“You caught the eye of my boss and he’s feeling generous.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“If he wants you to know that, he’ll tell you.”
“Fair enough. What’s the job?”
“Oldest job there is.”
Immediately Lucien thought Dominic was talking about prostitution and getting paid to fuck and forget. Sign him up. Dominic clearly could tell what he was thinking. A grin cracked over his face. “Not that old. Grave digging.”
Lucien was sure he didn’t hear the guy right, because who the fuck dug graves anymore? “Say again?”
“My reaction too, but there are a few graveyards where the owner believes in a more personal touch. You would work mostly at night, you get paid a hundred fifty dollars a week, meals are included, and there’s housing—nothing fancy, but at least it’s not the streets. You interested?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool, let’s walk and I’ll fill you in.”
Fourteen years earlier . . .
Darcy sighed and tightened her arms around Lucien as he brushed his lips across the tender skin under her jaw. He moved slowly, building up the tension so that desire curled in her belly. Her hips tilted to take him deeper and her mouth pressed to his. The kiss grew a bit desperate as Darcy poured all her fears and hopes into it. She wanted it to always be like this between them, but change was coming. Lucien was turning eighteen, and with Sister Anne gone, he was leaving. Reality was a harsh truth and one that left her feeling adrift because she was unsure of what came next for them.
His head lifted and Darcy saw the concern in his eyes, even as lust made them glaze over. He gripped her hips and pulled her close as he moved deeper and faster. The orgasm rippled through her and brought tears to her eyes seconds before Lucien called out her name and emptied himself deep inside of her.
Afterward, he would hold her; and sometimes it seemed to Darcy that he liked the holding as much as the lovemaking. It was like he was seeking the same feeling of connection that she was.
“What’s wrong?” His soft voice interrupted her thoughts.
“Nothing.”
He leaned up on his elbow. “Come with me.”
Her heart leaped. “What do you mean?”
“When I leave, come with me.”
“Do you mean it?”
“I love you, Darcy, and I want you in my life. I don’t know where we’ll live or how we’ll get on, but I do know that I don’t want to go without you.”
She threw her arms around him, and he chuckled as he fell onto his back, his arms tightening around her. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Words wouldn’t come, so Darcy responded by holding him even more tightly.
“You thought I was going to leave without you, didn’t you?” His voice was whisper soft.
She nodded her head.
“Why?”
Her eyes were bright when she looked at him. “I never understood why someone like you would choose to hang out with someone like me.”
He rolled so that she was pinned underneath him and he looked almost angry. “Why do you do that? Why do you always think so little of yourself? Never mind, I know it’s because of your fucking mother. I shouldn’t need to say this, but I will: I never had any intentions of leaving here without you. How could you possibly think I could?”
“I was trying to be realistic. You’re moving on. It isn’t unreasonable to believe that you’d forget me in time.”
“Forget you? How the hell could I ever forget you?”
Darcy was yanked from the dream when her alarm went off, but it took a minute for the memory of it to fade. She climbed from bed and shut the buzzer off. Lucien had forgotten her; just how soon after he’d left had she slipped from his mind? It wasn’t a question she needed an answer to.
She splashed some water on her face and reached for her toothbrush, her eyes falling on her Manhattan College mug on the counter. Her life had definitely gone in a direction she had never seen coming.
At sixteen, she’d planned to run away with Lucien. As an adult, she now understood the flaws in their plans; he’d been almost eighteen, so he could have left with no problem, but would she have escaped so easily? Probably not, but the idea of it had been so romantic that she hadn’t seen the pitfalls in their plan, only the happily-ever-after they would have had.
But the day they’d planned to leave, fate stepped in. She didn’t know the man