Page 21 of Honey Cut
“I hate leaving you like this,” he says, and there’s something in his words that I can’t recall hearing before. Maybe once, on the night he took my virginity.
I’d like to stay, he’d admitted in a voice that was quiet and raw, and arrogant still.
He’d held me in my bed after.
“Then don’t leave, sir,” I whisper.
Regret flashes through his expression—tight mouth, tight jaw, eyes reluctant to leave mine. And then he rubs a hand over his face before offering to help me up.
I get to my feet unsteadily, and he has to catch me around the waist once again as I abruptly realize how light-headed I am.
“I’ve never seen someone so naturally—” A sigh. “I really do need to leave. I have to make sure our little show for the wedding planner is landing the way we need it to.”
I’m struggling to find my balance, my breath. “Why did we need a show again?”
“She’s feeding information about us to the man who tried to kill me last month,” Mark says with the dispassion of someone talking about a relative’s vacation plans. I’m both impressed by his sangfroid and irritated by it—this is information that I would have liked to have about my own wedding planner. But maybe one doesn’t live with as many enemies as Mark Trevena and not develop some detachment when it comes to danger.
“It protects you if this man believes you’re fully mine and not to be fucked with,” he continues. “And playing the part of obsessed future spouses protects us both from speculation.”
“You’re good at playing it.”
Mark slowly reaches up to brush a stray lock of hair away from my damp face. He opens his mouth—and then presses his lips together, like he’s thought better of saying what he was going to say. “I’ve had practice,” he says instead.
And I don’t know if he means with me, three years ago, or with his first spouse.
Eliot, the dead husband.
It suddenly feels important to know, although I can hardly ask him without admitting to eavesdropping on him and Melody at the party.
Mark lets me go, making sure I’m fully on my feet before withdrawing his support.
“I’m leaving Tristan here with you while I deal with the planner and then go to my next meeting. He’s going to bring you water. Drink it all.”
“It wasn’t even a real scene, sir,” I say. I don’t need to saysirwhen we are demonstrably alone, but I can’t help it. It slips out around him, somehow.
“Wasn’t it?” he asks and then makes for the door. “All of the water, Isolde. I mean it.”
eight
TRISTAN
Mark escortsthe planner out of the boutique, offering to drop her by her next appointment on the way to his, and as he guides her out of the door, he sends me a look. I’m to mind the directions he’s just given me, it says.
I could almost be wounded. When have I ever refused him? Only once, when I ended things between us. In everything else, including fetching his bride to him, I have been the picture of obedience.
The tailors have disappeared back into the fitting area to help Isolde out of her gown, and it’s only after they return and tell me that she’s dressed again that I step back into the fitting area with the bottle of water I’m supposed to give her.
She’s standing in front of a mirror, her eyes glassy and her lips swollen. I can see a smear of pink lipstick at the corner of her mouth and her shaking hands as she’s struggling with a button on her blouse.
I don’t think as I close the door and set the bottle down. As I come between her and the mirror and replace her hands with my own.
“Are you okay?” I ask quietly. With a knife she is vicious, and in her armor of expensive clothes and even more expensive manners, she’s untouchable. But I’ve seen the way her shoulders curl when she thinks she’s alone; I’ve heard the misery in her voice when she’s spoken of this marriage and her future husband.
Like me, she is broken for him. And I don’t trust him not to break her even more.
“We had to,” she says. Her voice is dazed, and so are her eyes when they meet mine. “The planner, she was watching Mark and me.”
“I saw her.” I’d been standing by the door, hoping the storm of feelings in my chest didn’t show on my face. Hoping that if anyone looked at me, they’d see an expressionless bodyguard and not someone in love with both people inside that room.
