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The longing was so intense then that surely she should have doubled over. Crumpled to the frozen ground. Cried, at the very least.
Timoney would never know how she remained upright. Her gaze clear. “I will take that as a no. Nothing has changed. Because you can’t change, can you?”
She thought she might hate him, then, and that felt like an upgrade from the mess inside her. Because it was easier to be numb. It was far easier to lock up all the things she felt far away, where none of it could torture her. Where she could observe what happened to her from a distance. Where she could feel nothing.
Now she felt everything.
Now shefelt, and that might have been the most unforgivable thing he’d done yet.
“We don’t need to change a thing,” Crete said, as if he was warming to the subject. It made her wonder what he’d come here to say, if not this—but she pushed it aside. It didn’t matter. None of this mattered. “It can be as it was.”
“It can’t be as it was.” She shook her head at him. “Because I’m in love with you, Crete, and your reaction to my daring to say that out loud was to end everything. On the spot. Why would I sign up for that again?”
His expression hardened, and she knew that look. It was one she’d seen him wear often enough while tending to his many business concerns.
“Surely it is better to be with someone you love than this animated corpse who you will never love at all,” he said, mildly enough, though she could see that considering gleam in his gaze.
Timoney wanted to scream at him not to imagine he could handle her the way he handled his legion of underlings.
But screaming would prove to him that she needed handling and kid gloves and all the other things that set her teeth on edge. Or would, if he had ever offered them. He hadn’t before.
“On the contrary,” she said, with a great, icy calm that she hadn’t known she had inside her. “Far better to be in a relationship where I know exactly what I’m getting and what I can expect. Far better that than dying of loneliness with a man who could love me, but refuses. If I’m not to be loved, Crete, I’d rather not pretend. I’d rather immerse myself fully in the lovelessness.”
What she didn’t say was,I would rather not break my heart all over again.
He actually laughed. Timoney felt nothing short of murderous.
“I have never heard anything so absurd,” he said. “You cannot mean it. Might as well march yourself off to a stint in a prison, no?”
Timoney did not choose to tell him that her upcoming wedding rather felt like a prison, actually, and that she welcomed it. Better unmistakable iron bars than a touch like fire and that look in his gaze when he was inside her. Better not to avoid confusion.
“Surely you’ve had other mistresses who moved on to other men,” she said, scowling at him. “I don’t understand why this is such a surprise to you.”
“It is true.” Crete shrugged again and looked almost...philosophical. “But they did not love me. Many times they said they did, but it was not so. Not like you. You, Timoney, I believed.”
“Your arrogance is breathtaking.”
That wasn’t hyperbole. She felt as if she’d fallen from a great height and had landed hard on her back, knocking all the air out of her body.
Timoney stepped back even farther, because she didn’t want to. She wanted to move closer to him. She wanted to fling herself into his arms and promise him anything at all if he would simply take her back.
Did it matter if he loved her? Surely she could love him enough for the both of them...
But this was the trouble with Crete. He felt like a dream come true, but she knew better. She’d lived it once already. This time, she knew there was no happy ending here. There was only misery—and that dispassionate look on his face gone cruel when he dismissed her.
She couldn’t sign up for that again. She wouldn’t. “If you’ve come all this way simply to tell me that you don’t like the idea of my marrying Julian, it’s a wasted trip. You could have saved yourself the trouble.”
“What would make it something other than a waste, then?” he asked, in the silky manner that set off little fires all over her body—and also reminded her that whatever else he was, he was almost supernaturally gifted at making people do as he pleased. It was one of the reasons he had made himself too many fortunes to count.
She had never been any match for him.
But then, Timoney wasn’t the same woman he’d met outside that club, was she? She was the woman who’d survived him the only way she knew how.
“You have nothing to offer me,” she told him quietly. “It’s Christmas Eve, Crete. This is a season of miracles, but you have none on offer. You decided long ago that you are incapable of such things, of any and all human emotion. And once your mind is made up, there’s no changing it. I wouldn’t dream of trying.”
“But you cannot wish for this fate, Timoney,” he said, his voice still a rough thread of silk against the night. “Do you think I have forgotten how you came apart in my hands? How you sobbed out my name? How you told me you might die if I did not return to you quickly enough each evening?”
She swayed on her feet, still breathless. And she didn’t like him reminding her of those days, those weeks, that life. How desperate she’d been for him, always. How needy.
