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“Me?”
The intent of his probing eyes deepened. “I had never lived a minute without expectation hanging over me. Either what I put on myself, or from Harry and Olympus. But you wanted nothing from me.”
That wasn’t exactly true, but Tess wasn’t about to remind him of how she’d pestered him when her mood got frisky.
“I won’t trust you just because you try to make believe we were something that we weren’t,” she said. “Everything was a lie.”
He shook his head. “No,” he breathed. “The first time, yeah. Maybe the second, but somewhere the lie became real.”
“No,” Tess said, bending her knees to duck away when he reached for her face.
It wasn’t ideal that she was by the fridge with him blocking her route to the exit, but at least he wasn’t looming over her… not so close anyway.
“I know it can’t happen, that it won’t,” he said.
“Yeah,” she asserted. “Because I don’t have a damn clue who you are. You…” Tess gestured up and down at him. “This guy, he’s a complete stranger to me.”
“You know this me better than you knew that me. This me understands what you went through. I know what your existence was. What it is to lose your guiding light.”
Shaking her hair from her shoulders, she held her head high. “I already admitted I wasn’t thinking straight after my mom. Maybe if you’d been a gentleman and pointed that out…”
Except why would he? Daire wanted her in his trap, and she’d skipped along into it, oblivious to reality.
“I didn’t intend for it to happen like that.”
“Yeah, and I’m clearly the superior physical presence in the room,” she said, her words laced with sarcasm. “I didn’t force myself on you.”
Not exactly.
“All you wanted was me. No pressure. No expectation, just… me.”
While cocking a hip, Tess folded her arms. “Just a shame you couldn’t show up.”
“You didn’t need a guy like me then… I would’ve scared you.”
Daire didn’t scare her, not exactly. Maybe because she’d seen him training or because she didn’t have the capacity for fear while her head was such a mess. What was going on? What would her life be?
Whatever happened in the future, at least in the immediate future, her path was destined to parallel his.
TWENTY-NINE
MAYBE UNDERSTANDING how he did what he did would help. As it was, she couldn’t relax around him. The guy was a stranger, yet he knew things about her. Things that even she didn’t know.
“How did you do it?” she asked. “Change yourself so completely.”
“Training isn’t only in combat. We’re required to do whatever is asked of us. Sometimes that means going undercover… Harry is big on eliminating embarrassment. When we’re not doing combat training, we’re honing other skills. Skills that will be useful on missions or for ingratiating ourselves… Embarrassment is a cousin of fear; that’s one of Harry’s lines. So whether it’s line dancing in a honky-tonk bar or standing up unprepared on open mike night, he teaches us to face pretty much anything. Hesitation gets you killed. He instructs us to ignore hesitation, to suppress it. If we can do it with embarrassment, we can do it with fear.”
There was a weird kind of logic in there. One that made complete sense to her. Unfortunately.
Undercover… so he was used to adopting all kinds of false personas. Changing at a moment’s notice, just like he’d done when switching from Danny to Daire.
“Is there anything you wouldn’t do under his orders?” she asked, thinking again that Harry relished treating Daire like a performing monkey.
“No,” he said without hesitating.
“Even if you knew it was wrong?”
“A lot of what we do is morally wrong.” He thought for a second before correcting himself. “Did. What we did was morally wrong.”
