He shrugged. “Prison. Revenge. That’s all there is to know about me.” His words were simple but his eyes were complicated.
Shaking my head, I smiled sadly. “Not true. Where did you learn to cook like this? Did someone teach you?” My heart fisted as I asked. I knew he hadn’t slept with other women for affection but there might’ve been someone—a friend—someone who’d replaced me in some capacity, if not all.
Arthur took another bite, taking his time to chew. The longer he made me wait, the worse my suspicion grew. Oh, God, he does have someone close to him.
His eyes darkened. “You’re asking if a woman taught me this, right?”
I flinched. Yes. “No. I just—there’s so much about you that I missed out on. Tell me something—anything.” Tell me that no one else mattered but me.
He ran a hand through his hair, wincing as his fingers found the bump of his concussion. “Okay … I’ll put your mind at ease.” His lips curled, deliberately leaving me hanging.
“And …” I leaned forward, panting for his next word.
“I took a Thai cooking class.” He popped a bean sprout into his mouth.
“You took a class?” Huh. Not quite what I expected. Tilting my head, I waited for him to carry on. “When?”
“A few years ago.” Shifting under my reproachful stare, he continued. “When Pure Corruption was operating smoothly and my trades were finally paying dividends, I had this insatiable need to run. Everything was moving forward, life was getting better, and I fucking hated it because I felt like I was betraying your memory.” His voice thickened. “I often found myself at the airport, staring at the flight departures, wondering if I just switched off my thoughts I could somehow chase your ghost around different continents.”
My heart demolished into dust. “Arthur.”
He didn’t hear me. Throwing me a self-abasing smile, he said, “That day, I couldn’t return to Pure Corruption or the brand-new mansion I’d bought with cash. I felt like a fraud—like my life wasn’t my own anymore. So, I jumped on the next departing plane.”
My tongue was a brick.
His gaze met mine, his face heavy with the past. “I didn’t even know where I was headed until we touched down in Bangkok, Thailand. I had nothing packed and only a newly minted passport in my pocket …” His voice dwindled off, reliving those moments of exploration. “I’d wanted to feel excitement, freedom. But all I felt was loneliness.” His head dropped, his long hair curtaining his eyes. “I was so fucking lonely, Cleo.”
The sudden torture in his voice froze my blood and every inch of me needed to hug him. He sounded as if he believed that loneliness could come again. That what we had would disappear, leaving him destitute.
Nothing could be more wrong.
“I ended up staying for three weeks. I did the usual stuff. Traveled around, faded into one of the world’s busiest cities, but no matter what I did or saw, I was still alone with no one to enjoy it with. I finally had to accept that no matter where I was, how much wealth I had, or who I associated with, I would never stop the one thing I couldn’t change.”
“And what was that?” I asked quietly.
He took a sip of his water, a lone droplet sliding from his lips and over his chin. “That you were the only one with the power to fix me and because you were dead I had to come to terms with always being broken.”
This time I couldn’t stop myself.
Screw Pad Thai. Screw food.
Slipping from my seat, I moved like a river, slinking around chair legs and melting into his lap. The moment I sat on his knee, his large arms laced around me. He shuddered, holding me eternally close.
We both sighed hard.
“Take me there. Show me,” I murmured. “I want to put our life in a suitcase and never look back.”
He sucked in a breath. “I’d love that. So much.” A long hiatus lasted, before he buried his face in my hair. “I sound like a fucking sap. Shitty headache is making me admit things you don’t need to know.”
I struggled in his arms. “Never feel like you can’t tell me anything.”
He kept me imprisoned. “What you do need to know is I’m no longer broken, Buttercup. Don’t feel like you have to mend me or that I’m going to be a burden. Because it’s my fucking responsibility to look after you and I’ll do a damn better job than I have in the past. I promise.”
“I’m not your responsibility,” I said. “I’m your equal.”
The air switched from past pains to current agonies and Arthur’s arms twitched harder around me. “We need to talk about what happened that night.”
Somehow, the time between our argument at Dagger Rose and our current dinner vanished, leaving us exactly where we’d been—tense, frustrated, and confused.
My pulse thickened, feeding my cells with adrenaline in preparation.
“Why didn’t you believe him?”
His question was so quiet it was almost nonexistent. And it made no sense.
“What?”
He flinched, forcing himself to continue. “My father. He must’ve told you why I was in prison. He must’ve shown you the police report.” He glanced at me. “You would’ve seen it with your own eyes.”
“You still think I’ll hate you, don’t you?” Taking courage from his body heat, I said firmly, “I told you. I know everything. I saw everything.”