“Yes. It does, actually.”
“So talk to me,” he encourages. “Tell me the part we both know you don’t want to talk about.”
“How I ended up with Neuville.” I hate that just his name sends a shiver of dread down my spine.
“Yes. How did you end up with Neuville?”
I withdraw from Kayden, moving to sit in the chair, and he doesn’t try to stop me. Somehow, he seems to understand that I’m not rejecting him. I’m just not capable of reaching the monster in my life when the man I love is touching me.
“I had a dying man at my feet,” I say, as Kayden once again leans on the desk, “a necklace in my pocket, and people after me who would likely kill me for it.”
“And you had no money or resources in Paris,” he supplies, leading me to my next decision.
“Exactly. And knowing I had the necklace that seemed to be the reason David was killed, I couldn’t call the police without taking the risk of alerting who knows who. I needed help, and I needed it fast.”
“You called Neuville.”
“Yes,” I confirm. “Where else was I going to go? He was conveniently the only person I knew. The man set up to be standing in my path. He was this rich, powerful man who seduced me with any method he could including the promise of a safe place to hide that was never safe at all.”
“You were drawn to him,” Kayden says, and it’s not a question.
My eyes meet his, and the combination of knowledge in his eyes and understanding in my belly punches me in the chest. But I don’t run from it, or try to sidestep it. “Yes,” I admit, self-loathing filling me. “I was. Too much in the beginning, I think, and being that bad a judge of character doesn’t seem accurate. I don’t understand it, yet I’ve had random flashbacks that tell me it’s the case.”
Kayden pushes off the desk and steps in front of me, offering me his hand. I flatten my palm in his, warmth radiating up my arm, across my shoulders and chest. But I don’t look up and make eye contact, instead savoring the way I feel him everywhere, in places he isn’t touching me but I want him to touch me. In places deep in my soul that somehow I still don’t know, but he does. We linger like that a few moments, connected in ways that I know I have never felt with any other person, right in ways that I somehow know few things have been in my life before him. And this bond I share with this man only drives home how odd my pull to Neuville had been.
It is this question I’m still asking when Kayden gently urges me to my feet, but when I would search those now warm blue eyes for an answer, he simply offers me one. “We’re all human,” he says. “You were alone, and from what I can tell, you’d been alone a very long time.”
Somehow he’s hit on exactly my feelings when I’d called Neuville that night at the chocolate shop. “That’s not an excuse for not seeing him for the criminal he was right away. I might not know if I was CIA or not, but I know I’ve had the training and experience to see through that man.”
“He’s the head of the French mob for a reason,” he says, his hands settling on my waist. “He’s a master manipulator.”
“Don’t make excuses for me, Kayden,” I say, my fingers balling around his shirt. “Excuses equal weakness, and you can’t have a weak woman by your side, any more than I want to be one.”
He turns us, settling me against the desk, his hands on the desk on either side of me, mine beside his, while his big body frames mine but does not touch it. “I didn’t give you an excuse, Ella,” he says, his voice strong, almost hard. “I gave you a reason, a way to understand your actions and decisions, because you can’t control what you don’t understand. You are human—and if you forget that, it becomes a weakness. Know yourself. Know what can or cannot get to you, because your enemy always will.”
Those words trigger a whisper of my father’s voice in my head: Know yourself better than anyone else knows you. Know your adversaries more than they know themselves. That was exactly why I’d taken on the façade of a schoolteacher. To know me more than others knew me. But who were those others, and why did that matter? And why is my declaration to Niccolo, that my past has nothing to do with the necklace, feeling less and less right?
four
Ella.”
I blink at the sound of Kayden’s voice and come back to the present, with me still leaning on the desk, him in front of me, his hands bracketing my body. “Where are you in your head right now?” he gently prods.
“Thinking about control,” I say. “Everything is about control. I was trying to get it when I lost it completely.”
His eyes narrow. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I say, hyperaware of my hands touching his on the desk behind me, “and that’s the problem. But I am certain of this: my mind shows me things in seemingly random ways that always prove not to be random at all. I told Niccolo the past has nothing to do with the necklace, yet I keep seeing the past weave its way into the present. My father keeps coming back to me.”
“He formed much of who and what you are.”
“Yes,” I agree. “And it could be that, but I’m not sure anymore. When I told Niccolo my past had nothing to do with the necklace, something felt off. And almost immediately when I got in the car with you and Adriel, I flashed back to something that happened at my old home in the States.”
“What happened?”
“Two men visited me and I know they were CIA, but I know it somehow connected to my dad’s death. I kept my gun close. What the hell does that even mean? Are they bad? Am I? Oh, God—what if I’m working for Niccolo?”
He cups my face. “You are not working for Niccolo.”