“I didn’t say that.” She straightened her spine and met his gaze.
A muscle in his jaw twitched as if to say You implied it. He paced away from her to the other side of the room and then back. When he looked at her again, his stare held all the force of a freight train.
“I meant why are you here in my room in the middle of the night?”
“Vampires enjoy the darkness, Reyna. Did you forget?” He smirked at her. His mask firmly in place. This was the man she had first met at Visage, but this was not Beckham. Not the man she had gotten to know.
She swallowed back anger at the bite in his tone. This wasn’t what she had pictured. All those times she had dreamed of their reunion she had envisioned heartfelt words, love and devotion and apologies broken by vigorous sex to make up for all those lost weeks. Not crisp conversation and words that danced around the issue.
“You didn’t answer the question,” she pointed out. She wanted him to be straight with her. She tried to rip the words about Penelope out of her throat and to feed on all the disappointment and anger building inside herself, but instead, she waited for his reply.
“You were sleeping. So, I didn’t wake you,” he said simply.
She suspected it was the only truth he wanted to tell her. Once again, she was left in the dark. She thought they had gotten over that. But what the fuck did she know? She’d been gone from him nine weeks now. Clearly everything had changed.
“I thought you would be here when I was brought back.”
“Did you?”
Was that actual surprise or was he mocking her? His eyes were empty. Just two blank slates on his face that held no expression. He was stoic and reserved and in control. Perfect control. He had mastered it over the years and now he was using it on her. She hated that it was so hard to read him.
“You should have been here,” she told him.
He arched an eyebrow and stood there assessing her. What the hell was he thinking?
“What are you even doing here if you can’t answer a simple question?”
“I am perfectly capable of answering a simple question.”
“Well, where were you?” she ground out.
“Busy.”
An answer. But a vague one. So vague.
Her frustration mounted. Was he going to tell her where he had been? What was happening with Penelope? The engagement? What the hell he’d been doing the last nine weeks?
A chasm opened up between them the longer he stalled. If she walked any closer, she’d fall into that bottomless pit forever.
“Busy doing what?” she spat.
“Working.”
Her anger overloaded and she just went there.
“With Penelope? Are you two back together?”
His nostrils flared and his eyes hardened. “I don’t want to talk about Penelope.”
“Oh, what else is new?” Sarcasm dripped from every word.
“You have been gone for nine weeks,” he pointed out, gesturing to her. Some of his façade slipped away and his own anger was clear. “You cannot expect everything to be the same now that you’ve returned.”
“You make it sound like I chose to leave,” she said, her voice rising. “That I decided to go to Visage and work with Harrington. That this was what I actually wanted.”
“How could I possibly know if that was true or not?”
Reyna gaped at him. “Because I’m not suicidal!”
“He wouldn’t kill you. He needs you.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Her breathing was coming out uneven as she recounted all the things Harrington had said he would do to her if she didn’t comply. How he would torture and ruin her because all he really needed was her blood. B…God, just B. Her constant nightmare. But she didn’t tell him that. She hadn’t told anyone that.
“You left that night,” Beckham said, reminding her all over again of the night he had bit her, when she’d ran, and her life had turned to shit. “What am I supposed to expect when you come back?”
“Something other than this! I didn’t want to leave that night. It was an instinct. And I never would have left permanently.” She shook her head in frustration. “Be honest with me. Tell me what’s going on.”
All she wanted was the truth. Even if it hurt. If he could tell her that he hadn’t been with Penelope, explain the engagement, admit that it was all an act, then they could move on. Or at the very least, she needed to know so that she could try to pick up the broken pieces of her heart.
“Are you ready to speak about the last nine weeks?” he asked carefully. He slid his hands in his pocket nonchalantly.
She clammed up. No. No, she definitely wasn’t.
“Are you engaged?” she shot back.
“I said that I didn’t want to talk about Penny.”
“Oh God,” she said, backing slowly away from him. “You are engaged. You actually are.”