Page 72 of Bared

Brick pushed all the way to his feet and nailed her with his urgent stare. “Please tell me you used an alias on that lease.”

She rolled her eyes. “I am impetuous, Brickham. Not ludicrous.”

“Good girl.” He released an assuaged breath anyway. “So your plan was to meet your real father, then have some time getting to know him.”

“My plan is just that,” she countered. “Yes, you are right. That is exactly what I plan on doing.”

He cocked his head, hoping it’d soften the critical bite of his reply. “Despite the real possibility that you’ll walk right back into Carris’s crosshairs?”

She blinked at him, confused. “Is that not why you, Oz, and Jag have joined forces?”

Oh, hell.

“Sweetheart.” He straightened his posture. “We’re not the forces of anything here. We bundled our talents for one purpose alone: to make sure the dickwad didn’t get his hands on you in the first place. But if he does and can charm or bribe enough of the right brass at the PP and the airport, there’s not a damn thing we’ll be able to do for you.”

She was quiet, absorbing all that. Too quiet. Brick hated the new squall that seemed to stall over the building, dumping rain like hysterical tears. He shifted his weight, wishing she’d just let out her own emotions, but when she raised her head, her face was frighteningly dry. Nearly impassive.

Which forced his hand like she’d whipped a glue gun. Shit. But one of them had to crack this conversation back open, so to hell with his comfort zone.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” he offered. “That’s probably not what you wanted to hear, but—”

“If everyone only attended things they wanted to hear, Brickham, the world would never get changed.”

“Truth,” he mumbled while watching her shove all the way to her feet. But beyond that, he was going to be shit for words for a minute. Maybe two. He already knew the woman was bright, clever, tough, and tenacious. But level-headed to the point of profundity? She was a princess, for fuck’s sake. A royal darling who’d been raised on a remote island.

Two facts that were glaring reminders of a third. A tenet pounded into his head so many times, over so many years, he was dumbstruck it’d vanished for three tiny seconds.

The deepest truth about a person is the hardest thing to see.

It was a damn useful mantra on his list, constantly useful for keeping him neutral when interacting with assets. Though Jayd Cimarron was far from a basic asset, he’d gotten too damn lax about the principle. He’d slipped her beneath a whole handful of his unfair filters.

“All right, let’s back things all the way up, princess.” He applied the order to his own brain too. No more casting this woman in the hues of her rank, her title, or her last name. It was time to strip her from his expectations as thoroughly as he’d stripped her from her clothes. Not a comparison that necessarily helped right now… “If Carris wasn’t a factor here, and you and Emme were still wandering incognito through the city, what were your eventual goals for that scenario?”

For a long second, Jayd didn’t react. As soon as she restarted a strum of fingers along the lounger’s headboard, he knew the question was at least getting some deeper processing from her beautiful brain.

“Perhaps that is also why I needed the time,” she finally stated. “To figure all that out, I mean. To figure myself out.”

But she wasn’t even finished with the words before a harsh V formed between her eyebrows. As soon as her aquas turned the shade of moonless midnight, Brick broke back in. “All right. What’s wrong with that?”

“What is right with it?” she retorted, flinging up a hand. “There are billions of people across this globe, suffering in awful and real ways, and I am standing here swan-diving into my navel, worried about ‘who I really am’?” After gesticulating the air quotes, she turned her hand and facepalmed herself. “You hear it, do you not? That loud scream of how banal and privileged I sound?”

“Wait. What about how normal?” Brick returned. “Maybe even how human?” He landed the last part before she could push out her huff. “Okay, I get it. You’re a princess—”

“Was a princess.”

He narrowed his eyes. Rolling them would’ve been a waste of time and effort. “You were raised with the expectation that you’d be wearing a crown for the rest of your life. We can agree on that, right? But that doesn’t mean that at the age of…”

“Twenty-four.”

Shit. She was only twenty-four? Granted, he’d slept with younger, though it had all been legal and consensual—and so damn illusional. He saw behind all those girls’ jaded façades, knowing the “maturity” was just an act. But Jayd Cimarron wasn’t pulling an act. She really did have the sentience and conscience of someone older.

After the initial jolt of that extra intel, he embraced it for the logical helpmate it could be. “Right. Twenty-four. At the age of twenty-four, crowned or commoner, you’re not expected to have the cosmic eight ball memorized. Hell, with the wild ride you’ve been on lately, I’d be surprised the eight ball itself wasn’t rolling to the corner for some fetal position time.” He reveled in her awkward little snicker, complete with a punctuating snort, before going on. “So, yeah. Fine. You’ve had the grace of education, enlightenment, servants, and space. But you also had advisors, administrators, handlers, and PR gurus, all feeding you ideas about who you should be. But as soon as your birthright got ripped out from beneath you, all those concepts got blown to shit.”

Jayd wasn’t giggling at him anymore. For several long beats, all she did was blink. Then for several more, she did it as iridescent drops rolled down her cheeks. “That…is exactly how it feels.”

“Then cut yourself some slack for the rest,” Brick murmured. “You’re a human being, not a machine that can simply be reprogrammed.”

She absorbed his assertion with a hesitant tug of teeth on her lower lip. He’d barely recovered from fixating on that hypnotizing sight, when more diamond-perfect tears appeared on her lashes. And that did it. So much for his brain supplying a superb grand finale for his pep talk.