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He schooled his expression into one as hard as his voice. “I don’t love you.”
“You are lying to me.” Her voice broke as she pleaded, “Why are you lying to me?”
“Why can’t you just accept the truth?” he said harshly. “I had a job to do. That’s all. I shouldn’t have taken advantage of your inexperience, but I did, and I’m sorrier than I can ever tell you. I broke a cardinal rule in my line of work—never let yourself get personally involved. Never let yourself fall—” he corrected himself quickly “—get attached to the person you’re guarding. I regret it more than you’ll ever know, and it has to end. I’m moving on. End of story.”
She took a step toward him. “You are not like that,” she whispered on the edge of tears. “I know you are not. You are lying and I want to know why.” She stared at him for endless seconds. Then a light came into her eyes, her face. “You are trying to be noble. Yes! That is like you. You think I have not thought it through, loving you, and you are trying to be noble. But you are wrong. I—”
Desperate to convince her, Trace said brutally, “You just don’t get it, do you? Do I have to draw you a picture? The State Department didn’t just happen to pick me to be your bodyguard. I’m not a DSS agent like the Jones brothers—they couldn’t just assign me. They had to borrow me from the agency I really work for. If you don’t believe me, you can ask Walker.”
She stared at him. “Why?” She barely breathed the question. “Why did they...”
“Because women find me attractive, damn it!” He threw the words at her like stones, and he suddenly realized he could tell her the truth...the truth that was also a lie, but which just might do the trick. “Because they wanted me to seduce you!”
She stood there pale and still, as if carved in marble. Then she blinked. “Seduce...” She shook her head slowly. “I...I must be very stupid because I do not... Why? Why me?”
“Leverage,” he said, with a cynical twist to his lips. “Zakhar is politically important, and...” He let her fill in the blanks for herself.
“Leverage.” There was no emotion in her voice. No tears in her eyes. Just a face deathly white. “Then...those times at your cabin...?”
“You made my job easy.” Trace bitterly regretted that statement as soon as he’d uttered it, and he wanted to take it back. But it was already too late.
She blinked again, but that was the only sign she’d heard him. “I...see,” she said eventually, her eyes very dark in her pale, expressionless face. She opened her mouth to speak, and for just a second her bottom lip quivered, but she caught it with her teeth and bit it into submission. There was blood on her lip when her teeth finally let it go, and she asked in a voice barely above a whisper, “Photographs?”
Raw pain savaged him, talons ripping into his heart. He couldn’t have lied to her about that to save his soul. But his silence was enough.
“I see,” she said again. She stood immobile for a moment, her lips parted as if she wanted to say something else, but she didn’t. The thin line of blood on her bottom lip bore mute testimony to the control she had exerted on herself. Then she licked her lips, tasting the blood there, and Trace tasted despair when he saw it.
Mara touched a finger to her lip as if she’d just realized what she’d done, then stared at the blood on her fingertip for endless seconds. She whispered something in Zakharan that sliced through Trace like a razor, but she’d already turned away and didn’t see his reaction.
He fought the overwhelming desire to call her back, to tell her it was all lies, every word, that he loved her more than life itself. That he would never betray her love in that degrading fashion. But he’d chosen his course deliberately. He had to be cruel in order to drive her away. Now, before it was too late. Before she ended up dead or injured again because of him. Before he took what she ached to give him and he ached to have.
His eyes burned, but at first he didn’t recognize what it meant—it was so long since he’d cried. But he knew he would never forget her last words to him. Would never forget the desolate emptiness in her voice when she said, “I should have known I could not be loved.”
Chapter 15
Mara stood at her bedroom window, staring out at nothing in the gathering darkness. Wondering why everything seemed so distant. Wondering why the woman reflected in the pane of glass didn’t weep. She touched her right hand to the image on the glass, and wondered why she didn’t feel the cold seeping through the window to her skin. Wondered why she felt absolutely nothing.
