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“That’s not to say he won’t retaliate somehow. But let’s put that aside for a moment and concentrate on the main issue here. Telling him we’re involved with each other wasnotokay, Danton. You had no right—”

“I hadeveryfucking right, Cat.” He fired me a hard look. “You belong to me. Something you well know. I am not going to let him or anyone else force you to do shit you don’t want to do.”

I scoffed. “You didn’t issue that warning to him for my benefit. You did it for your own. You don’t like that one of your rivals would have taken what you consider yours and essentially given it to someone else. That’s all. And I cannot tell you how much I detest being a pawn in power games.”

“You’re not a pawn, and this isn’t a game. It’s a simple situation. You’re mine. You agreed to that over six months ago—”

“And last night, I made it clear that I’m no longer yours. Why is it that you chose to completely ignore me as if what I say, feel, or think isn’t relevant?”

He tossed me a sideways frown. “You said you needed to end our arrangement due to family obligations. Those obligations are now gone. I made them go away for you. Does that sound like I ignored you?”

Well no, but that wasn’t really the point. “I didn’t ask you to interfere. I told you I didn’t want Jorge to know about us. You should have stayed out of it.”

“You honestly thought I would?”

“Yes, actually, I did. You’ve never interfered in my life before. And it’s not like you were anything close to serious about me. We fucked. That was all.”

“Not sure why you’re talking in the past tense. I told you last night, we’re far from done.”

Oh my God, his selective hearing was on fire.

“I don’t know why you’re so pissed. You had a problem. I fixed it.”

I did a slow blink. He didn’t know why I was pissed. Well of course he’d struggle to see things from my point of view. He didn’t seem to be fully in tune with his sense of empathy.

“You didn’t fix the situation, you complicated it,” I told him. “And you did it for no good reason. It was pointless.”

His brow creased. “Pointless how?”

“It hasn’t changed anything—we’re still over. I didn’t only choose to end our arrangement because Jorge tossed a request my way.”

Tension slipped into his broad shoulders. “Then why?”

My heartbeat sped up.Moment of truth.Yanking up my metaphorical bootstraps, I took a subtle, preparatory breath and blurted out, “You matter to me.” I watched him carefully, noting how his fingers minutely tightened on the stirring wheel. “I don’t like being in arrangements with people who matter. There’s no true way of being content with ‘casual’ in a situation like that.”

“Other people manage it just fine,” he said, surprising me—I’d expected him to shut down and drop the whole thing. “Some of the arrangements that exist within the Vault might be relatively impersonal, but most aren’t,” he went on. “There’s respect there. Regard.”

“It’s more than that for me. Which would be fine if it was a two-way street, but it isn’t.” I was relieved that none of the hurt I felt at that laced my voice.

His nostrils flared. “You’re not some faceless toy to me, Cat.”

“No, I’m not. But although you’re possessive, that’s as far as it goes for you. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t leave me straight after sex. But you do. You always have to go. Well, maybe I want someone who doesn’t.”

“You never complained about it before.”

“Because I believe in respecting people’s boundaries. I respect yours. That doesn’t mean I’m fond of them.”

Stopping at a red light, he looked at me. “What difference would it make if I stuck around after fucking you?”

I could see that he genuinely didn’t understand where I was coming from. “It’s not a matter of me needing you to hang around awhile. It’s about the fact that you don’t wantto. It illustrates what I’ve been saying—I don’t matter to you. And I wouldn’t care about that if it weren’t thatyoumatter tome.”

Pausing, I tilted my head. “Are you getting what I’m saying? Because I feel like you don’t; like your detached sense ofempathy is stopping this from really sinking in and resonating with you.”

Facing forward as the light turned green, he drove on. “I get what you’re saying. But I don’t get why you think you don’t matter. Or why you’d want to matter to me when you don’t want anything more than a casual arrangement.”

But that was the thing. I did want more. I just wasn’t in a rush to lay it all out for him.

I’d already told him I cared about him—that had been hard enough. It also hadn’t made the impact on him that I’d thought it would. He hadn’t turned wary or uncomfortable. In fact, he hadn’t reacted to it at all. He’d pretty much just glossed over it.

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