Sinful Love (Sinful Nights #4)

But just like proximity breeds closeness, distance kills it. Too many days apart, weeks alone, and years gone by. Paper and ink couldn’t feed their hungry hearts. Eventually, their love became unsustainable. Stretched too far, it collapsed under the weight.

They drifted apart after the first year of college. Even then, she’d clung to the distant possibility that someday, somehow they’d meet again. Hope powered her even in the years when they no longer talked. She took a job as a waitress at a local café during school, saving all her euros, thinking they’d fund a return trip to the United States. Like a piggybank for rekindled love.

But by the time she’d have been able to use them, she and her high school sweetheart had faded to memories. The fondest ones to be sure, and she’d kept a book of photographs of their days together, a record of her young love.

Besides, the euros had gone to something else.

She’d had to move on. He’d moved on too.

Annalise graduated from university, hunted for jobs across Europe, and eventually landed the gig of her dreams as a photojournalist. There she met Julien, a rival photographer, soon her lover, then her fiancé.

That was what Julien was the time she’d seen Michael ten years ago. He’d just sent her the most beautiful and heartbreaking love letter, and it had ripped her apart knowing she couldn’t respond in kind. Mere days after receiving it, chance had ushered her to the airport in Marseilles on a job, and she’d run into him on a layover. He’d just moved to Europe and was stationed there for his work in army intelligence. It was unexpected and God, the sight of him, a man then, had punched her in the chest. She was in love with Julien, but guilt still gnawed at her when Michael’s eyes traveled down her body and landed on her hand. Her engagement ring.

As if she’d broken a promise.

And for the briefest of moments that afternoon, she’d been tempted to break one to Julien. She hadn’t. She wouldn’t. Straying wasn’t in her nature. But had Michael sent that letter before she met Julien, her life might have taken a different course, back to him. As it was, she’d had to march onward, and she did. But with so much that had once been between them, perhaps it was no surprise, really, that the first man she’d ever loved would be the one to rekindle all that was dormant in her body. Last night had ignited something inside her.

Julien had said over and over that he didn’t want her to mourn him forever, or at all. “Love, I won’t be here always. You’ll need to move on. You’re young and beautiful and smart and vibrant.”

She’d laughed him off, shook her head. “Darling, you aren’t going anywhere. I won’t let you,” she’d said, then mimed digging her claws into her husband’s chest as they’d relaxed on a park bench watching the sunset by the Eiffel Tower one evening. But Julien didn’t toss back his sandy blond head, or smile his sweet, sexy grin at her. Instead, he’d tugged her close. “The odds, Annalise. The odds. Five years is much more likely than fifty.”

“Stop that,” she said. “Let’s not talk about this. The sun is falling. The lights are coming on.”

The odds were not in their favor. They never had been, and she’d known that before he got down on one knee. He had a lethal arrhythmia, a genetic condition that meant he could die of cardiac arrest at any moment. Well aware she’d likely be widowed young, she’d walked down the aisle anyway. She wasn’t blind. She wasn’t foolish. But her love for him was powerful. It couldn’t be quashed by medicine or odds or statistics.

“Fifty years or five years. I want whatever you have,” she’d said to him after he proposed.

She’d gotten eight.

A tear slipped down her cheek as she glanced out the tinted window of the Nissan. The car veered right onto the Strip, and the bright light of the sun pounded down from the sky. Las Vegas in daytime was exposed. Nothing hidden. Every trick, every mirror, every trap was starkly visible in the daylight.

She’d always been so good at spotting sleight of hand, at something out of place, at shining the light in a dark corner. But with Julien, she’d chosen to believe in the illusion—in the glass half-full, in the possibility of fifty years with him. Hope was more powerful than knowledge, love stronger than evidence. She’d loved him fiercely until the day he died in his sleep two years ago.

Knowing the odds had never prepared her for the wreckage of her heart when she found him that morning, unable to be roused. Over the next two years, the only things that got her through each day were routines. Work, walking, shooting photos, taking care of her mother, buying bread. Those simple acts had guided her out of the black hole of grief, as had the change in her career to fashion photography. Her heart had been too heavy for the weight of current affairs.

As the car pulled into the portico at Caesars, she glanced at her watch. A few more hours until Michael arrived.