AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He could put off telling her for months, maybe even a year, until he was forced to tell her. Until the DSS transferred him someplace else. But he just couldn’t do that to her. He couldn’t pretend everything was fine. Angelina deserved better. She deserved to know now that they had no future. That for them there was no forever and a day. But he knew once he told her, her smile would fade. The light would go out of her eyes. And the light would go out of his world.
She’d understand. That was the damnable thing. She’d understand when he told her he couldn’t resign from the DSS because he needed to continue the fight for all the Cates out there. Just as she’d understand when he told her children weren’t an option—not for him. Not for them. Not under the circumstances.
You’re afraid to tell her. Just admit it.
Yeah, he was. Because he’d rather cut off his right hand—his shooting hand—than break her heart. But he had to tell her. He’d put it off long enough. And no matter what she decided—even if she chose to go with him when he was reassigned—their life together would never be the same. It couldn’t be.
* * *
Angelina stared at Alec in the soft, wintry moonlight. They’d walked after dinner, as they usually did. But instead of walking by the river, this time he’d shepherded her to this little park not far from her apartment. Then he’d sat her down on a park bench and told her.
Her world was crumbling, but the manners she’d had drummed into her since she was a little girl said a lady never made a scene. A lady was always circumspect, always in control of her emotions, no matter what.
“Say something, Angel.” The hard edge to Alec’s voice steadied her.
“What is there to say?” she said, fiercely glad her voice didn’t tremble. “You have made your decision without consulting me.”
His lips tightened. “I don’t have a choice, damn it!”
She forced a smile. “There is always a choice.” She tucked her hair behind one ear, struggling to hold back the chaos of emotions bubbling inside her. “I understand,” she said when she finally had herself under control. “You would not be the man I lo—” she chopped off what she’d started to say and replaced it with “—the man you are if you could choose otherwise.”
“You don’t understand,” he said with desperation. “I can’t resign. I thought I could—I was even making plans about what I could do for a living instead—but I can’t. Not even for you, Angel. My job is who I am. Just as your job is who you are.”
His breath made a white cloud in the cold air. “I know you said you’d give it up for me. To build a life with me when the time came. But we’re not just talking going to your fallback career in the law. You know that. Eventually I’d be transferred. How can I ask you to sacrifice everything? Your job? Your home? Your country? Yes, you love me. But do you love me that much? To give up everything?”
“We will never know, will we?” she asked softly. “You did not ask me.”
“Angel—”
“No,” she said, cutting him off. “You did not ask me.” She stood, calmly rewrapped her scarf securely around her throat and walked away, her head held high.
* * *
She walked for miles. Dazed, bewildered and bereft, she huddled inside the warmth of her coat, but the chill in the air was nothing compared to the ice embedded in her heart.
Alec loved her, but not enough. Not enough to sacrifice his career. That was all she could think of as she eventually found herself at the river and made her way along the river’s edge. We jogged here, she remembered when she came to a bend in the river. This was where she’d taken him by surprise and thrown him to the ground. Where he’d turned the tables on her so neatly. Where he’d kissed her for the first time. You wanted him to kiss you, she acknowledged. You wanted him then, just as you want him now.
She’d been drawn to Alec from the beginning. Why? she asked herself now. Why Alec, and no other man?
Because he understood her. Understood what motivated her. And loved those things in her she’d never believed a man could love in her. He loved those things in her because he was the same way. And she loved him for the same reasons he loved her. Because he could sacrifice what he wanted, what would make him happy, for a higher purpose.
Honor. Duty. Loyalty. Sacrifice.
Words that meant everything to them.
A quotation came to her from out of the blue, a line from a seventeenth-century poem by Richard Lovelace. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more.”
A memory clicked into her mind suddenly, her telling Alec in the safe house, “...men have been doing things like this to women for thousands of years and will continue to do so until good men—men like you—stand up and say, ‘This stops here!’”
