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LadySharkey1 rocks my world by being the most amazing, kick-ass beta I could ever imagine.

11.

Waking up to the sound of the sea was starting to become a habit to Bella. Stretching, she enjoyed the sounds of the waves and birds drifting in through her open window for a while before she flung her legs over the side of the bed.

The previous day had been…different.

When she'd met Edward in the dunes, she couldn't have foreseen that she would walk away with even more conflicted feelings about him than she'd had beforehand. But then again, had her feelings about him ever been quite as conflicted as she had wanted herself to believe?

On the phone with her dad the previous night, she'd vehemently agreed that there would never be anything between her and Edward, including friendship. In the official account of events, Edward was just staying at his sister's place and annoying the hell out of her simply by being in the same space as she was.

But that wasn't true, though.

From the first time she'd set eyes on him, she'd felt something drawing her in towards him. Even when he was annoying the hell out of her by calling her 'little mousy' or taunting her all through their outing to the zoo, the attraction she had felt couldn't be denied.

And that left her rather conflicted.

Bella was a good girl. All throughout her life she'd tried to make the good choices. She excelled at school, and had picked a good, steady boyfriend and waited an acceptable amount of time before giving him her virginity. She interned at the local attorney's office instead of lounging at the beach with her friends during her summer break from school. And finally, she moved to the other side of the country to pursue a legal education because of the excellent stepladder it provided for her career.

Falling for an ex-con (and was he even an ex-con?) certainly wasn't a part of her plans.

And yet somehow she couldn't stop herself from falling.

He'd been in her head all through the previous day; that look in his eyes when they'd had their strange, silent communications in the dunes not letting go of her no matter how hard she tried to focus on Jasper and Rose. She'd seen through it then—through the image he wanted to world to see and into the insecure, damaged soul that lay beyond that. And that soul was one she desperately wanted to get to know.

By the time she had returned from their little shopping spree in town, Esme had come back from Manhattan with a million stories about the work she'd done and, much to the horror of the children, the impromptu date night she'd had with her husband. Yet all throughout their lunch, Bella's eyes were drawn to that one closed door, barely visible at the end of the hallway and the things that were going on behind that door.

Even Esme had noticed; her brow arched upward as she gazed at her young employee. Her warning not to go in there under any circumstance while her brother was writing had rebuked Bella only for so long before the urge to do exactly the opposite had gotten stronger again.

She was curious, that went without saying, but she also felt a desperate need to know that he was taking care of himself. After all, even his sister had admitted to worrying about him whenever he locked himself into a room for God only knew how long. She couldn't even say if he ate, or slept, and the only way she knew that he did sometimes visit the bathroom was because she'd heard him flush the toilet at three in the morning one time.

Bella just couldn't live with the fact that he was willingly starving himself and depriving his body of all the things it needed to function just because the urge to create was stronger than the need to look after himself. Unlike his sister, she just couldn't take that for a fact and live with it and so, after everyone had gone to bed, she'd snuck out of her room and fixed him a plate of cold leftovers from their dinner.

The things that had followed after she'd gone to him still completely threw her mind. He'd been the same, but yet, so different; the creative side of him tapping into that part he liked to keep hidden and bringing it more to the surface. She'd seen him, that night. Not the person he wanted people to see.

And that song…

Bella could feel her skin flush as she thought about it. It had been so full of raw emotion and an unfulfilled desire for something out of reach that she wasn't quite sure which emotion had prevailed when she listened to him: heartbreak or admiration.

Maybe it had been both?

It had been such an intimate moment, as she sat there and listened; his arm brushed along her side as he pressed the piano keys and bared his true self in front of her. It had been another peek into the soul of the Edward she desperately wanted to know…the one he seemed to be so afraid to embrace.

Sighing, she wondered if he'd ever let her get to know him…the real him. The fleeing glimpses she had gotten of him where enough to pique her interest. No, it was more than that. They were enough to stir a desire so strong it scared her and a longing that made her miss him even when he was only a few rooms away.

She was falling for him. She knew it; even when she couldn't say she knew exactly what she was falling for. There was a pull, sucking her in one word and one shared look at a time until the feeling had lodged so deep within her that it couldn't be extinguished by rational thought.

The rational side of her was screaming that she was making a bad mistake.

As she slowly went through the motions of getting showered and dressed, she was just about ready to conclude that the chances of that happening were about as slim as a snowstorm passing through the Sahara when she found a little note, slipped underneath the door.

