But she was too wounded to say that. Because what he’d said wasn’t fair at all. She had never treated him that way. Not ever. She had never treated him as anything other than special. As anything other than one of the most important people in her life. And him trying to make this about snobbery, trying to make her marriage to Lucian about anything other than benefiting Basilia was utterly and completely unfair.
She’d been brave now. She’d been the first one to speak the truth of the thing that burned between them, and he’d humiliated her for it.
All while being a coward.
“If you don’t want me, then just say so.”
She turned, and left him standing there, and she didn’t look back.
If he didn’t want her?
He was plagued that night as he lay out on the lounger on the top deck, trying to sleep.
Of course he wanted her. He had wanted her all this time, and she dared to say that to him?
It didn’t benefit either of them for her to know how much he wanted her. So he had not gone after her, and he had not sought to close any of the distance between them because that could only end in disaster.
It nearly had.
The way that she had looked at him, the way that she had touched him? God. He had been undone. All these years of practicing discipline. Of turning himself into a good guy. A man who could be trusted. A man who could not be called a villain, not the way that his father had been, and he was ready to destroy it all for her.
To burn the world down to touch her lips to his.
I would very cheerfully kill him.
Because there was no good end to it. There was nothing that could come of it.
She had run away from him, and it was for the best.
His phone lit up in the dark. There was Wi-Fi on the boat that allowed for messaging even out in the middle of the sea. It was Onyx.
How is everything?
As good as it can be.
Meaning?
Your sister is still marrying a man who might kill her, and I am taking her to her doom.
But everything is going according to plan.
According to plan. Yes, the plan where he sent Emerald to another man’s bed.
Fuck.
He threw his phone down on the deck, and it made a loud clatter.
He heard a gasp. “What are you doing out here?”
“Sleeping,” he responded, annoyed that yet again, it was Emerald. Yet again, he could not escape her.
“Don’t you have a cabin?”
“Yes. I don’t wish to make use of it.”
“Why not?”
“Go to bed, Emerald.”
