And there it is.

A paralyzing joy floods my brain, blurring everything else.

Years ago, I gave myself to a young soldier as we lay in a broken-down shack deep in the heart of Georgia, in a clearing thick with Spanish moss.

No one else knew about that tryst. No one except—

“Gatsby?” The word cracks from my lips.

“Daisy,” he says softly.

So it’s him after all. I knew it, and yet the admission makes me angry.

I shove a fist against his chest. “You didn’t come back. I thought you died.”

“I sent letters.”

“I never got them.”

“Your mother.” He practically snarls the word. “She never liked me.”

“She hated you.”

“Because I was penniless and nameless, and yet I dared to love her daughter.” Anger and contempt color his tone. “I’m richer than your parents now, with a name I’ve made for myself.”

“Yes, but how, Jay? How did you do all this?”

He starts to reply, but I take one swift step forward and clamp my hand over his mouth. “No… Wait. You don’t need to tell me—not right now. Maybe you’re a bootlegger, a hatchet man, a thief or a sharper—you’re definitely a vampire, and I don’t care. All I care about is that you’re here, just in time.” I grip his collar in both hands, pulling his face to mine, brushing my lips over his.

“Just in time,” he echoes. “You know, I’ve been following you everywhere. They’ve been dragging you from place to place without any warning, almost like they knew I was trying to find you. I was always a step or two behind—couldn’t catch up. But I saw your cousin Nick in Boston a while back, and he was kind enough to let me know you’d be coming here, to prepare for the wedding. So I bought this place, I started throwing parties, and I let my name be known. If you were really in love with Tom, I didn’t want to interfere—but I thought, if you wanted me, you’d come find me. And you did.”

“So…” I hesitate, because despite everything he just said, I’m scared to ask the question that’s searing my very soul. But I need to know what my options are: a secure, socially approved marriage or whatever he’s offering. “So…what now?”

“Now,” says Gatsby, his voice low and intense, “now you leave that bastard and you come live with me, in this house. It’s all ready for you, furnished with you in mind. If there’s anything you don’t like, we’ll change it.”

My heart sinks. “I can’t live with you here, Jay. Not so close to Tom and his parents—not here, where people know them, know me. If we’re going to do this, we have to run away. We have to leave everything and just go.”

“But you don’t understand.” He clasps my hands. “I did all this for you. We can stay here, close to this wild, wonderful city, and we can hold our heads high. If they try to ostracize us, damn them all. I have money now. Money will pave the way. It can buy their acceptance, you’ll see.”

Slowly I withdraw my hands from his. “You wrote to me all those years, wanted me, followed me, collected all this wealth for me—and now you won’t do this one thing? You won’t leave with me? That’s cruel, Jay, cruel to both of us. I’m willing to abandon everything for you—I always was, even before you had all of this.”

I turn and walk away, out of the tree’s shadow. After the darkness beneath the boughs, it feels brighter on the open grass…but it’s a cold, cheerless light from distant, unsympathetic stars. Far away, the band is playing a haunting melody, like a serenade to lost love.

He can’t do this. He can’t come back to me and then make me live here, under the ruthless scrutiny of the people who will judge us both for being together. It’s not right. If he loved me like I love him, he’d understand why I can’t bear that, why I need to be far away from them all.

Strong, gentle hands cup my shoulders, and his voice surrounds me, steady and comforting. “Of course I will.”

“Of course you will what?”

“I’ll run with you, Daisy. Anywhere you like. What I’ve started here can be continued elsewhere. I only ask that when we find a place you love, where you’re comfortable, you agree to putting down some roots. I’ve been without a family for years, kitten, and I want one. I want a home, with you.”

A glow spreads inside me—better than lust, better than champagne. This is pure joy.

I turn around, looking up into his face. Fondly I trace his jawline with my finger—such a strong jaw, even more defined than the last time I saw him. “We had sex, fought, and made up all within the first hour of meeting each other again.”

He chuckles. “Does that worry you?”

“Not on your life. Though you have some explaining to do about your new set of chompers. You plan on ripping my throat out?”

“Never,” he says earnestly. “I would never hurt you. And I wouldn’t hurt anyone else unless I had to, to protect you.”

“Good enough.” There’s a frantic urgency in my blood, a warning that simmers through my veins—the knowledge that if Tom gets wind of my leaving, he’ll try to stop me with everything he’s got. I suspect he’d kill me before he’d let another man have me. “Let’s run right now.”

Gatsby nods. “I’ve got cash and a fast car—everything else can be sent to us later, once we get wherever we’re going. What about you? Anything you need?”

Mentally I review the contents of the trunks lined up in my bedroom at Tom’s parents’ house. Strangely, I’m not attached to a single thing in any of them.

“I don’t want anything from the past,” I tell him. “Just you.”

“Then come on, Daisy Faye.” He flashes me that sharp-toothed grin again. “Let’s go for a ride.”

Minutes later we’re in his big yellow Rolls-Royce, hurtling down the road, heading through New York City and on to anywhere. Disappearing, both of us—dissolving into gossip and then into legend. I can practically taste it—love and liberty, the sweetest of pairings, a liquor no law can ever deny us.

CHARMING DEVIL

I don’t paint portraits. Ever.

Which is why I have to respond with a gentle no to the commission request in my inbox.

Sometimes people get pissed about being denied. Like they have a right to my talent and my time. They come back with a faintly belligerent “Why not?” which I usually brush off with “I’m just no good at faces” or some such excuse. Never the real answer.

Others simply don’t understand. They love my style, and my refusal makes them want it more. They give me sweetly emotional reasons why they want a portrait of this person or that. It’s tougher to say no to the nice ones.

But in the end, everyone gets the same answer—including this latest potential client.

My thumbs fly over the screen, spelling out one of my usual excuses. I push send and lay aside my battered iPhone. It’s several generations old. I’m hoping to replace it soon.

People think I’m a rich girl because I own a studio near downtown Charleston and a house close to the waterfront, on Wentworth Street. Thing is, I inherited both of them.

When you lose something in life, you almost always get something in return. I recently lost my last living relative—an aunt I barely knew. In return I was able to pay off my college debt, and I got an adorable, squashed-looking house on Wentworth Street, along with a tiny shop on the corner of Columbus and Meeting Streets.

Inherited houses and retail spaces come with all kinds of chains, like super-pricey insurance, heavy taxes, repairs, you name it. Home insurance near the beach, in a hurricane-prone area? Yeah, it sucks.

What I’ve dubbed my “studio space” used to be a secondhand clothing store. It’s a dingy room with carpet that curls up in the corners, which I have to keep stomping down. The lighting isn’t great, but I’ve got lots of thrifted lamps around the place, so I make do.

I dab another blob of Mixing White into the Ultramarine Blue on my palette and absently swirl it around with my brush. The resulting shade is almost right for this coastal painting—the kind of art tourists gobble up. When they come to Charleston, they want pretty, beachy paintings and sketches, not the art of my heart, the creepy gloriousness I keep tucked away at the back of my shop. That stuff is too morbid, too “weird.”

I have to force myself to paint the art that sells. Usually I arrange a mental bribe, like if I finish two beach vignettes, I can work on one of my paintings.