My chest tightens so hard it feels like something tearing.
Elizabeth wipes at her face angrily, like she refuses to let me see even one tear. “That kiss changes nothing.”
“No,” I say hoarsely. “It changes everything.”
Another mistake. I know it the second the words leave my mouth. Her expression hardens all over again. She pushes off the wall and puts space between us, hugging herself like she can hold herself together by force.
“You’re unbelievable.”
“Elizabeth—”
“No.” She draws in a shaky breath. “You kidnapped me. You threatened people I care about. You tore apart the one stable thing I had, and then you kissed me like that because what? Because I made you angry? Because I struck a nerve?”
Because you’re the only woman I have ever looked at and forgotten how to be a man anyone should trust.
Because hearing you say you found peace with him made something savage rise up in me.
Because I have loved you badly, selfishly, ruinously, and I don’t know how to stop.
But I say none of that. I just watch her. And she watches me right back, both of us breathing too hard.
Finally, she steps back again.
“Don’t touch me,” she says.
The words land like a sentence.
Then she turns and walks toward the rear of the cabin, leaving me standing there with the taste of her still on my mouth and the sting of her slap burning in my skin.
And somehow the slap is the easy part. It’s the kiss that’s going to kill me.
By the time we land in London, I’m running on fumes and fury.
Neither one is enough.
Elizabeth doesn’t look at me on the drive from the airport. She sits turned toward the window in the back of the car, swallowed by that oversized hoodie, her face pale in the wash ofstreetlights. She’s still wearing the clothes I forced her into on the jet. Still carrying the rage I earned.
Good.
Better that than indifference.
I bring her to the townhouse in Mayfair because it’s secure, discreet, and mine. No staff waiting up. No unnecessary eyes. No one to ask questions I don’t feel like answering.
The second we step inside, she stops in the foyer and folds her arms.
“Where are we?”
“My house.”
“In London?”
“Yes.”
Her laugh is soft and bitter. “Of course you have a house in London. Is there where you keep all your mistresses?”
I don’t answer and lead her upstairs. She follows because she’s exhausted, not because she trusts me. I can feel that much. When I open the bedroom door, she freezes.
There’s only one bed.
