Modern Romance March 2021 Book 5-8 Carol Marinelli (ebook reader computer txt) 📖

So why did it hurt when he threw what she’d given him at her like that? Why did it hurt, that he dictated careless of her needs, wants and desires? Why did she feel like a child all over again, simultaneously wanting to strike and to please him? Why did she feel like ten times a fool at the same time, blithely walking into her mother’s fate—that of the tragic, foolish and abused woman—when she’d sworn to herself it would never be hers?

“I’m just saying the evidence of your ability to keep your word is sadly lacking.” His words were flat. Dismissive. Distinctly unimpressed.

The rising heat in her body dissipated like a popped balloon.

He had gone past anger.

Lust and longing would not make a pawn or a slave out of her—she wouldn’t allow it. She had been caught up, ensnared and foolish enough to falter once, but never again. And it started immediately. She would never let a man dictate to her, no matter what she’d given him. Never.

She stood still, her body’s readying itself reminiscent of the surf being pulled out to sea before a tsunami. It was quiet, eerie, all wrong, though it would have been hard to immediately pinpoint why. “Take me home. Immediately.”

For a moment he just stared. She couldn’t be serious. She had broken her vow. She had agreed to his plan. She was dedicated and honorable. She wasn’t backing out now. “What? That’s absurd.”

“Take. Me. Home. Now. I say no and it’s over.”

His ears roared like the inside of a conch shell. This was not happening. She’d already given up her vow. She couldn’t go back now. They’d gone too far. The roaring took on a tunneling quality. “Did it occur to you,” he said, proud of how steady and even he kept his voice, “that it might already be too late?”

Horror filled her eyes, transforming into two bottomless pits of sapphire, and the expression was a knife in his gut. “The odds of human conception in any given encounter are rather low, so while, yes, it occurred to me, I was not so naive as to jump to that conclusion.”

“I wouldn’t be so quick to assume averages would apply to the two of us,” he said, the words tasting bitter on his tongue. She, like everything else in her hands, became a weapon.

She rolled her eyes. “Right. I might be pregnant because the big bad Sea Wolf looked at me. That’s a pretty high opinion you have of yourself. But why should I be surprised?”

The flare of his temper was as unwelcome as the realization that he wasn’t entirely in control—of himself or the situation.

It was a novel experience.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, pleased with his low and even tone.

Anger danced in her eyes. “Why should I be surprised that a man like you thinks he’s somehow above everyone around him, that the air he breathes is so rarified that it gives him the right to make decisions for everyone around him?”

His eyes narrowed, his glare warning her to quit while she was ahead.

She didn’t back down. “Why should I be surprised when I have known that man my whole life?”

He didn’t explode, though his anger at being compared to her father by her was as deep and thick as the molten lava waiting to burst forth from below the earth.

With the words out, unable to be taken back, she eyed him warily with an expression that he would have said was tinged with sadness had it graced any face other than hers. She burned too hot for something so cold and wet as regret.

He returned her regard from a remove, a distance that was entirely invisible separating them, and separating him from what he said.

“He’d be dead and gone if you didn’t work so hard to keep his memory alive, Helene. He died years ago and yet you talk to him like he’s alive. In fact, Helene, he is. You keep him alive with every breath you take. You look in the mirror and deep in your eyes, you know the person who looks back is him, and no matter what you do to offset his evil in the world it won’t matter because as long as you exist to do battle with him, he lives.” And if his words applied to himself, too, it didn’t matter, because he had scored his point.

Pain lanced her expression, but the tears that glistened in her eyes did not fall. Instead, she jutted out her chin at a stubborn angle and he was instantly sent back, the image of her now superimposed over the dusty memories his mind had stored of her from when they’d been children together.

Coltish even as a young child, Helene, he recalled, had been nonstop energy from sunup to sundown, absolutely determined to keep up with her older playmate. Absolutely determined that no one—certainly not a twelve-year-old boy—would dominate her.

He felt an undeniable déjà vu comparing his images of the child Helene to the woman who stood before him.

“I said I’d give you seven days, but I’ve made my mind up already. I will not be a part of your plot. I will not be your pawn. I promised myself on the steps of the academy that I would never let a man like my father control me, ever again. I meant it. Not him, and certainly not you. Take me back to Cyrano. I want to go home now.”

His eyes blazed rage at her, impotent as it was, as the plan he’d waited thirty years for went up in flames, laced with an even sharper pain, an underlying and relentless acid ache that started in his chest and radiated outward, as if his heart was being slowly eaten alive. And it was worse since there had been more than mere revenge between them, because, whether she knew it or not, the potential for something real existed