Page 120 of Cozen

“You shouldn’t, Sargon.”

No one should.

Cozen was a thief. Her name was most appropriate. She took; she stole; she kept by means of trickery or deceit. She did not, however, give in return.

She had not been taught to give—only to take.

Sargon sucked in a hard breath before saying, “Enough of this. It’s enough.”

“I have two weeks,” she returned.

Sargon’s lips flattened into a grim line. “For what?”

She was grateful he went that route.

Grateful he gave her another chance.

“To finish my business here. You can let me have those two weeks, can’t you?”

“I don’t think I have a choice. You’ve backed me into a corner here, too. I wonder, is that purposeful? Do you use me like you use him? A part of your plans—whatever they are. Am I something disposable, and easily replaced, Cozen?”

She didn’t even have to lie.

That’s probably what scared her the most.

“You are not either of those things,” she whispered.

“Are you sure?”

Cozen pushed up on her tiptoes, and kissed him again. A soft, ghost of a kiss that still managed to tilt the world around them. “This is how it has to be. This is how I have to be.”

“And what comes after, Zen?”

“I don’t know.”

Lies.

She knew.

Didn’t he?

“I have tonight, then,” he told her.

Cozen met his gaze. “Tonight for what?”

“To have you before you’ll technically be back in the city—or that’s what I told him, anyway. And then you go back to …”

“Him and the job,” she finished for him.

Sargon smirked, and shook his head. “You’ve never been his. You can’t be when you’re mine.”

Cozen drifted around the hotel room with a keen eye. She moved from thing to thing and touched anything she could find. The suit jacket he’d discarded on a chair a couple of days before. A glass half-filled with water. Even the edge of the bedspread that he hadn’t made before leaving.

“So this is where you’ve been staying?” she asked quietly.

“Seems so, Cozen.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder, and smiled. Despite the sweetness in the camber of her lips, he could still see a warring heat blazing in her gaze. Every single time he found her looking at him, he saw that same heat.