The Sounds of Secrets Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Sounds of Secrets

  Whitney Barbetti

  Copyright 2017 by Whitney Barbetti

  All Rights Reserved

  First Edition

  Cover photography by By Braadyn

  Cover design by Najla Qamber

  Interior design by The Write Assistants

  Editing by KP Curtiss

  Proofreading by Alexis Durbin; Amanda Maria

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, actual events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The use of any real company and/or product names is for literary effect only. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

  Contents

  Author Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Author Note

  Acknowledgments

  Sneak Peek

  Six Feet Under

  Coming Soon

  Other books by Whitney Barbetti

  About Whitney Barbetti

  For those of you who are new to my work, I am a writer native to the United States. Though this novel is set in London, England and the United States, I’ve exclusively used American English spellings, to avoid confusion for myself and my editors. I truly hope this does not affect your reading experience.

  At the end of this novel, I’ve included a bonus first look at my next dark romance, Six Feet Under, to be released in Spring 2018.

  “I want to write a novel about silence.

  The things people don’t say.”

  – Virginia Woolf

  This book is dedicated to those who didn’t see my broken pieces and instead, loved me whole

  Chapter One

  The scary thing about power is that the ones who have the most never have to ask for it. Samson had more power over me than he’d ever know—which was the secret I’d keep from him as long as I could.

  A ten-year-old secret that would turn bitter on my tongue, a secret I wished would harden my heart after one thoughtless mistake. But he was always it for me. And for him, my heart was eternally soft.

  The teacup was blue, the color of my mum’s eyes; its handle golden, like her hair. The same color hair and eyes she’d passed on to me thanks to the miracle of DNA.

  And the teacup held a crack, deep enough for me to run my nail down. I imagined that fissure greatly resembled the one going through my heart at the moment.

  It’d been three months since her passing, and each day I kept waiting for more space to breathe around all the aching I was doing.

  I poked my head down the hall of the London flat I shared with my father, my sister, and her husband. Seeing the lights off in my father’s room allowed me a heavy sigh. He was deeply, irrevocably heartbroken by his wife’s passing—I often though he wished he’d gone with her.

  There was that ache, the prickle behind my eyes signaling the gathering of moisture that was sure to flow.

  “Lotte!” yelled my brother-in-law, Ames, in a tone that was more urgent than I’d ever heard from him. I blinked rapidly, dispelling the unfallen tears.

  I was in the kitchen of our flat, water splashed up to my elbows when Ames barreled into the room, his arm wrapped around the waist of his best friend and the man I’d been in love with for ten years.

  At the sight of Samson, bloodied and bruised in Ames’ arms, I set the teacup in my hands gently into the milky water and silently followed him down the hall into the living room, where Ames negotiated Sam onto the sofa. A groan spilled from his split lips, quickly followed by a mumble.

  “Make sure he doesn’t roll off,” Ames said before disappearing back towards the kitchen.

  Sam turned his head, his blond-brown hair falling over his face and obscuring his eyes.

  “Hey,” I whispered, flipping the hair from his eyes and running my thumb across the smear of blood on his cheekbone. “What’d you get yourself into?”

  His bottom lip fell open and his breath warmed my hands as I cleaned up what I could of his face with my fingertips.

  “Hi,” he managed, his eyes closed in a wince. I wasn’t sure how coherent he was, if he even knew who was talking to him. “I opened my mouth.”

  “Of course you did.” I sighed, took in the dirt caked on his shirt and the wet around his face. “Fall into a puddle, did you?”

  “A fist, first.”

  Ames returned, handing me an ice pack. In his other hand, he held a towel saturated on one end. I pressed the pack just above his eyes and looked at Ames with a question in my own.

  He squatted down beside me, where I kneeled on the floor. “I had to boost a guy out of the pub. He wasn’t going easily, so Sam took over and carried him right out.” Ames placed a hand over his heart, his eyes earnest. “I didn’t think to check on him. Thought he was out for a smoke. Another patron found him in the street.”

  Anger blasted through me so fiercely that I turned away, so Ames couldn’t see me lose it. Ames didn’t know about my love for Sam—neither did the man himself—and this was not such an occasion to make it apparent.