Folding it open, her heart started to pound a little harder in her chest as she recognized the neat, cursive swirls of handwriting she'd seen splashed all over music paper the previous day.

Time to return the favor.

Meet me in the dunes when you're awake.

E.

Curious about what he'd written about returning a favor, Bella quickly slipped on some shoes before she tiptoed down the stairs. The past couple of days had schooled her in the quickest and quietest way to sneak out of the house without waking the family up.

Stepping out, she breathed in the fresh air, her footsteps pattering along the deck before she hopped onto the sand. The wind tugged at her hair and the baggy sweatshirt that used to belong to her father as she plowed through the loose sand, her steps determined as she kept her eyes on her destination.

Her dune.

Their dune.

Climbing to the top of the slope, her footsteps faltered as she peeked over the edge to find Edward sitting on top of a checkerboard blanket, an overfilled picnic basket sitting next to him with a thermos sticking out of it.

"Ah, you're here!" He grinned as soon as he spotted her. "I was beginning to think I was going to have to eat all this stuff on my own!"

Barely keeping on her two feet as she awkwardly slid down the slope, Bella started towards him, her smile mimicking his. "You brought me breakfast?"

He shrugged and for a moment Bella thought she saw the beginnings of a blush staining his cheeks. It was only a moment, though, before he hid his face as he started to unpack the basket. "After you were nice enough to feed me last night, I figured I should return the favor."

Snorting, Bella sat down opposite of Edward, taking a cup of steaming coffee as she picked out a few of the treats Edward had produced from the basket. "And since when did you turn into a gentleman?"

Laughing aloud, his face took on a boyish, totally relaxed look as he tried his best to fake indignation. "I'm hurt, kitten! What makes you think I'm not a perfect gentleman?"

"Uhm….everything?" Both snickered at Bella's statement, the fact that most of the time Edward was anything but a gentleman so blatantly obvious that no factual reminder was needed.

"The concept of courteous behavior isn't completely foreign to me, though," Edward acknowledged after a while, chewing his way around half a cream cheese bagel.

Leaning back on her elbows with her eyes closed, Bella let the sweet rays of early morning sun caress her face. "Then what happened?"

Shrugging, Edward took a moment or two to organize his thoughts, thinking carefully about what he would reveal and, more importantly, what to keep bottled up. "When you get drilled a certain way by people who have no business being anywhere near kids, your gut instinct is to kind of do the exact opposite as much as you fucking can."

Bella was on the brink of coming back with another witty one-liner when she caught something in Edward's face that made her close her mouth abruptly before any words could slip from it. "But once you've reached a certain age…" she started cautiously, letting her words drift off into the sea breeze.

His eyes were startling in their honesty when they locked onto hers, his long, dexterous fingers crumbling a piece of his bagel as he once again weighed his words with care. "I was never allowed to be a kid, so I figure it was time to make up for it."

"Even when that means destroying yourself in the process?" Bella asked, her heart pounding faster with every tiny bit of the puzzle that was Edward Masen she could put in its place. "I mean, you're playing around with some pretty heavy stuff if the tabloids are to be believed."

"If you really knew me, you'd know there's not much left of me to destroy." Edward shrugged, the fences rising again as his face took on a hardness that saddened Bella to no end. "Not like a lot of people who would care about my destruction, anyways."

"That's not true," Bella was quick to argue. "Your fans care about you. And what about your sister and the kids?" And her?

"I'm not so vain as to think my fans wouldn't find another idol to worship before my body is cold," Edward answered bitterly. "And as for my sister and the kids…Yeah, they'd miss me but frankly the kids don't really know me, and Esme…" He shook his head, his mouth set in a hard line. "I sometimes get a feeling that she loves me more out of obligation—because she's the only one left to love me—than anything else. And it's my own fault, really."

"Then quit making it so hard for people to love you!" Bella cried, unwittingly scooting closer to him. "You may think you're so good at hiding who you really are but I see you, Edward. You are a good man, even if you try so hard not to be. It's in your songs…in the way you are with Jasper and Rose but, most of all, it's in your eyes whenever your guard slips for a second or two."

The next thing she knew, his hands were on her, crushing her arms in their hold; her gasp drowned in the touching of his lips to hers. Desperate…demanding…beseeching…taking…giving…solidifying what they already knew was between them but had been too afraid to acknowledge.

It was the best kiss of her life.

Thoughts?