Sweet as Honey (The Seven Sisters) - By Caitlyn Robertson Page 0,54
to navy in the fading light.
She didn’t know where this was heading, or even what was going to come out of her mouth. But suddenly it felt important to get to the bottom of things. It was as if they’d spent the past six months growing flowers in a beautiful garden, but finally they were going to dig down into the soil and discover the whole secret world that lived beneath the surface.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dex watched as Honey paused to gather her thoughts. Without his jacket, the cool evening air caused goose bumps to rise on his flesh beneath his shirt and the rough rock behind him dug painfully into his back. But he didn’t care. He would have sat there for a thousand years if it meant he had a chance of getting Honey back.
He’d never felt anything like the relief that had flooded him when he’d found her sitting there. Surprisingly, Cam had not been worried to find she’d escaped out of the bathroom window. He’d just sighed and said, “She’ll come back, when she’s ready.” When Dex had protested, Cam had reminded him, “She’s twenty-five, not fifteen. She’s a grown woman, and if she doesn’t want to talk to anyone, that’s her right. She knows where we are, when she’s ready to talk.”
But Dex couldn’t bear the thought of her sitting in the dark on her own somewhere, trying to deal with God knew what horrors Cathryn had thrown at her. He would have combed the bush all night to find her.
She unscrewed the bottle top and took another tiny sip of the whiskey, following it with the delicate wince that amused him every time before passing him the bottle. He took a mouthful, reminding himself that if he carried on like this he wouldn’t be able to drive home, and passed it back to her. She screwed the top on carefully. The moonlight that coated the bush around them, turning it into real silver fern, painted her nose and the apples of her cheeks with pure silvery-white. She looked like a Greek statue, ethereal and sad, and it made him catch his breath.
“Marriage is for an awfully long time,” she said finally. “I mean, I know you can get divorced if it doesn’t work out, but it doesn’t seem great to go into it thinking like that. ‘Till death parts us,’ is what we’ll have to say, and it seems to me you have to be pretty certain of each other to make that commitment.”
“I’m certain,” he said, but she waved the words away.
“You proposed to me very soon after we’d met. And I said yes. And since then the outcome hasn’t been in question. But I don’t think either of us has really sat down and thought about what it means, and if we’re right for each other.”
“I’m certain,” he said again, meaning it.
She gave him an exasperated look. “I’m serious, Dex. I’m not looking for false flattery or glibness here. This isn’t Regency England—it’s not an arranged marriage. A little compatibility is sought for before couples get together now. And we didn’t know a thing about each other at the beginning. We made the decision based on a kind of desperation, a hope that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they had been for both of us in the past. For me, certainly, I saw you—a policeman with a strong sense of justice—as a kind of hero. I put you on a pedestal—I know that.”
“I like being someone’s hero,” he said.
Her lips curved wryly. “And you saw me as some sort of innocent angel who’d wash away your sins. Don’t deny it, Dex—I know it’s true.”
“I’m not denying it. It is true. And I still believe it.”
“I’m not an angel—nowhere near it.” Frustration furrowed her brow. “I’m very much an ordinary mortal with tons of foibles and weaknesses.”
“I guess that makes two of us then.”
“Dex… Do you see what I’m saying? Being with me doesn’t make you into a different person, any more than being with you makes me different. Our past doesn’t dissolve when we’re together—we just paper over the cracks.”
“You’re wrong,” he said simply. “I am a different person when I’m with you. And I like who I am when we’re together. It’s not a case of forgetting the past or trying to change. It’s that you bring out the best in me.”