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In comparison to him, even now at nineteen, almost twenty, he probably still views me as a child.
I don’t know why I thought I could show up and he’d see a woman.
He’s my childhood crush, but he’s not mine. He’s never been mine, and I deluded myself into hoping anyway.
I push back my shoulders on a deep inhale, my heart skipping when his dark eyes drop to my chest before lifting, hard as stone, back to mine.
I won’t let him see me tremble. I won’t let him see how afraid I am right now.
“Today was my engagement party,” I tell him flatly. He doesn’t deserve my raw emotion, but I feast on the surprise I see in his expression. Through the surprise, I think I see something darker. Something I can’t begin to read.
“You’re engaged?”
“I was.”
His eyes drop to my bare finger. He knows very well that Remira Laurier would never have accepted a proposal for her daughter’s hand from a man who dared to ask without putting a rock on her finger, weighty enough to drown her, if she ever happened to fall in a large body of water.
The rock had certainly been a weight I’d worn painfully for three months before I’d run for my life. I’d left the ring on the lid of the toilet, glittering against white porcelain in a silent statement of exactly what I thought about the marriage I’d nearly been forced into.
Thinking of it now, I should have taken the ring. I could have pawned it.
But I’d had a statement to make, and running, as much of a statement as that made in itself, hadn’t felt like enough.
I was a fool.
I was a fool for leaving the ring worth enough to help me set up another life away from—them. And I was a fool for running to him.
To Cole Taviera.
“Who’s the sorry bastard?”
Ouch. Asshole.
I don’t let him see that his words hurt as I hold his eyes. “Your brother.”
That something dark I thought I saw—it’s full of rage now.
He comes at me again fast. This time, he doesn't touch me. But I can feel the hot puff of angry breath that blows from his nose. His eyes are filled with a kind of heat that could burn me from the inside out. They just might. Lord knows those talons have their hooks in deep enough.
“You're engaged to my brother?”
“Was engaged.”
“Your engagement party was today?” His voice is gruff. Like the emotion in it is bursting at the seams, a moment away from detonation. I don't know why, but I want to push that button.
I refrain, of course. I am a lady, after all.
“You smell like cheap perfume.” I deadpan.
His brows bounce. “What?”
“You smell like a stripper.” I spell it out for him. Daft, irritating man.
“Like a stripper?” His lifted brows slam down, eyes bouncing the length of my body. “What do you know of strippers?”
“I know you smell like one.” I shrug. Maybe I'm not the lady I thought I was, because I can't help myself. I slam my finger into that button, hard. “And I know, because I’ve smelled them on Darius. Cheap. Perfume.”
He grinds his teeth. A vein in the side of his neck bulges, throbbing in time with his quickening pulse. His big hands curl into big fists at his side. “How long have you been with my brother?”