  “Your secrets are what make you a woman,” as my mother always said. It was one of the last things I had from her, besides memories. Even though she’d been gone three months, her presence was practically suffocating in our flat—she lived and breathed in every corner despite what the date of her passing said on her tombstone.

  I’d been like her. Full of secrets. She’d seen that in me, and had encouraged me to hold onto all of my secrets—they were armor for women
like us. And so, I had an entire garden of them, and a special corner dedicated to the man bleeding and aching on our sofa at that moment.

  Once I’d composed myself, I took the towel and blotted the wet away from his face and arms. When I made it down the length of muscle to his hands, I paused for just a touch longer than I needed to, feeling the weight of his hand in mine. I was never this close to him and though it felt forbidden, I allowed myself that brief moment of satisfying the wonder I always had.

  Some might think it pathetic, immature even. To love a man as soundly as I loved Sam, a man I’d never kissed, a man I’d never held. A man who had never been mine in any sense of the word. My heart burned for him before I really knew what that meant, before I understood the power and devastating despair of unrequited love. He was the man who came to me without warning, who had me before I had a grasp on who I even was.

  From the first time he jogged up the stairs to our flat, brushing past me with a wide grin, his hair flopping maddeningly around him—there was a shift in my soul. A whisper of a secret I’d lived with for the last ten years. Being around him in the entire decade that came after was like being fed just occasional bites of an indulgent meal. I always wanted more. One more smile, one more playful wink, one more tug on my hair, one more ‘Lots’, one more joke. Sam had a way of making everyone felt like they belonged. And I never wanted to belong more than with him.

  Even hearing my own thoughts made me want to groan. Because none of this would ever pass my lips into his ears.

  “Did you catch the guy who did this?” I asked Ames, not meeting his eyes as I carefully looked over the cuts and bruises on Sam’s hands.

  “No, he was a one-timer bloke.”

  “Yeah, well, this wasn’t a one-timer experience for Sam.” I raised an eyebrow at my sister’s husband. “How many times is Sam going to get beat up for the pub, considering he’s not even our official bouncer?”

  Ames rubbed the back of his neck. “He’s not weak, Lotte. He gives as good as he gets. Look at him, he’s nearly built of solid muscle.”

  I swallowed, eyes lightly grazing over his body—which was absolutely made of muscle. His sweater even bunched up from his position on the sofa, revealing the lower half of his well-defined abs. Averting my eyes, I carefully set his hand on his chest. “Is the party still going on downstairs?”

  “It’s just a little party,” Ames replied defensively. “We got renovation plans approved for our restaurant—why not celebrate in our pub?”

  “Is Mal down there?”

  Ames averted his eyes, and I knew the answer. “She’s being selfish,” I said, my words holding none of the venom I felt. My sister—though I loved her deeply—was grieving in a way I didn’t understand. Pushing everyone away, as if she was the only one who was suffering, who was suffocating.

  “It’s a lot for her, the restaurant, the pub.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re running the pub solo. And the restaurant—it’s not even finished. What’s she got to stress about there?”

  My grandparents had gifted my sister and her husband a restaurant to renovate, and they’d gifted me a dance studio. Mine had come complete, but the pile of rubble that Ames and Mal had been gifted needed quite a bit of work, which they had to save up for by working for my father’s pub. “I thought Samson was going to help with the renovation?”

  “He’ll help, of course, but he’s got his own job. Besides, we need professionals for the plumbing and those sorts of things.”

  “You’re not going to get a lot of help out of him if he doesn’t heal. We’ll need another gel pack. His knuckles took a beating.”

  “Rather gave a beating,” Ames said as he rose to standing. “He’s still breathing, right?”

  I whipped toward Sam’s face. The wrinkle from his wince was softened, and his chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. “Yes. I think he’s gone to sleep.”

  “For the best. He’s probably concussed.”

  “Are you supposed to sleep after a concussion? I thought that was a bad thing?” Try as I might, I couldn’t hide the panic that splintered my words. I placed a hand to Sam’s chest.

  “We had a quick chat when I found him and he helped me walk him up here—he’s all right.” Ames disappeared down the hallway, but nothing he said actually put me at ease.

  I slid my hand from his chest down his sweater before pulling it to cover the skin he’d accidentally exposed of his torso. I smoothed the wrinkles and then moved to his feet, which were soaked from the persistent rain we’d been dealing with for far too long. Once I had his boots off, I was working on his socks when Ames returned with two more ice packs.

