Beautiful Secret (Beautiful Bastard #4) (35 page)

Ruby was the only woman I would ever want, and the prospect of having her in my life for only these past four weeks was so depressing it turned something sour inside me.

The first weekend after I took a hammer to her trust and forced Ruby to silently end our relationship, I managed to make it to the office to gather some reports and designs. I wanted to at least present a semblance of getting work done at home. I was long unshaven, wearing the same worn jeans and T-shirt I’d had on for the previous thirty-six hours, and I’m not sure I’d even looked at myself in the mirror before leaving the flat.

It was still dark out, so early in the morning that the streets were wonderfully still, providing a sort of external calm I was desperate to steal and pull inside me. Cars remained parked at the curb; shops wouldn’t open for hours yet. The lobby of the building was silent as a vault.

I pulled my keys from my pocket outside the glass doors, curiously peering in at the single light turned on inside the firm.

It was in the far right corner. Near Ruby’s old office.

I found my hand moving forward
and the door opened under my robotic push. In the back corner, I could make out the sounds of papers being tapped into order on a surface, of picture frames being set down. Of books being dropped into a box.

“Hello?” I called out, rounding the corner and freezing as I caught sight of her inside the interns’ office, hand suspended in midair as she met my gaze.

She’d had the same idea: come in early on a weekend, avoid everyone. But instead of picking up work to numbly sort through in the privacy of a living room, Ruby was packing up her desk.

My stomach crawled up into my chest, clogging my windpipe with emotion.

“Ruby? You’re here.”

She closed her eyes, and turned back to her packing. “I’m almost done.”

“I wish you wouldn’t rush off. I’ve . . . I’ve wanted to speak to you. To really speak to you, not like that rambling on the phone the other night.”

She nodded but didn’t say anything. I stood lamely, staring at her and completely at a loss over what to do.

Her cheeks were pink, bottom lip wet and thin beneath the pressure of her teeth biting down upon it.

“Ruby,” I started.

“Please,” she croaked, holding up a hand. “Don’t, okay?”

She’d phrased it as a question, almost as if she wasn’t sure continuing this horrible silence was even the right decision. I’d never been heartbroken before,
ever
, a stark realization for someone who’d spent the majority of his adult life in a single relationship, and the weight of it pressed down on every vital part of my body.

I wanted to walk to her, pull her to face me, and bend to kiss her. Simply
kiss
her, tell her she was the only woman I think I’d ever want again. If she’d let me, maybe I’d be able to offer up some begging. I might, in fact, be able to put a name to these things I felt.

Devotion and apology. Adoration, desperation, and fear.

Above it all: love.

Instinct, however, told me to give her space.

I turned, walking to my office. Behind me, her packing sounds seemed to pick up speed and force and I winced, wishing it was easier than all this. Was I wrong? Was my instinct a constant red herring? I clutched my forehead in both hands, wishing I knew what the hell to do.

Absently, I grabbed a file off my desk, collecting a few more from my cabinet. I was barely focusing on the task in front of me, knowing Ruby was only a few feet away.

Stepping out of my office, I exhaled a long-held breath at the sight of her still in the building, taping up her small box of belongings. Her hair was messier than usual, as if she’d scarcely paid it any attention. Her clothes were loose and drab: a beige skirt, a mud-colored sweater. She looked as if she’d been dragged through a rain cloud.

I missed her. I missed her with a kind of clawing ache that seemed to dig deep scars inside my chest, in a place I couldn’t reach, pushing aside things I required
for breathing, heart beating, for moving about the world in a way that had once been reflexive. I’d never had the tendency toward melodrama, but in this case my self-pity was crippling. I’d never had to win over anyone before in my life, at least not consciously, and felt utterly unprepared for what was required of me in this instance.

“I know you want to be left alone,” I started, trying to shake off the way she seemed to wince at the sound of my voice, “and I realize that I’ve hurt you in a way that will be impossible to undo. But, darling, I’m so sorry. And if it means anything—”

“I think I’m going to lose my spot at Oxford,” she said in the world’s quietest voice.

