‘Olivia?’ I detect concern in his tone. ‘Please, share your burden with me.’ There’s no evading him, even less so when he pushes himself up to his knees and pulls me to mine. We’re mirroring each other, our hands clasped and resting in his lap while he rubs gentle circles across my skin with his thumbs. ‘Olivia?’
I make a point of holding his eyes when I speak, searching for any mild reaction to my question. ‘Please tell me why everything needs to be so perfect.’
There’s nothing. No frown, no expression or telling signs in his eyes. He’s perfectly composed. ‘We’ve had this discussion before, and I’m certain we agreed that we’d exhausted that subject.’
‘No, you told me that the subject was exhausted.’ It wasn’t exhausted at all, and now my horrible thought process is stamping all over my conclusions. He’s ashamed of his upbringing. He wants to eradicate it all from his memory. He wants to hide it.
‘For good reason.’ He drops my hands and looks away from me, searching for something to do other than face me and my pressing questions. He settles on messing with his suit jacket, smoothing the already immaculately folded garment.
‘And what is that reason?’ My heart breaks when he glances at me out of the corner of his eye, caution on his handsome face. ‘Miller, what is that reason?’ I inch towards him slowly, as if approaching a frightened animal, and rest my hand on his forearm. He looks down, frozen in position, clearly in a muddle. I’m patient. I’ve drawn my conclusion, yet I’m unable to share it with him. He’ll know I’ve snooped, and I want him to volunteer this information about his history. Share it with me.
It’s merely seconds, but it feels like an eternity, before he shakes himself back to life and stands, leaving my hand falling to the blanket and my eyes looking up at him. He takes his jacket and slips it on, buttoning it fast before pulling at the sleeves. ‘Because it was exhausted,’ he says, insulting my intelligence with his pathetic brush-off. ‘I need to go to Ice.’
‘Right,’ I sigh, and start to collect the remnants of our brief picnic, piling the rubbish into a carrier bag. ‘Actually, no.’ I toss the bag aside and stand, getting up close and personal with Miller’s tall frame. I must look tiny and fragile next to him, but my resolve is huge. He’s constantly demanding I share my burdens, yet he’s happy to shoulder his own. ‘I’m not coming to Ice,’ I say, drilling holes into him, knowing he won’t go without me. Not after this morning. He wants to keep me close, which is fine by me, but not at Ice.
‘I beg to differ,’ he snorts, but his tone is lacking its usual confidence and in an attempt to show he means business, he takes my neck and tries to turn me.
‘Miller, I said no!’ I shrug him off, anger and frustration afflicting me, and hit him with burning eyes of determination. ‘I’m not coming.’ I sit down again, kick my flip-flops off and collapse to my back, swapping the blue of Miller’s eyes for the blue of the sky. ‘I’m going to enjoy some quiet time in the park. You can go to Ice alone.’ I’ll kick and scream if he tries to manhandle me.
I take my arms behind my head and keep my eyes on the sky, sensing him fidgeting over me. He doesn’t know what to do. He loves my sass, supposedly. Bet he doesn’t now. I settle in for the show, getting comfy, determined not to budge, and find my thoughts drifting back to what had my sass rearing its ugly head in the first place. Miller and his perfect world. My conclusion is simple, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. He had a poor upbringing, with shabby rags for clothes, and now he’s obsessive about wearing the finest threads he can buy.
How he came to have the money to buy the millions of suits of armour he possesses is irrelevant. Kind of. Not at all. My conclusion has only led to more questions – questions I dare not ask, not for fear of upsetting him, but for fear of what the answer might be. How did he come to be in ‘this world’? That house was a children’s home. Miller has spoken of no parents and confirmed there is only him. He’s an orphan. My fussy, fine, perfect Miller has been alone for ever. My heart’s breaking for him.
I’m so lost in my sobering thoughts I jump a little when a warm hardness is suddenly pressing into my side. My head falls to the side to find his eyes. He’s snuggled right in and after laying a gentle kiss on my cheek, he rests his head on my shoulder and slides his arm over my stomach.
‘I want to be with you,’ he whispers. His actions and his words have my arms relinquishing cushion duties for my head and wrapping around him where I can. ‘Every minute of every day, I want to be with you.’
My smile is sad, because having reached my assumption, I know that Miller hasn’t had a someone before. ‘Us,’ I confirm, squeezing some comfort into him. ‘I love your bones, Miller Hart.’
‘And I’m deeply fascinated by you, Olivia Taylor.’