing more than for something beautiful to rise from us together. I have my demons and apparently he has his.

We waste little time in getting intimate. He’s inside me and instead of the lazy, luxurious romp we had just before, this one is crazed and desperate. It’s like he’s handing himself to me, afraid if I don’t take it now, he’ll lose me forever.

But he won’t lose me.

Because I am absolutely in love with this man.

And that realization is terrifying. Because he was so, so wrong about hearts and buildings being different. They are the same. They are structures that keep us safe, that shield us from the elements. And the minute they start to falter, everything else is at risk.

A heart can be condemned, just as a building can be.

A heart can be destroyed by a sledgehammer disguised as rejection, by a bulldozer masquerading as a careless word. A heart can be blasted to pieces and ruined to the ground.

But even knowing all that, I need to move forward. I need to take that chance. I need to trust in Bram and trust in myself that giving myself to him, opening myself to love and letting myself fall for the first time in my whole life, doesn’t have to end in rubble.

It can reach the clouds, pierce the sky. It can be that bridge from the life I had before, from that person I knew before, to something so much better.

I don’t tell him this though. I don’t dare. I keep these feelings – I love you, I need you, I crave you – and the fears – you’ll break me, you’ll wreck me, you’ll condemn me – all to myself. But I let him inside that night. I let him in deep. I want him to discover these parts on his own, without the fanfare, without the expectations.

And when he comes, his eyes holding so much magic, and I think that maybe he knows.

Maybe he finally knows just what he is to me.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Bram

“Hey, fuckface,” Linden says as I answer the phone.

“Hello, Linden,” I say politely. I’m in the middle of a meeting with the board of directors from San Francisco’s Inner City Initiative and even though a coffee break has been called, there’s no way in hell I’m going to greet my brother like I usually do.

“Caught you at a bad time, eh brother?” he says. “I’ll call back later.”

“What do you want?”

“Just wanted to check in with you,” he says, sounding defensive. “Jeez, your own family can’t see how you’re doing. I haven’t talked to you since you got back from your Disneyland excursion. Which, by the way, thanks a lot. Now Steph is harassing me wondering why she hasn’t been whisked off to the happiest place on earth. I don’t know how you did it with an actual child in tow.”

His comment makes me flinch, as most of those types of comments usually do. “I did it for Ava,” I tell him, “as well as Nicola.”

“Fine, fine,” he says. “I’m just saying, you’re a saint. And I never thought I’d call you that. She must be really getting under your skin. Don’t tell me you’re going to pull a Jerry Maguire and go all ga-ga over the kid. I can’t imagine Ava telling you how much the human head weighs.”

No, but she would tell me the names of a lot of the dinosaurs from the Jurassic period. But I don’t mention that to Linden. I don’t want to give him any ammo.

“If it makes you feel any better,” I tell him, lowering my voice so the people at the end of the table sipping their water and making small talk, don’t hear, “I am ga-ga over Nicola. She’s a shag like you wouldn’t believe.” I had to throw that part in there or Linden might accuse me of being a body-snatcher victim.

“I bet she is. Why else would you still be around?”

I breathe out slowly through my nose, trying to not let him get to me. I knew my brother would never understand any of this, any of what I feel and anything that I’ve been through before. There is so much he doesn’t know about me, so much that no one knows, and lately I’ve been feeling like it’s all boiling too close to the surface.

“You just watch out, Linden,” I tell him. “Pretty soon Steph is going to start harassing you for wee babies and then where the fuck are you going to be? You’re going to be taking them little shits to Disneyland and I’m going to be having the last laugh.” I pause. “And yes they’ll be little shits, because you were an epic shit when you were young and that will be your bloody karma.”

He’s silent for a change. “I’d say the same to you,” he eventually says, “even though I know no girl in her right mind would ever want you to be her baby daddy.”

And again, straight into the gut. I take another deep breath and remind myself that Linden has no idea.

No idea.

“Is that all you wanted to do?” I ask him, trying to sound unaffected and bored. “Trade barbs with me?”

“Where are you anyway?”

“Busy,” I tell him, not about to get into the specifics. He and my family still don’t know about the potential charity work, about my building and ideas. No one outside of Nicola knows and I much prefer it that way. Although tonight there is a black-tie gala for a fundraiser that attracts some pretty important local people. If Linden followed the news or local politics at all, he might get an idea.

Thank God he just sticks to flying helicopters, though that’s obviously no small feat on its own.

“I see,” he muses. “Well, whenever you’re not busy and you’re not shagging the single mum, come by and we can dip in some beers.” There’s a patch of silence. “Sometimes I miss you, brother. Just not this time.”

“Fine,” I tell him. I whisper into the phone, adding, “Fuckface.”

I hang up and then realize that the people at the end of the table – Mr. Arterton and Mr. Bayswater – have heard what I’ve said.