I felt my entire body go still. “You what?”

“I was fired, but Tony also put a letter in my file. He sent me a copy of it—though after reading it I have no idea why he thought I would want to see it—and in essence it says that I was a tolerably mediocre employee because my affections for you had me preoccupied and, he thinks, affected the quality of my work.”

I took a step forward, blood pumping so fast in my veins my chest ached. “For one, that is utterly preposterous. I’d heard him rave about you on more than one occasion. And two, he had no knowledge of your affections prior to our trip!”

“I know. Thanks for passing that along,” she said dryly, reaching to put the tape back on the now-empty desk.

“Ruby,” I spluttered, “I mentioned it spontaneously, like a bleeding idiot, simply because I was still
awed that you—”

“Niall?” she interrupted, and I could see tears shining in her eyes. “Don’t, okay? I get it. You didn’t mean to tell him that, or at the very least you didn’t mean for it to come off the way it did. I don’t actually care that you told Tony I had feelings for you before our trip; I don’t think it matters. Tony is an enormous prick for what he did. My problem with this,” she said, motioning between us, “is that he’s not entirely wrong. I
was
distracted. I
was
preoccupied. I made it clear I would do anything to be with you . . . and you went back to her.”

“I
didn’t
. I knew before I went into her flat that I had no intention of—”

“The way you left it last week,” she said, her voice thick with restrained tears, “felt like you were giving her another chance.”

“Ruby—”

“I
threw
myself at you. I was so in love with you—had been for so
long
—that I ignored all your signs telling me you weren’t ready. I told you I loved you after only a few weeks, and you clearly weren’t ready to have sex with me, but you did—”

“Ruby, please stop.” I felt nauseous. I couldn’t keep up, but her words grew brittle and toxic in my ears.

“—and the very next day you went to hear Portia out about
reconciliation
, assuming that I was so desperate for your attention I would still be here if you decided against it.” When she looked up at me, the tears in her eyes finally fell. “I think you assumed that because I always want to talk about everything that I would understand how much
you wanted to hear what she had to say, and that would somehow override my need to feel important to you.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again.

“I think you assumed I would think it was a great idea because—
hooray
—it turns out Portia isn’t a robot and actually
does
have feelings and she finally wants to share them.” She swiped at her cheek. “But I
didn’t
. I
wanted
you to tell her she had eleven years as your wife to tell you those things and that you had a girlfriend now who had the privilege of talking about what was going on in your mind and your heart.”

She sucked in a lungful of breath before she continued. “Jesus Christ, I was so eager to hear everything you had to say, even if it meant talking about your sex life with Portia right after we made love for the first time. For fuck’s sake.” She laughed sharply, without humor. I’d never seen emotion so raw. Ruby wasn’t filtering for my benefit; she was just laying it all out in a rush before she could talk herself out of it.

“You could have told her she was welcome to come meet you for lunch if she had things to get off her chest, or to feel free to put it in a fucking
email
. But to go see her the first night after we’d made love? To be unwilling to make it clear that you were with me now?” She shook her head, wiping away more tears. “Even if what we had was raw and weird and sometimes had these awkward fits and starts it was way better. We had something good, we had something
real
, and you know it.”

“We did,” I told her. “We
do
.”

I stepped closer, put my hands on her hips. To my profound relief she didn’t pull away, and I bent, kissing her neck. “Ruby, I’m so sorry.”

She nodded, her arms limp at her sides. “You hurt me.”

“I was an idiot.”

Pulling away, she closed her eyes to collect herself and then, to my absolute horror, she picked up her box and walked down the opposite way from me, down a row of cubicles and out of the office before I could gather the right words to make her stop.

Bringing home the folders was an exercise in going through the motions. I remained just as useless for the remainder of the weekend.

Sleep. Eat. Drink myself into a stupor. Stare.

My phone was disturbingly silent. I was grateful to receive no calls from Tony, no calls from family, nothing more from Portia. But it devastated me every time I looked down at my phone and had heard nothing from Ruby.

