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“I see. You lied to her.”
“Yes.”
“And she believed you.” It wasn’t a question, but Trace nodded anyway. “I should kill you for that,” the king said softly, his chest heaving suddenly, and Trace knew he wasn’t talking about having him killed; he literally wanted to kill Trace with his own hands.
But Mara’s brother couldn’t hate him any more than he already hated himself. He would never forget the expression on Mara’s face when he told her... “There’s more,” he said, holding himself straight, meeting the sharp accusation in the king’s eyes. “She knew me too well. She wouldn’t believe I didn’t love her. She thought I was trying to be noble. So I had to tell her...” He couldn’t say the words.
“Ahhh. I see it now. Seducing her? Was that also part of your assignment?”
“I never seduced her!” The harsh words echoed through the vast room.
“There is seduction...and then there is seduction,” the king said softly. “Perhaps you did not seduce her into your bed, but you seduced her into loving you, did you not?”
“That was never part of my assignment,” Trace rasped. “That was...” Mara’s face rose before him, her lovely green eyes smiling shyly at him as she offered him the gift of her body...and her heart. As she offered him her trust. The fierceness in her eyes and her voice as she said, there is no such thing as a bastard child. “That was...” Inevitable, a little voice whispered in his skull. To know her...really know her sweet and loving heart...is to love her unconditionally.
“If you love her, can you not see you have wounded her far worse than my father ever did?”
The words scourged Trace and the blood drained away from his face, leaving him cold and light-headed. “No,” he said, shaking his head slowly, even though he knew it was the truth. Wasn’t that why he’d gone back to the estate before Christmas, only to find her gone? Wasn’t that why he’d booked his flight here even before he’d been kidnapped? To try to undo the damage he’d caused? “No.”
“I tell you yes. You have killed her as surely as if you had stabbed her, but not quickly, not cleanly. She will go on living, dying by inches, her heart already dead inside her. If you could have seen her as I saw her when she stepped off the plane...” A muscle twitched in the king’s jaw. “I could have killed you for that alone.”
Chapter 17
Trace tried to defend himself. “I had to push her away. I thought I was putting her in danger.” The king’s brows drew together in a questioning frown. “Those men following me—your men—I thought they were stalking me from a case I worked on a while back. I can’t give you the details, but they were stone-cold killers. I knew damned well if they tried to take me out she might get caught in the crossfire. I wasn’t about to risk that. No way in hell was I going to let anything happen to her because of me.”
The king cursed long and fluently in Zakharan, but the words and the expression on his face told Trace the curse was internally directed. “I did not think of that,” the king whispered finally, more to himself than to Trace. Then his lips tightened as he went back on the offensive. “But you did not tell her that was the reason, did you?” he said shrewdly, his words clipped and precise. “If you had, it would not have broken her heart. Wounded her, yes. But not crushed her soul as you have done.”
Trace shook his head, facing the bitter truth. “I thought I had to find a way to kill her love,” he insisted. “I wanted to free her. Free her to find a better man than me.”
“Free her?” The king stared at him in disbelief. Then one hand made a sharp gesture of denial. “You are not Zakharian, no matter how fluent you are in our language, so perhaps you do not know. Marianescus mate for life. It started with the founder of our house, and that character trait has flowed through our blood for more than five centuries.” Pain slashed across his face for a moment before he controlled it. “We love once,” he said softly, his eyes looking beyond Trace at a long ago memory, and Trace sensed he wasn’t just talking about Mara. “Then never again.”
The king’s eyes sought the portrait on the wall beside them. “Even my father could not escape that fate. I have often wondered if he could have married again after my mother died, perhaps he would not have blamed Mara for her death. Perhaps he would not have hated her so completely.”
