and hot and relieved and furious and grateful. So many emotions charged through her throat that she couldn’t find words. “Don’t you ever do something like that again, Ivan, do you hear me?”
He looked stricken, and that wasn’t her goal. She didn’t know what her goal was. She picked up his scarred, tattooed hand, feeling tears well up in her eyes and cascade over her face and pour out in such waves that she couldn’t speak. She put her hand on his face, lightly, gently, and shook her head. “I need you, Ivan. I need you to live, okay?”
He raised a hand and pulled her head down to his chest and she wept and so did he. “Thank you,” he growled.
Isobel put her hand on Elena’s head. Then she was gone.
When Patrick returned, Elena called Julian. “I need a favor,” she said. “I need to do something today. I need to go to the airport.”
When he picked her up, he was aloof and quiet. Which she deserved. “When will you be back?” he asked finally, when they stopped at the curb at the airport.
“This afternoon. I’m just going to see my mama.”
He reached out and turned off the ignition. “I need to get something off my chest before you go, Elena.”
“I don’t really have a lot of time, Julian,” she said, putting her hand on the door, ready to bolt.
“You have enough time.” He pulled off his sunglasses. “We’re at a crossroads, Elena. I’m not the kind of man who can settle for a little bit of you, here and there, whenever you feel like letting me in.”
Enormously uncomfortable, she looked away, watched a woman in an expensive parka cross the street. “Julian, this is not the time for—”
“There’s never a good time.” He reached into the back seat and pulled out a notebook. “Before I give you this, I want to tell you that I am in love with you.” He took a breath. “Not a little bit. I love you like you were made for me. I think you love me, too, but you have to get over your fears and let me in, or it will never work.”
“Julian, don’t do this right now! It’s been a really long night and I’m feeling very emotional and I just want to go see my mom, okay? I’ll be back this afternoon.”
“There’s one more thing.” He held the notebook in his hands. “I have a confession to make. The movie we’re going to start filming in June is a ghost story. About a woman who lost her soul mate in a car accident and is haunted by him.”
Elena stared at him.
He took her hand and put the notebook into it. “This is the script,” he said, his rich dark eyes direct. “Take it and read it. If you hate it and you don’t want me to make the movie, I’ll pull it.”
She started to shove it back at him. He pushed back, patiently, quietly, that same stillness that had so captured her the first time they sat together over a meal in Vancouver rippling from him and touching her.
“Just read it,” he said. “Give me a chance.”
Afraid she’d fall apart right there, Elena yanked open the door. “I’ll call you when I get back.”
He leapt out of the car and came around. In the bright cold, in front of God and everyone, he said, “I love you, Elena.”
She nodded, and ducked away, tucking the script under her arm. She knew she was being cold. She heard Patrick and Mia and everyone else telling her to let her guard down. But it was her guard that had held her together.
This one time, though, she turned around and made her lurching way back to him. “I’ll read it,” she said. “But I am who I am, too.”
“I get that.”
It was a wildly expensive but fairly short commuter flight to Santa Fe, bumpy and probably dangerous. Elena recognized a famous actress behind giant sunglasses, and in the front of the plane was an Arab businessman in a five-thousand-dollar suit. He wore heady cologne.
Elena wore her sunglasses as well, to cover the ravaged swollenness of her eyes. She was exhausted, emotionally, physically, and mentally, but this was her one and only day off, and she didn’t have any time to waste. She didn’t read the script, not yet. It sat in her lap, burning hot, but she didn’t let herself think, a trick that had worked for her for twenty years, the only way