So when it began buzzing over where I’d hurled it a few hours before, on a throw pillow on the floor across the room, it took a few full rings for me to startle out of my trance and answer.

I stumbled over, and cursed down at the screen, answering it anyway. “Max.”

“I talked to Rebecca earlier,” he said by way of greeting.

“Mm?”

“Mum’s in bits over this. Rebecca already told her she thinks Ruby’s going to be the one.”

My sister. “She’s never bloody
met
Ruby.”

“Doesn’t matter, apparently.”

I spoke into my tumbler of gin, “At least you two never dive in to anything headlong.”

“You sound pissed.”

Staring into my drink, I told him, “On my way. And miserable.”

“Aw come on, then. Tell me what’s happened?”

“Ruby ended things.”

Max fell silent for several beats. “She didn’t.”

“Yeah, she did. Our affair in New York cost her her job, whereas I got a slap on the wrist. She thinks she might not get into Maggie’s program now.”

He blew out a heavy breath. “Fucking hell.”

“And I went to have dinner with Portia the night after Ruby and I finally shagged, not knowing Tony’d given Ruby an ultimatum: me or her job.”

“And she chose you,” my brother guessed.

I laughed into the tumbler. “Right-o.”

“You
idiot
.”

“Exactly.” I finished what was in my glass and dropped it onto the floor. “So, needless to say, she’s ended things with me quite soundly.”

“So you’re going to drink yourself into a stupor of self-pity on your couch then?”

“You know what my life with Portia
was like,” I started. “And with Ruby . . . I’d never thought much before about children or finding what you have with Sara, but I did with her.” I stared out the window, at the sky and the new leaves as they shook in the early spring breeze. “But I will never be okay after this. She changed me and I . . . I don’t want to go back.” The line was quiet for a moment and I reached for my glass again, refilling it. “So drinking myself into an amnesia of what I’ve lost—that sounds about right.”

“Or,” he suggested with a laugh that said,
You twat
, “you could get off that stupid arse and go talk to Maggie. For fuck’s sake, Niall, you act as if you’ve got no resources. Figure out what you can bloody well fix and fix it. This is what you
do
, mate.”

I had a bit of time to reflect—finally sober—on what I wanted to say while I took the train from London to Oxford. Margaret Sheffield was a bit of a hero of mine, having served on my thesis committee and been more of a mentor to me than my own alcoholic advisor had ever been. Although Maggie’s specialty was civil engineering, she had a hand in designing and overseeing the construction of many of the cornerstone commercial buildings in crowded London neighborhoods, and I idolized the way her career easily straddled engineering, architecture, and broader urban planning. One of the proudest moments of my professional life to date had been when a colleague had introduced me at a keynote conference as “our generation’s Margaret Sheffield.”

But I’d never been to see her on such a personal matter. In fact, aside from the heated moment I’d stormed into Tony’s office last week, I’d never really been to see
anyone
from my professional life with a personal matter. So even though the cold wind whipped around me as I trudged down Parks Road toward the Thom Building, I was flushed with nerves.

Maggie had been around long enough to deserve an emeritus office in one of the grander buildings, but preferred being closer to the action, she’d said. Her building was an odd, hexagonal structure but from it she had a beautiful view of the University Park just to the east. Just being here again, close to Engineering and the materials sciences buildings, brought on a heavy sense of nostalgia. I’d been young when I lived here. Young and married, and for that reason always a bit different from my peers who spent their days working hard and evenings partying harder.

I knocked on her open door, relieved when she looked up at me and smiled widely.

“Niall!” She stood, making her way around her desk to give me a firm hug. Maggie had never been a hand-shaker, but with determination had trained me over the years to give in to her affections.

When she pulled back, I asked, “I was hoping you’d have a few moments?”

“Of course.” She smiled. “Your email did make me curious with its complete lack of detail.”

“And . . .” I began, “if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, we
could grab a coffee?”