For once in her life, Erika didn’t know what to say.
And the longer she stood there, gazing at him—or scowling at him—the more that feeling of well-being that she’d woken up with eroded.
Stupid, she thought, the sharp little voice in her head far too much like her mother’s.Always so stupid.
Because it really hadn’t occurred to her until this moment that while she had gone on a significant journey last night, he’d been...doing what he did. To Dorian, there was no connection between a moment in a ballroom two years ago and today. He wasn’t the one who had taken it upon himself to search her out. He hadn’t done “research” all over the globe, trying to figure out how to get next to her. While she felt profoundly altered by what happened last night, he didn’t.
Clearly.
Because the Dorian who stood there across a granite countertop from her looked exactly the same as he had when he’d tried to cut her down to size in Greece.
And suddenly, everything that had happened between them seemed dirty. And not in the hot way.Soiled, not sexy.
Why had she gotten on her knees? Why had shecrawled? Why had she, a grown woman, let this man spank her like a child and then fuck her like some kind of whore?
And how had she curled up in his arms like all of that was a gift, then slept more soundly than she had in years?
She could feel her pulse everywhere, her heart in her throat as if she might get sick.
“Oh my God,” she said, soft and horrified, her eyes wide. “Youhateme.”
Something changed, there in the intensity of that dark-coffee gaze. “I don’t hate you.”
“I think you do,” she said, shaken. “I should have realized. Here I was, thinking this was some kind of connection, and you were just...”
Dorian leaned forward, keeping his gaze trained on her, and she wanted to run away. Get away. But she couldn’t seem to move.
“Were you chasing a connection when you came into the club last night? Or was it something else?”
She laid her palms on the cool countertop, hoping it looked as if she was doing literally anything but what she was actually doing, which was holding herself upright. “What other reason could I possibly have?”
“I’ve wondered that myself since the moment you showed up,” Dorian said in that same relentless way of his that made her want to cry and made her want to touch him and left her messy straight through. “And the only conclusion I reached was that you really, really want to stick it to your brother and thought you’d use me to do it.”
Her heart was stuck in her throat. Or pieces of it were. And she didn’t understand why it was involved in the first place. “Because nothing could possibly be worse than getting tangled up with me, obviously, whatever the reason.”
“You’re beautiful,” Dorian told her, and what waswrongwith her that she felt like the sun had come out from behind a cloud. “You’re smart and quick and funny. And I watched the strength you have in you, Erika. Over and over again. I watched you fight yourself. I watched you struggle and suffer, and I’m not being patronizing when I tell you that it was truly humbling to see you give yourself wholly and completely. To me.”
Her throat was dry, then. And her heart was a lost cause.
“But,”she prompted him.
Because if she knew anything, it was that when it came to her, there was always abut. Always.
You could be so lovely, Chriszette had sighed at her father’s funeral,but you’re soemotional.No one likes that muchdrama, Erika.
I know we’ve been friends for years, her supposed best friend ever had told her in boarding school,but I don’t reallylikeyou, actually.
I like fucking you, a great many of her lovers had told her, in one way or another.But that’s all it is. You know that, right?
You’re my sister and I love you, Conrad had said, frowning, after she’d announced she wasn’t returning to Oxford after all,but I can’t support this wasted life you want to live.
There was always, always abut.
“But I don’t understand how you can be the woman I saw last night,” Dorian said quietly, “so courageous in your surrender when you want to be, when the rest of your life is such a disaster.”
The more he spoke, the further away she got without moving an inch, and that was a blessing. Her own, personal gift. After all, she was used to being dressed down. Shouted at. She was everybody’s convenient punching bag, and there were only two ways to take that. You either curled in on yourself, a sad sack in every regard. Or you practiced your enigmatic smile in the mirror, pretended everything was amadcap adventure, and that it all rolled right off you.
Erika had always opted for the latter, because nobody got to see her suffer.