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If he could not be a man of honor, then he would be a man of the basest betrayal.
It was the sight of that book sitting on the side table that brought him back to himself. Just a flash of normality. A familiarity. A reminder of who he was supposed to be, that caused him to release his hold on her and set her back on her feet.
She looked dazed. Her lips were swollen. Utterly wrecked.
Just like he was.
“Never,” he said. “It will never happen between us.”
“But... It already did.”
He chuckled, dark and without humor just like the very center of his soul. “If you think that was an example of what could be between us, then you are much more inexperienced than I would have given you credit for.”
“I...”
“The things I could do to you. The things I could do to us both. I could ruin you not just for other men, but for sleep. Wearing clothes. Walking down the street. Everything would remind you of me. The slide of fabric against your skin. The warmth of the sun on your body. All of it would make you think of my hands on you. My mouth. And you would try... You would try to use your own hand to bring yourself the kind of satisfaction that I could show you, but you would fail.”
“And what about your brother? Would he fail?”
“It is why I won’t do it. Because yes. After me. After this... Even he would fail to satisfy you.”
And he turned and walked out of the room, leaving her behind. Leaving his broken honor behind, held in her delicate hands. And he knew it. He only hoped that she did not.
The sooner Matteo returned, the sooner Javier could leave this place. Could leave her. Matteo needed to do what he thought was best for the country.
But Javier would not stand by and see it done.
CHAPTER NINE
SHE HAD FAILED. It kept her awake that night. The sting of that failure. She was supposed to seduce him. It had been her one job. Granted, it had all gotten taken out of her hands, and she had a feeling that her own inexperience had been played against her.
Her heart hadn’t stopped thundering like it might gallop out of her chest since.
She hadn’t expected him to find her in the ballroom. That was the real reason she had been in there. Who hung out in an empty ballroom? But then he had appeared. And she had realized it was her chance.
She hadn’t actually been sitting there scheming. She had been avoiding her scheme.
After her failure at the waterfall, and after...
The problem was, he had shared something of his past with her there, and she felt like she knew him better. Felt guilty for her seduction plan even though it felt like the perfect solution to her problem.
Because she knew on some level that if Javier were to sleep with her, Matteo would not want her anymore.
And she had been... She had been excited about it, perversely, because for the first ti
me in her life she was attracted to a man, so why not take advantage of it? She didn’t want to marry him. He was... He was an unyielding rock face, and she had no desire to be stuck with a man like that for any length of time.
But then she had been sitting there reading that fairy tale. And not only had she—through those stories—come into a greater understanding of his culture, there was something about the particular story of the beast she’d been reading that had made her understand him.
Transformed into something due to the sins of his father and so convinced that the transformation was a necessity.
That he had to sit in the sins, in the consequence, to avoid becoming a monster on the inside as well as a monster on the outside.
She had been so caught up in that line of thinking that when he had appeared, she had clumsily made an effort at seduction, and she had been carried away in it.
That was the problem with all of this.
She was a reasonable girl. A practical one. A businesswoman. Thoroughly modern and independent in so many ways, but she had been swept up in a fairy tale, and nothing that she knew, nothing that she had ever achieved, had prepared her for the effect that it was having on her.
