Her dark eyes scrutinized mine like she was trying to decide something, so I held her gaze and let her look at me. My blank mask was in place because holding my emotions in check was a habit more than anything else.
“You’re so different from last night,” she said.
Her words sucker-punched me right in the gut, but I didn’t show that, either. “I was highly inebriated last night. I apologize for anything I did or said that was inappropriate. Hell, I apologize foreverythingthat happened last night.”
Lexi still didn’t look away from my eyes, and I fell into the depths of pain I saw in hers. “Everything?” she asked.
The two guys in the front seat weren’t talking to each other, so they were listening to us. “I’m sorry the wedding wasn’t everything you’ve dreamt of.”
At that point, she did break eye contact with me and looked out the front windscreen. “I liked our wedding.”
“You deserved better.”
Her shoulders hunched. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters, really. Are we ever going to be alone again?”
With that, I settled back in my seat and chuckled a little. “Of course, we will. I’m not the king of England.”
Her head was still down, and she looked like she was staring at the back of the seat where Dushyanta was sitting. “No, you’re not the king of England.”
Lexi didn’t speak the rest of the short trip. I’d lived with operational security my whole life. The security detail had been less intrusive when I was young, but it gained more and moreoperators and protocols as each of my parents and relatives was murdered. I wasn’t rude and didn’t ignore them, but their presence didn’t feel prying to me anymore.
Ueli and his crew were simply there.
Although I did, occasionally, ditch them.
The ride to Billionaire Sanctuary would be short, so I slipped one earbud out of my suit jacket pocket and twisted it into my ear canal, tapping my phone screen to pull up our wedding video that literally everyone else in the world had had a chance to watch more closely than I had.
I listened again to what Lexi had said to me, that momentary glimpse of vulnerability when she begged me to love her.
And I listened to what I had said to her.
My words seemed so heartfelt, emerging from somewhere deep within me, and then the sarcastic part of my brain overwrote the sentiment as maudlin and prosaic, criticizing everything from the pauses and vocabulary and doubting my sliver of a soul’s ability to produce such ostentatious emotion.
The feelings shining in my eyes felt decadent and indulgent, like overwrought teenage poetry. No adult should be swamped by emotions like that.
I watched myself. My own face was so often hidden by that neutral mask of mine in photographs, even candid ones.
The openness, the eagerness to be trampled, the shining middlebrow happiness in my eyes looked uncultured from this lofty position where I now perched, alone.
How uncouth.
Perhaps the alcoholic blackout had saved me from some embarrassment at the memories.
But oh, I wished I could remember kissing her.
The camera shot panned down to Lexi’s fathomless dark eyes watching my face. The wide-open, desperate hope as she watched me, her gaze flicking back and forth from one of myeyes to another, made me touch the car door’s armrest for balance.
This woman hadsavedme last night. Considering how absolutely trolleyed I’d been, I might have awakened this morning bound and naked in a bathtub full of ice, short one kidney and with drained bank accounts.
Instead, she’d humored me and simultaneously prevented anyone else from taking advantage of me. She’d even refused to let me destroy myself, even though if I’d been in a car on the verge of a cliff, I would have shoved the pedal to the metal.
Even now, she was saving me by continuing this unlikely pretense of being married.
What kind of sweet soul did it take to save a debauched robber baron such as myself?
All Lexi had really wanted was for someone to tell her that they loved her, and she hadn’t demanded even that, only asked.
Maybe I could valiantly attempt to be slightly less of a toxic dickhead, at least when we were alone.
