Page 101 of Nefarious
He could do it. With his eyes closed, he could tell her it was all a game, a joke at her expense. He could break her heart with finality and keep her out of his dangerous clutches.
“Look at me, Dane.”
He lifted his eyes. Hers were blue pools of disaster for him. He couldn’t look away. Those were the eyes he’d seen in a New York City hotel room he’d named Paradise. But once you leave Shangri-La, you don’t get to go back. Once you break a woman’s heart, it will never be whole.
His breath rose and fell like the moon pulling the tide, and he couldn’t form the lie that would save her from him. “I can’t.”
Noelle laid a hand on his cheek. “Don’t you know that I love you, too?”
He waited a beat for her to qualify it. “I love you, but. . .”Buthe needed to atone for his sins.Butthey were never meant to be.
It never came.
“Noelle, what we had was . . .” God, what word could encapsulate the everything of those few days when he’d had her body, mind, and soul. When she’d looked at him like he was the person he’d pretended to be. “It was serendipitous.”
She laughed. “Hardly.”
“It wasn’t for you?”
“Serendipity is an accident of circumstances, Dane. Do you really want to tell me you’ve ever just fallen into anything that remarkable by happenstance?”
“What would you call it, then?”
“Preordained.”
“Doomed.”
“Blessed.”
How could she keep seeing him that way after everything else. He shuttered his eyes and sought a way to escape her relentless pursuit of his beleaguered soul. Before he found the strength to bolt, she pulled him into a hug that felt like true acceptance, and he wanted what she was offering, desperately needed it like rope to a drowning man.
But he pushed her back. “You don’t get it, Noelle. I cheated. I lied. I hurt people.” His voice rasped liked sandpaper. “I’m the bad guy in this story. I don’tgeta happy ever after.”
She sniffed as though offended. “Well,nowyou’re being a little bit selfish.”
“What?”
“Are you going to send me away? Break my heart? Make your sacrifice mine as well?”
His fingers raked through his hair. “You deserve better. You’ll find someone who’ll earn your love.”
“Excuse me? I’m not a cookie or a gold star someone wins for checking off a series of good deeds. If you’re working to earn anybody’s love, it should be your own. I don’t need you to self-immolate for me.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It might take me my entire life to rediscover the person I once was.”
“Dane, hear me when I tell you that I’ll gladly help you do that work, but foryou. I love you the way you are.”
He swallowed back the painful tightening in his throat. Nobody had ever said that to him. Nobody but Rosamund. He whispered his last plea. “You’re making a mistake. You should go home.”
“Unless you can tell me you don’t want me here,thisis my home.”
The last bit of glass sheltering his heart cracked, and he clutched his chest as though he could actually die from happiness. “Will you promise to leave me when I don’t measure up?”
“No, Dane. I’m not going to abandon you whenever you show yourself to be human. I might call you on your bullshit, but I promise to stick by you until you find a way to believe you already do measure up.”
His knees buckled from the relief of this woman strong enough to hold him up while his fight gave out.
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him. “Yes, I want you. I’ve never stopped wanting you. Damn you. You shouldn’t want this.”
