My Twin And Faincé Betrayed me...So I Married His Rival

Chapter 29

*Eliza's POV*

10:58 PM.

I stared at the ceiling of my room and counted my own heartbeats and told myself to wait.

I had waited this long. I could wait another thirty two minutes.

I couldn't wait.

I sat up. Looked down at myself.... the silk robe I was putting on had nothing beneath it, the knot at the waist tied loosely, deliberately. My hands were steady again. They were always steady when I had already made up my mind.

I stood up.

And I walked down the hall.

His door was slightly open, which I took as the universe's way of telling me I was making the right decision. I pushed it gently and stepped inside.

The room was dim. Just the silver light of the moon coming through the curtains, painting everything in soft grey and white.

Alexander was on the bed.

Lying on his back, one arm across his chest, his eyes closed. He was still dressed. He had clearly intended to rest for a moment and been pulled under faster than he planned.

I stood in the doorway and looked at him and felt the familiar pull ... the one that had always been there, from the very beginning, long before I had done anything I wasn't supposed to do. The pull of wanting someone so completely that it stopped making sense. That it stopped being something you could reason with or talk yourself out of.

I had wanted Alexander Steele since before Elena even knew what wanting felt like.

I still wanted him.

That had never been the lie.

I almost turned around. My feet actually shifted ...one small step backward, the beginning of a retreat. I had come this far before and stopped, talked myself out of it, gone back to my cold empty room and stared at the wall and hated myself quietly.

Not tonight.

I stepped fully into the room.

Moved to the window.

The moonlight was exactly right ...falling in a wide pale column across the floor, cool and soft and completely forgiving. I positioned myself inside it and then I reached up, slowly, and found the knot of the robe.

Loosened it.

And i let it fall.

The silk whispered to the floor.

While the moonlight revealed everything on my bare body

I stood there in the silence of his room, completely bare, my heart was slamming so hard I was sure he would hear it before he even opened his eyes ...and I watched his face.

He stirred. Slowly. The way a person surfaces from sleep when something has shifted in the room around them, when the air has changed. His head turned toward me.

His eyes opened, they found me.

And stayed.

For a long moment he didn't move. He didn't speak. Just looked and I watched his face change the way a sky changes before a storm, something moving behind his eyes that was nothing like sleep, nothing like rest, nothing even remotely like the tired man who had walked through the front door an hour ago.

He sat up.

Still looking at me.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe. I stood in the moonlight and let him look.

He stood up immediately as if being controlled by the drink, which of course he was.

I had forgotten, somehow, in all the cold silence of recent months, how he moved when he was like this. How quickly. How completely. Like a decision had been made somewhere deep and everything else had simply stepped aside for it.

He crossed the room in four steps.

His hands found me ...my face first, both palms, tilting me up toward him and then he kissed me passionately.

Not gently.

Not carefully.

Like something that had been held back too long and had run out of patience entirely. Like every wall between us had come down at once and what was left underneath was just this ... urgent and breathless and completely unguarded.

He fixed his hands on my hair, while my hands gripped the front of his shirt, the moonlight behind me and him all around me and nothing else in the world existing for this one suspended, electric moment.

I had wanted this.

I had wanted exactly this.

And yet somewhere beneath the wanting ... quiet, stubborn, refusing to be drowned out completely, a voice I did not want to hear said one thing and one thing only.

"He thinks you are Elena"

I kissed him harder.

And told the voice to be quiet.