However, she interrupted his self-castigation with a whispered, “Nathan, I love you. I’m glad you’re the first. But could you please start moving again.”
He happily accommodated her request, pumping into her with only slightly less abandon than before. He had never wanted anything as much as he wanted her. All thoughts of Andrew disappeared from his head and so did the rest of the world as he braced himself against the edged of the curved window seat and moved inside of her. A sweet hurt built up inside his groin, begging for him to release. But he denied himself, desperate to please her, to show her he was a better choice than Andrew in every way, even if it didn’t seem so on the surface.
“I love you,” he whispered, over and over again into her ear, until she finally climaxed for him.
“Nathan!” she cried, clenching around him, drawing him even further in as they both came.
Afterwards, they didn’t talk about what they had done, just straightened themselves out enough to look decent when they walked through the house to the one-bedroom guest cottage he occupied behind the mansion. He led her straight to his room, and this time they took their clothes off before making love again. Nathan could still remember how happy he’d felt as he fell asleep with her wrapped up in his arms, like he could accomplish anything and everything now, just because he’d won the heart of Layla Matthews.
But the next morning he’d woken up to find her gone. At first he wondered if it had all been a dream. But no, there was his acceptance letter to Yale, sitting on his desk, packaged and waiting to go.
It occurred to him Andrew was due back that morning and Layla might have taken off rather than risk getting caught cheating on him with his twin brother.
Nathan should have felt more guilty about stealing his brother’s girlfriend, but the truth was, she had always been his, from the moment he met her. To Nathan’s way of thinking, his brother was partly to blame for meeting Layla first and taking something that didn’t truly belong to him.
Knowing Layla, she was sitting in her dorm room at that moment trying to think of the best way to let her brother down. But Nathan already knew the best method would be to rip the band-aid off. It would be better for Nathan to tell it to his brother straight, without subjecting him to the embarrassment of Layla’s profuse apologies.
So he went to the main house to do this, climbing the stairs to his brother’s suite. He could see the door was open, which meant he was already back from his trip.
It occurred to Nathan at that point that maybe he shouldn’t go to Yale after all. He’d rather be here with Layla at Carnegie Mellon, than a six-hour drive away in Connecticut. But Layla probably wouldn’t go for it. With that misguided sense of honor she had, he could already hear her saying they shouldn’t rub their relationship in Andrew’s face—
That’s when he saw them. Layla wrapped in Andrew’s arms as he kissed her with a passion Nathan hadn’t even known his staid brother possessed.
First it felt like a punch in the gut. Then his heart cracked into a thousand pieces, leaving nothing behind but a black ball bitterness and hate.
As if sensing him his presence in the doorway, they both looked up.
“Nathan,” Layla said.
But he didn’t stay. He refused to stand there while she let him down easy, explaining why she’d obviously chosen his brother over him. He walked away, ignoring Layla calling his name. Why had she told him she loved him? Maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so bad if she hadn’t lied to him, but he had believed her, and left himself unprotected. It felt like Layla had plunged a knife into his heart and he had just walked right into it like a total dupe.
He stopped at the cottage to grab his passport and stuff a few clothes into an overnight bag. Fifteen hours later, he was in Ibiza partying his way through a stream of worldly and cynical European girls, vowing to never let another woman hook him the way Layla had. The pain didn’t go away, but after two weeks it lessened to the point that he felt he could face Layla and Andrew without doing them physical harm.
His plan had been to move to New Haven earlier than he needed. Now that Layla had chosen Andrew, there was nothing keeping him in Pittsburgh. But when he stopped in to get his things, he found the house in an uproar because Layla had fallen down their main stairs, and had only come out of her resulting coma the night before his return. Afraid of a lawsuit, his father forbade Andrew to have any further contact with Layla, and to Nathan’s surprise, his twin had tersely agreed.
Despite Nathan’s anger at her, he had to tamp down the urge to visit her himself. He couldn’t stand the thought of lovely and vibrant Layla stuck in a hospital bed, having sustained multiple injuries. He had almost convinced himself to go see her against his parents’ wishes, when her father had come to the mansion and threatened them with his bogus assault charge.
As his father had written hers a check, Nathan also wrote Layla off, shuttering his heart against her, and leaving for New Haven just a couple of days later. He didn’t see or hear of her again until she came storming back into his life three months ago, reigniting his obsession with her, simply by revealing she had completely forgotten her betrayal and had no idea how deeply she had hurt him.
But now he could feel her slipping through his fingers again, and this time it was no one’s fault but his own. That morning at work, he couldn’t concentrate on the business contracts he’d been sent for review. He snapped at Kate more than once. He even hung up on one of his vice presidents—all because Layla had him so twisted up inside.
He couldn’t let her stay in Pittsburgh, but at the same time, he couldn’t figure out how to let her go.
Kate interrupted his brooding by buzzing into his office. “Mr. Sinclair, your sister-in-law is on line one.”
“Send her to voicemail.”
“She says it’s urgent,” Kate answered.
He rolled his eyes. Knowing his sister-in-law, she was panicking about some detail of the ball. But he took it, just in case it had something to do with Andrew.
He pushed line one. “Diana, what do you want?”
Diana’s voice came down the line, crisp but distraught. “There’s a black woman sitting in our receiving room. She says she’s Andrew’s ex-girlfriend, and that she’d like to talk to him. Do you know anything about this?”
Fury exploded in his chest. “Keep her there,” he said, barely able to speak.
“Nathan, what’s going on?”
“I’m coming right now. Keep her there, dammit.”