  “Get him some slippers or something,” I instructed as I took the ice packs from his hands. “And a blanket.”

  Luckily, when Ames had laid Sam on the sofa, he’d put pillow under his head for support, so Sam really only needed a blanket. September had rolled in August’s wet wake, bringing with it a chill in the evenings that permeated through the cracks of our ancient flat as we slept. The cold only seemed to bother me, however. Ames and Mal never complained about the cold, and neither did my dad.

  But given that it was past midnight already, Sam might as well stay on our sofa for the night.

  “Here you go, mate,” Ames whispered as he slid some slippers on Sam’s bare feet. “I’ve tried calling Mal, have you heard from her?”

  I shrugged indifferently. “She’s probably off being reckless.” I gave Ames a quick look. Ever since my mum had died, Ames had been there. Not my father. Not my sister. My brother-in-law had picked up where my father had faltered, and had endured it all with hardly a complaint.

  “She’s struggling, Lotte,” he said gently, but I could see in the dark circles under his eyes that her behavior was affecting him too. “She’ll come back to us.”

  I knew he didn’t mean physically. Physically, my sister Mahlon was in and out of the flat, the pub, but emotionally, she was like a vessel that had been emptied. I didn’t recognize this shell of who she was. I hated her in that moment, for stranding Ames with the pub, with the plans for the renovation of their restaurant. She wasn’t the only person to lose our mum.

  But I merely nodded and looked over at Sam. Though he looked at peace in his sleep, his lips slightly parted and his hair tamed to the side, I felt an inexplicable pull to stay with him, just in case he’d need me. Without meeting Ames’ eyes I said, “I think I’ll stay up a little later.” When my cheeks warmed from Ames’ silence, I hurriedly added, “I know, with concussions, that he might get nauseated. I don’t want him to throw up all over our sofa.”

  “Don’t you have to be at your dance studio tomorrow?”

  I thought of the small place that my grandparents had gifted me upon my mother’s death. Where I trained students on dance, but mostly used the space for my own dancing. “I don’t have any students until the afternoon. It’s fine.”

  “Right.” Ames stood. “That’s your prerogative.” He turned on his heel and paused at the door to the hall. Closing my eyes briefly, I waited for it. Waited for Ames to finally call me out—to address what was so plainly written upon my face. In the silence of the room, I could hear his mouth open and the intake of air right before a person spoke. But he didn’t say anything. Out of my periphery, I saw him turn and then the flicker of the hall light muting the area in darkness.

  I sighed and dropped my forehead to the cushion in front of me. Now, enveloped in darkness, I was away from his steady gaze. The curtains were closed across the windows of the living room, and with the soft footfalls of Ames down the stairs, I truly felt alone.

  Alone, with Samson.

  Sure, he was practically passed out. But I was in the same room as Samson without the searching eyes of my worrisome sister—not that she’d have the wherewithal to notice now. But I was also away from the questioning gaze of her husband. I hated, down to the root of who I was, that it was so plainly obvious, my affection for him. I knew, with my pale skin, that my blush b
urned brighter than most, but I had taken care not to meet Samson directly in the eyes—the eyes held the truths of every secret.

  A soft moan from his lips caused my head to lift. In the dark, it was hard to make his face out, but I could see him turn his head briefly and he moaned again.

  “Samson?” I asked, leaning over him. “You’re in our flat. It’s okay; just sleep.”

  As my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see him open his mouth and say, “How’s my hair look?”

  It took me a minute to grasp what he was saying. “Your … hair?”

  “Yeah.” He let out a breath through his nose that made it sound like he was settling in.

  “Your face looks like absolute shit right now, and you’re worried about your hair?”

  “It looks good, right?”

  I couldn’t help the laugh that poured from my throat then. “I can’t see,” I whispered. “It’s too dark.”

  “Mm-hm. It looks good still.” He gave me a lazy smile, his eyes still closed, and I ached to trace my thumb along the curve that carved into his cheek.

  “You’re ridiculous.” And he probably wasn’t all right in the head. “Why’d you let yourself get beat up?”

  “Felt good,” he said, but his voice was so low that I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly. Seconds later, his lips were back in a soft line and the even cadence of his sleeping breaths signaled to me that he’d fallen back asleep.