Picture Perfect Read online

  I sat on the edge of the bed, wiping under my eyes to catch the mascara and trying to even my breath. I felt the same ache in my chest that I'd felt years ago when Connor had died by degrees in my arms. For a moment I remembered us the way we had been, sitting side by side beneath a summer sunset, building our childhood with bone-clean Popsicle sticks and hot whispered dreams. And then I let him go.

  "STOP."

  I could barely hear my own voice, but the chauffeur of the limousine--God only knew where Alex had found one in Tanzania--immediately screeched the brakes. Before he could turn around and inquire what I needed, I had opened the door and started running.

  I figured someone would come after me. And would have caught me, too, because I couldn't really gain speed in a twenty-pound gown, a corset laced tight around my waist. I slowed only once to kick off the low-heeled slippers, thinking that I could run faster barefoot.

  My veil streamed out behind me in a misty fog and sweat started to run down my neck and the sides of the dress, but no one was following. When I realized that, I slowed down, half hopping, pressing my hand to the stitch in my side.

  I couldn't go through with this wedding. Our relationship, our attraction, had not been crafted in the real world. I was supposed to believe that a few magical weeks under the African sun would erase the differences between our lifestyles, that I could come home and slip into Alex's glittering Hollywood whirl without missing a beat.

  All I had ever wanted was an affiliation with a university, a professorship, and a stunning piece of research. I had never even pictured someone like Alex, so how could I fit him into my plans? I sat down in the tall grass in the middle of nowhere, my skirts making a cloud around me.

  It might have been hours; the only way I had to measure time was by the fact that I'd lost my veil and that my pancake makeup had pooled in a brown edge around the sweetheart neckline of the wedding gown, no doubt revealing my bruises. Alex's footsteps whispered through the tall grass, and he crouched down beside me. "Hi," he said, picking a blade and setting it between his teeth.

  I could not look at him. "Hi," I said. He grasped my chin and pulled my head up until I saw him, breathtaking in his black tails and snowy shirt.

  "Jitters?" he asked.

  I shrugged. "You could say that."

  His eyes flickered to my throat. Guilty, I reached for his hand. "Alex," I said, taking a deep breath, "maybe this isn't the best idea."

  "You're absolutely right."

  Stunned, I blinked at him, wondering if he'd bolted from his own limousine and, purely by chance, had wound up at the same spot on the plain that I had. He squinted into the sun. "I shouldn't have planned such afais-dodo . A big shindig. It would have been better to do it quietly, just you and me, without everyone around." He turned to me. "I guess I figured this was the kind of wedding every woman wanted. I just temporarily forgot that you aren't every woman."

  "I was thinking more along the lines of canceling it entirely." There, it was out in the open. I hunched forward, waiting for Alex to yell or jump to his feet, to contradict me.

  "Why?" he asked softly, and it was my undoing.

  I knew he was thinking of what had happened the night we went camping, but that was only part of it--I certainly didn't blame him; it was more a matter of my being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The problems ran deeper than that. I hadn't known he was racked by nightmares. I hadn't known how much he'd been forced to survive on his own. I sensed that the Alex Rivers I knew was just the very tip of the iceberg, that strange currents and dark passions were somewhere underneath the surface.

  "I don't know anything about you," I said. "What if the Alex who saves me half his breakfast and plays Marco Polo in the pond behind the lodge is just another character you're playing?" The unspoken sentence hung between us:What if the real Alex is the person I saw the other night?

  Alex looked away. "I think the line is: For better or for worse." He stood up and turned his back to me. "I told you before I wasn't acting out my attraction to you, Cassie," he said. "And I suppose that you'll just have to believe me. As for the rest, well, like anyone else, I'm a lot of different people rolled up into one." He faced me, pulling me upright. "Some better than others, I'm afraid."

  I glanced down at my beautiful wedding gown, the one for which Alex had sent halfway around the world. Its lace hem was dragging on one side and a string of beads had popped from the bodice to trail over the skirt. Across the back were stripes of red earth, contrasting with the satin like blood. I pictured Alex slipping into character under the milky eye of a camera; Alex playing stickball in the puddles behind the lodge with round-bellied native children; Alex leaning toward me in the night, branding me with his own terror. "Whoare you?" I said.

  He gave me a smile that slipped under my defenses, an amulet I could carry with me for the rest of the day. "I'm the man," Alex said, "who's been waiting for you all his life."

  He held out his arm for me, and without hesitation I walked toward him. We were late to our own wedding. With every step back to the waiting limousine, my misgivings faded. All I could think was that I loved Alex. I loved him so much it hurt.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ALEX tried to time his arrivals at LAX so that they fell in the thin hours of the night, two or three a.m., when only the die-hard reporters hounded the gate and the baggage claim area. The day we were to leave Kenya, where we'd flown for a honeymoon, Alex woke me by laying his palm against my cheek. "Cassie,chere ," he said, kissing me into consciousness. "Cassie."

  I sat up, noticing the neatly stacked piles of clothing, the precise line organization of Alex's shoes and toiletries, all waiting at attention to be transferred into a suitcase. Never in my life had I packed as well as Alex could, and this sort of surprised me, because I had figured there were three or four servants at his beck and call who'd do his packing for him. I rubbed my hand over my eyes. "Is it time to go?" I asked.

  "In a minute." He stared out the window at the fading moon, which outlined the Ngong hills in silver. "I have to tell you something," Alex said.

  My whole body stiffened. This was what I had been waiting for, wasn't it? The punch line, the realization that I had been living some kind of lie.Surprise , he was going to say,those vows were a farce. The priest who performed the ceremony was an actor . I looked away, not willing to let Alex know I had been expecting his words all along.

  "No matter what, when we get back I want you to understand something." He took my hand and pressed it against his chest, where his heart beat strong and slow. "Thisis me. I may say things and act different from any way you've ever seen me act before, but that's because I have to be what people expect me to be. It's not real." He gently touched his lips to mine. "Thisis real."

  Stunned, I couldn't say anything at first. Alex's eyes turned the color of rain. His mouth tightened, so slightly that someone who did not know him as well as I did might never have noticed. Under my palm, his heart began to race.

  He was scared. He thought that I'd come home, see him for what he really was, and leave. He had no intention of letting me go; he was simply afraid that I'dwant to.

  But then Alex couldn't know that the last time I had been in L.A., the days had run together, one indistinguishable from another. He couldn't know that my skin seemed to hum when he touched me; that I had never thought I was beautiful until I saw myself through his eyes. He didn't know, as I did, that I was the antidote to his pain; that he soothed me like a healer's balm. I smiled and offered the comfort I had believed I would be needing. "You'll see," I said. "Everything's going to be fine."

  ALEX TUCKED ME UNDER HIS ARM, AND I TURNED MY FACE IN TO HIS chest, but even closing my eyes couldn't block out the sight of over sixty people jostling each other at the airport security gate to touch Alex's sleeve and to scream questions and snap photographs of the newly married couple. I breathed deeply, smelling the soap from the inn in Kenya and the warm spice that came from Alex's skin, and when I dug my fingers into his side