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He’d said the words for a reason.
The first time she’d dropped down to her knees and taken him in her mouth had been the straw that broke the camel’s back and later they’d broken the arm on his sofa.
The hate was still in his eyes, but so was the knowledge that she hadn’t just slept with him, but they’d fucked more than a dozen times before she’d slipped out of his life and left him thinking that she’d probably done it as part of her job.
Yes, Leo was probably calling her a whore.
And deep inside her heart she knew that he felt justified.
That alone, almost killed her.
“I cleared you, L-”
“Don’t.” He’d raised his hand again, his finger pointed at her mouth. “Just don’t. Say. My. Name.”
He didn’t know.
Or he couldn’t trust that she’d been with him because she wanted to.
She hadn’t even been looking at him as a suspect when the almost too overwhelming evidence of his guilt was revealed to her.
Cygny knew then, what was now crystal clear, she was going to spend the rest of her life trying to make up for it.
Hank spoke up then, turning their attention toward him. “What were you saying?”
She nodded at Hank before she turned to look at Leo. “I cleared you.” She drew in a deep breath and tried to explain. “I had to turn in the information that I found under orders from my boss, but I wasn’t content to leave it at that report. I had to find out the truth. The truth that wasn’t staring me in the face.
“I knew,” she paused, meeting his hard gaze, “that you weren’t guilty.”
She watched his Adam’s apple work its way along the column of his throat. She had extremely visceral memories of chasing that with her tongue but forced those from her head.
Lust rose easily with any thought about Leo.
But there was no way he’d ever cross that line with her again.
And she didn’t blame him.
How could she?
* * *
“I knew,”she looked straight at him and kept looking when she spoke and said, “that you weren’t guilty.”
What the ever-loving fuck did it matter?
The room was ridiculously quiet.
“So you knew, but you let them roast me over a spit? You let them boot me out of my unit? Do you have any idea what kind of a bomb you set off in my life?”
She didn’t reply and he nodded, smiling.
“You knew. You walked away. And I’m supposed to be grateful that you decided to circle back and cleared my name after you let everyone believe that I’d sold out my country?”
He saw her flinch and something inside of him smiled at the gesture.
And something even deeper than that told him to go fuck himself.
Yeah, well, they could get in line.
“And now, what?”
His mouth was dry. Bone dry. He had to swallow to speak. The trouble was, he didn’t know if he should anymore.
She remained quiet and some of the anger bled out even if the hurt didn’t.
“How?” He’d asked the room, but he really wanted her to answer him because he hoped that she had an answer they could both live with. “How are we supposed to work with each other, Elaine?”
Something shifted in the room.
What it was, he didn’t have a grasp on the answer.
Neither, it seemed, did she.
Lifting her chin, she met his gaze, but the person who looked out at him was almost a stranger.
Oh hell, she was a stranger, wasn’t she?
“My name,” she breathed, “is Cygny.”
Leo saton a rock near the edge of the woods and didn’t even try to walk away when Jake came to talk to him.
Well, he couldn’t.
Not really.
All of his indignant anger had been left behind in the room.
