Keeping my tone calm, I said, “I want to know why. Why did you marry me at all?”
He glanced at me over his shoulder, and I saw something in his dark eyes. Pain? Regret? I couldn’t tell, but he felt something. In fact, that might have been the first time I’d seen real emotion in his expression. Besides amusement, of course.
“I deserve to know the truth, Rule. If that really is your name.”
He cocked his head to the side in that gesture that said,Seriously?
“Fine. It’s your name,” I conceded. “And the rest?”
“I always intended to tell you everything, Laikyn. I’ve been trying to protect you.”
I scooted to the edge of the cushion and angled toward him. “Protect me? By lying?”
“I haven’t lied.”
“Omitting your reasons is the same thing,” I countered, unable to hide my frustration.
“Maybe.”
“There’s nomaybeabout it. It is. You had an ulterior motive when you married me. Has everything else been a lie?”
Rule stood and turned to face me. He took a seat on the cushion, only a foot remaining between us.
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “Everything.” I waved a hand to encompass the house. “Whatever this is that we’re doing.”
His eyes narrowed. “What is it that we’re doing, Laikyn?”
Okay, now he was trying to piss me off.
“Stop repeating my questions,” I snapped.
“I want to know, too,” he said, no inflection in his tone.
“And you think I know?” God, was he crazy?
“You said it earlier.”
“What? I said a lot of things earlier,” I grumbled, taking a sip of my wine and setting the glass on the table. I needed to move. Sitting still wasn’t helping.
Rule’s gaze followed me as I walked around the sofa toward the pool.
For the longest time, I stood there, staring out at the water, trying to wrap my head around what happened, wanting to organize the millions of questions running through my gray matter.
They had secrets they were keeping from me. I was angry about that. But at the same time, I wasn’t. I’d come here under the guise of working off my mother’s debt. That was the agreement we made the night he came to her house. However, I wasn’t an idiot. Even then, I knew that wasn’t what this was. But I never bothered to find out. I’d put blinders on and allowed this to become my new life. Allowed Rule and Jinx to lure me in, to make me fall in love with them. I never cared what the circumstances were because I was happy. Happier than I ever remembered being.
I felt Rule more than I heard him. One second, I was alone. The next, he was there, standing behind me. He didn’t touch me, but he might as well have because I felt his nearness like a security blanket.
“It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” he said softly.
“Like what?”
“You and me. You and Jinx.”
“You and Jinx,” I added because he had never acknowledged that there was something between them. A hell of a lot more than sating a biological urge. I saw it with my own eyes. They might pretend it didn’t exist, but there was no denying it when they were together.
He didn’t respond, and I didn’t turn around to see his expression.
