What did not make sense was that he knew Rux was aware of this, too. She’d known exactly what he was the first moment she’d seen him. And still she laughed.
She laughed again now. “Besides,” she said, sounding something more like rueful, “I will never beg him and I do not cry. I would rather die than let him see me so diminished.”
It reminded him of his mother’s brief defiance on that terrible night, her attempt to fight the inevitable—
But he did not think about his mother. He did not think about that night. He certainly did not equate these people he met because of his job with his lost family, because that would make him—
Something inside Jovi cracked at that and he had the strangest notion that it was his ribs. The ribs that should have been holding that wild heart of his in place. That wild, excessively beating heart seemed to know things about him—about her—that he did not.
It made him furious.
He blamed her for that, too, because it was another fuckingfeeling. He never, ever, bothered with those.
He never had to bother with those because he never felt them in the first place.
But nothing about this had been right, not since the first moment she’d lifted her gaze from that book of hers and fixed it on him.
The parallels to his mother were bad enough, but that wasn’t all it was. It was a one-two punch of unwanted memories and something else.
And he had told her he was honest, so he was honest with himself, too.
The truth was that he wanted her. That he had never wanted anything else, not in any of his life that he could remember—and he had locked that other part of himself away. He had hidden it. It was as dead as his family was, and it told him something he didn’t want to know about himself that he used that word to describe the traitor Donatello and the necessary casualties of the choices he’d made.
Joviwanted.
And he knew better than anyone else that if he gave in to that, the price would be unbearable.
“Did you hear me?” she asked, and he wondered what she saw in his face.
Because he knew, somehow, that in addition to all of her other offenses tonight, she was the only one who had ever managed to read him.
It was another hint that all of this would end in despair.
“I told you that I would rather die,” Rux said again, with a little more heat behind it. “And I mean it.”
“Luckily, you foolish woman,” Jovi growled back at her, “that is the point of this entire exercise.”
CHAPTER FIVE
AN EXCELLENT CUREfor my bravado, it turned out, was being hogtied, thrown in the back of a thankfully swanky Range Rover, and then chained up in a room that looked…exactly the way a room like this always looked in every version of it I’d ever seen on television.
I told myself to be happy it wasn’t a serial killer’s basement or a run-of-the-mill warehouse in a conveniently abandoned industrial estate.
I would have preferred that strange heat again. That heart-poundingly close call with the wild, rising wave inside me that he had seemed to control so easily.
That he had managed to rouse and then deny, twice.
My mouth was dry again now, but still not from fear. “I don’t actually know if you mean that literally.”
“I think, Rux, that you know I do.”
But something happened to him, too. Right there in front of me as I watched.
I could see it like another sort of wave, crashing over him and evident to me in the way his dark eyes flashed that molten gold. And the way his impossible mouth tightened.
Now that we were past the intrusion into my bedroom and the whole kidnapping escapade—which had been both much less traumatic and a bit more uncomfortable than expected, because I hadn’t felt the terror I should have but I really did not enjoy the pins and needles in my hands or the fabric of that gag against my tongue—I really tried to take him in.
I tried to reallyseethis man who had done the thing I’d never managed to do and gotten me out of my father’s clutches.
