“To apologize.” He wished he had more, but her words had scraped him raw and he needed a minute to pull himself together. “I hurt you.”
“You’ve been hurting me for a long time.” Her voice was almost a whisper and hard to hear over the soft sound of an equally soft rain. “And I’ve been complicit. I could have, should have, walked away a long time ago.”
“You deserve better. You deserve a man who?—”
“It’s not about what someone deserves. It’s about what they want. And I wanted you.”
“Wanted. Past tense.”
Her eyes narrowed with frustration. “We’ve already had this conversation. Why are you here?”
“To apologize for hurting you?—”
“You said that already.”
“—and for the way I implied I got to decide when and if our relationship ended.”
“Bullshit.”
Frustration surged past the regret and heartbreak that had gripped him and rendered him nearly mute. “What do you mean bullshit? That’s why I’m here.”
“You could have sent another ridiculous middle-of-the-night text. There was no reason to fly to Paris.” She shook herhead. “You’re here because you don’t trust anyone—my people, Victoire’s people.”
“I trust you, Nikolett. I trust you more than you’ll ever understand.” He’d shown her parts of himself that he’d never dared expose to anyone else.
“You’re here because you don’t like that they’re using me as bait and you think you and the?—”
There was a screeching noise in Eric’s head, almost identical to the sound tires made against the road when you stood on the brake.
He grabbed her by the upper arms, forcing her to face him. “Bait?”
Nikolett’s eyes went wide and she licked her lips. “You know the plan for the Spaniard.” The sentence rose slightly at the end, almost a question.
He didnotknow the plan for the Spaniard, and later, he was going to have words with someone as to why he didn’t know. Then he was going to have choice words for whoever’s monumentally stupid idea it was to use Nikolett as bait.
“You’re here as fucking bait?”
Nikolett arched a brow, the expression clearly saying,“Yes, and I don’t want to hear your opinion on the matter.”
Slowly, Eric turned his head to glare at everyone in the suite. Grigoris and Maxim were both right up against the glass, Maxim’s hand on the door. They took an alarmed step back in unison when he focused on them.
Good. They were aware he was going to kill them.
This might be why they didn’t tell you.
“You aren’t bait,” he ground out.
“It was my idea.”
“Ofcourseit was.” He shook her, just a little, as if he could shake some sense into her.
She didn’t pull back or shrug off his hands. Somehow that made it worse.
Fight me, Nikolett. Show me you still care enough to fight with me.
“We have a good plan for capturing the Spaniard, and it involved me being seen in Paris. Assuming your arrival, and the fact that we didn’t know it was you and reacted accordingly thereby exposing the extent of our security measures, didn’t screw it up.”
Eric jerked her forward, just enough so she had to brace her hands on his chest to avoid tipping into him.
