Total pages in book: 152
Estimated words: 145574 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 728(@200wpm)___ 582(@250wpm)___ 485(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145574 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 728(@200wpm)___ 582(@250wpm)___ 485(@300wpm)
Her gaze traveled to my mouth. “And what if I wholeheartedly want to give it to you?” she whispered.
“Do you?” Every muscle in my body tightened, locking down the nearly uncontrollable impulse to discover how she tasted.
Her cheeks flushed, and her breath hitched as she looked away, back to the photo album. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” She flipped through a chunk of the album, landing on her wedding pictures, not formal, but candid.
“You look beautiful.” It was more than that. Wedding-Day Georgia wore a look so openly, honestly in love that a stab of irrational jealousy flooded me. That asshole hadn’t been worthy of her heart, her trust.
“Thanks.” She flipped to what was obviously the reception. “Funny, but now when I think about that day, I mostly remember Damian schmoozing anyone he could in Gran’s circle.” She said it easily, as if it was the punch line to a joke.
My brow knitted. How long had it taken Ellsworth to dull her sparkle?
“What?” she asked, glancing my way.
“You don’t look anything like the Ice Queen in these pictures,” I said softly. “I don’t understand how anyone could ever mistake you for cold.”
“Ah, back when I was all hopeful and naive.” Her head tilted as she turned the page yet again, this time revealing a shower of bubbles as the bride and groom made their way toward their honeymoon getaway car. “The nickname didn’t come until later, but that first time I found out he was cheating on me, something…” She sighed and flipped again. “Something changed.”
“Paige Parker?” I guessed.
She scoffed. “God, no.”
My attention snapped to her face as she turned a chunk of pages—years.
“He wasn’t that careless back then. Actresses get you caught, but eighteen-year-old assistants don’t.” She shrugged.
“How many—” The question was out of my mouth before I could stop myself. It was none of my business how incredibly hurtful Ellsworth was. If I were married to Georgia, I’d be far too busy keeping her happy in my bed to even think about someone else’s.
“Too many,” she responded quietly. “But I wasn’t about to tell Gran that I didn’t get that same epic love she did—not when all she wanted was to see me happy, and she’d just had that first heart attack. And I guess, admitting that I’d made the same mistake as my mom was…hard.”
“So you stayed.” My voice lowered as another piece of the Georgia puzzle clicked into place. Indomitable will.
“I adapted. It’s not like I wasn’t used to being left.” She grazed her thumb over a picture, and I looked down to see a colorful autumn tree in a location I recognized well—Central Park. Georgia stood between Damian and Ava, her arms around both, her smile a dim shadow of the one just a few years before. “There’s a warning, a sound your heart makes the first time it realizes it’s no longer safe with the person you trusted.”
My jaw flexed.
She turned another page, another black-tie affair. “It’s not as clean or impersonal as a break or a shatter. Besides, those are easy to repair if you can find all the pieces. Truly crushing a soul—now that requires a certain level of…personal violence. Your ears fill with this desperate”—flip— “rasping”—flip—“gasp. Like you’re fighting for air, suffocating in plain sight. Strangled by life and someone else’s shitty, selfish decisions.”
“Georgia,” I whispered as my stomach turned, my chest pulling tight at the agony and anger in her words, pausing over a picture from the red-carpet premiere of The Wings of Autumn. Her smile was bright but her eyes flat as she posed at Damian’s side like a trophy, both generations of Stanton women at her right. She was freezing over right in front of my eyes, each picture a little colder than the last.
“And the thing is,” she continued with a little shake of her head and another mocking smile, “you don’t always recognize that wet sound for what it is—an assassination. You don’t register what’s actually happening as the air disappears. You hear that gurgle, and it somehow convinces you that the next breath is coming—you’re not broken. This is fixable, right? So you fight, holding on to whatever air there is.” Her eyes filled with unshed tears, but she raised her chin and held them back as the pages flew by with every sentence. “You fight and you thrash because this fated, deep-rooted thing you called love refuses to go down with a single shot. That would be far too merciful. Real love has to be choked out, held under the water until it stops kicking. That’s the only way to kill it.”
She flipped again and again, the album a color-streaked kaleidoscope of photos she’d obviously chosen with great care to send Scarlett, constructing the lie of a happy marriage.
“And once you finally get it, finally stop fighting, you’re too far gone to get to the surface to save yourself. And the spectators tell you to keep swimming, that it’s only a broken heart, but that little flicker that’s left of your soul can’t even float, let alone tread water. So you’re left with a choice. You either let yourself die while they accuse you of being weak or you learn to breathe the goddamn water, and then they call you a monster for what you become. Ice Queen, indeed.”