“But you…murder them?”
“Some. Not all.”
She looked away, and his stomach soured. “How do you decide?”
“I mirror them. It depends on their crimes.”
Her brow pinched. “Did Dr. Tannhäuser kill someone?”
His jaw locked as his mind ripped back to the last time he saw the good doctor. This was where the line between redemption and condemnation blurred most. This was where he expected to lose her.
He traced the backs of his fingers down her cheek, needing to feel her soft skin one last time. “You’re the first person I ever let in. The first person to truly see me. I know it’s not a pretty view?—”
“Jack.”
“Let me finish. I know it’s not…” Words seemed to clog his throat. “I know who I am, Daisy. I know what you see when you look at me, and I think I fell in love with you the first time you didn’t look away.”
Her lashes flickered as pink flooded the whites of her eyes.
“But there’s no way to pretty up the shameful things I’ve done. The things I might continue to do. I’m not meant to have a life of leisure like other men. I don’t know how to have a family.” He shook his head. “I know my purpose. The world needs men like me, men who know the evil out there and have the means to put it out.”
He was saying too much. “You asked if Tannhäuser ever killed anyone, and the honest answer is I don’t know. What I do know is—had I not stopped him—he would have killed something pure and beautiful inside of you. And that bleakness, that yawning, suffocating space… It would have stayed with you for the rest of your life.” He closed his eyes as he saw her there, on the floor, screaming in another man’s blood. “And it destroys me every day, thinking I might have been too late.”
“Jack, no.” She lifted his face and kissed him again. “He didn’t… I’m still…a virgin.”
Relief surged through him like a tidal wave, not because he wanted to claim her innocence for himself—that was never it—but because he wanted to protect her.
“And you have no idea what I see when I look at you. Yes, I see your scars, but I don’t see them the way you do. To me, they’re marks of courage. Brushstrokes. Hidden keys to your past. Scripture that tells exactly who you are. And I know I might never fully understand your story, but I want to try. Even if it comes in tiny broken pieces. I’d spend a lifetime puzzling it together if it helps me get closer to you.”
He scowled, unable to catch his breath. “You’re not listening, Daisy. Beneath the velvet curtains and champagne, I’m a predator. I’ve built empires by stealing power from giants. I’m ruthless. Damaged. You can’t fix me.”
“Jack, I don’t want to fix you. I want to love you.” Her voice pitched as tears streamed down her cheeks. “Don’t you see?”
“No. I can’t possibly see how someone like you could love someone like me.”
She caught his hand and flattened it to her chest. Her pulse beat rapidly against his palm. “Do you feel that?”
He nodded.
“That’s my heart. If you break it, Jack, you would also be killing something pure and beautiful inside of me. And that would haunt me more than any other agony. I’d have to live with it forever, knowing you were here, alone, when you could have just as easily been with me.” Her grip tightened. “Is that what you want?”
He swallowed, trying to beat back the riotous current she woke inside of him, but it was too strong. “I just want you to be happy.”
“Then make me happy, Jack. I want you.”
The words struck him with the force of something physical, settling deep inside his chest where they rearranged the order of everything he believed himself to be.
“You want…me?” He searched her face for doubt, for the faintest tremor of uncertainty, and found none.
“Yes!”
He didn’t wait. Didn’t give her the chance to take back her words. His lips crushed to hers, sealing her confession with unrestrained acceptance.
“I want you, too.” He kissed her again. “So much, it pains me.” His hand slid behind her neck, fingers threading into her hair, and he pulled her into him with a hunger that no longer needed permission to exist.
Not the way he kissed her at The Preserve, weighted with apology and grief. He kissed her the way a man kisses a woman when language has exhausted itself, and the only vocabulary left is touch.
She made a sound against his mouth, something between a gasp and a sigh, and her fingers curled into the lapel of his robe. The thin silk parted under her grip, exposing the hollow of his throat where his pulse hammered so violently she could feel it against her knuckles.
