“You always have been an excellent shot,” he said wryly. Silence stretched between us as he turned my hands over so that they were palms up and ran his thumbs along them. “All this time we were both acting out of pride and spite.”
“It was why you kissed her, wasn’t it? Why you wanted me to see? You thought I loved someone else and you were showing me that you didn’t care about me.”
He nodded and stayed quiet.
“You wanted to hurt me the way that I had hurt you,” I said, finally understanding what that whole thing had been about.
“And because I refused to be like my father,” he said.
Now I was the one confused. What did his father have to do with any of this?
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Getting that letter from my uncle reminded me of how much pain my father caused my mother. She loved another and he didn’t care. And because of you, for the first time in my life, I finally understood him. I thought you had another man in your heart but it didn’t stop me from wanting you,” he confessed.
I knew what his father had done to his mother, and not once had this thought entered my mind—that Xander was afraid he was behaving like his father.
He looked down at our joined hands. “I tried to be respectful of you and your feelings. There were times when I didn’t care but then I would have to remember myself. I refuse to live his life. To hurt someone that way, as my mother had been. I couldn’t allow myself to care about someone who couldn’t care about me.”
So many things were starting to make sense—why he’d held back, why he had put up walls between us, why he had done things that he knew would upset me. It wasn’t just to protect himself. It was because he cared enough about me that he wouldn’t let me have his mother’s life, forced to be married to him when he thought I loved someone else.
There was also the pain of having a mother who wouldn’t love him because he was his father’s son. What had it done to Xander to give her all his love and not ever have it returned?
He was afraid. I was sure he’d never admit that out loud, but that scared boy was still inside him, the one who had been rejected over and over again by the woman who was supposed to have loved him most.
I was sure that wasn’t the only thing that concerned him. He had told me more than once that he was no one’s second choice. He had been worried that he would spend his life pining after a woman who would never return his feelings. Who settled for him because she had no other option.
Because he was there and the other man wasn’t.
How had I not realized this earlier?
“I have seen what relationships do to the men in my family. My father. My ancestor destroyed all of Ilion in a war because of his obsession with a woman he couldn’t let go of,” he said.
And Xander had refused to be those men, even if part of him had wanted to.
“I knew that you were looking for something. You were always reading and studying. I thought to give you my mother’s library to help you and as some misguided attempt to win you over. Then I realized what I was doing. I was literally giving you the same books my father had given to my mother in an effort to gain her love, and I realized how terrible and pathetic my gesture was.”
“No!” I wouldn’t let him taint that. “It wasn’t terrible or pathetic. I can’t tell you what it meant to me.”
He raised his gaze to mine and I saw what looked like hope in his eyes. “When you lay with me on the floor all night, even though you hated it—that being with me mattered more than your own comfort ... I thought that maybe I had pushed him out of your heart.”
“There was never anyone else there,” I told him. “Only—”
The tent flap flew open and Io and Suri walked in. I tried to pull my hands away from Xander but he held on to me tightly.
He wanted his sister to see.
She put on a happy face, but I noted the concern in her eyes. “It’s so late. We need to go to bed.” Her words were pointed at him, wanting him to leave.
For a moment I thought he might ask me to go with him so that we could continue talking, but instead he nodded. He leaned over to kiss me on my cheek, his warm lips making my skin light up.
“Sleep well,” he said.
Zalira and Ahyana entered the tent then, and I was grateful for the reprieve. It would mean I wouldn’t be alone with Io and Suri. I didn’t want to talk about what had just happened. It was private and for just Xander and me. I already knew Io’s concerns. I didn’t need to hear them again.
He stood up and scooted past Ahyana and Zalira. When he got to the tent opening, he turned toward me and said, “Don’t have nightmares.”
“I won’t,” I said.
