“I couldn’t resist you. I told myself you were moving to Scotland, so what difference would one weekend make?”
“But I never left.”
“I tried to hide you. Tried to tell myself you would move back to Scotland, but that just made things worse. I was crazy for you, and I couldn’t show it. Things got very strained between us. You and me, me and him. I had to get you away. Make you go to Scotland, make it so you would stay. It was a risk because you loved me.” I glance up at her, but she angles her gaze away, refusing to look at me. “You didn’t have to say it. I just knew. I didn’t fuck her,” I add with such urgency. My love, it is constant. “I didn’t want to hurt you, but I had to make sure you would leave, so I set the whole thing up. I knew the news would get back to him, you running crying from the building. I’m so sorry. Seeing you like that tore out my fucking heart, but I’m not sorry for what I did. I won’t apologize for protecting you.”
“How can you be sorry for that but not sorry for Giles?”
“He deserved it. You didn’t. It really is as simple as that.”
“Murder is never simple.”
“Not when it involves family.”
Her lips pinch, her face turning pale. “Oh, Niko, no.”
“You went to Scotland, I had no firm plans after that, not immediately. I thought things might calm down. That Konstantin would find something else to obsess about. But he didn’t. He decided if I wouldn’t marry you, then he’d get someone else to. It was Alexander, you see. A twenty-five-year-old duke with no one to guide him through life. Ripe for the picking,” I add with an unhappy laugh. “The least tractable man in the country.”
“Yes, you’re quite a pair.”
“Konstantin told me he’d decided his second-in-command would move to Scotland. He was also blond and good looking, so he’d do. He didn’t care that the man already had a fiancée. A baby son. He’d be your Russian rebound. He said it with a laugh that turned my blood cold. That bastard had no sense of loyalty. I couldn’t let it happen.”
“What did you do?”
“I couldn’t kill him outright, not without becoming a target myself. But it was you or him. And I will always choose you. So I hit him,” I say, my voice flat. “I fractured his skull and made it look like he’d fallen. It was a risk, but one that paid off. Despite a subdural hematoma, he survived but in a vegetative state. I cut off the snake’s head. It needed another one quick.”
“And that’s you?” She sounds horrified.
“It had to be me. You were my one hope, my darling. I knew I’d get you back.” My shoulders tighten. I roll them back. It doesn’t help the tautening of my skin. Every muscle screams, from my jaw to my legs. “Only, you didn’t wait,” I whisper, loosening my fingers to stretch them wide over her thighs. I want to tighten them. Squeeze. Give her a small taste of my pain. “Did you?” If my words sound like an accusation, it’s because they are. “You married the first idiot to come along.”
“Niko, no,” she whispers as I slide my hands higher up her thighs. Her skin is so soft, scented by orange blossoms.
“You don’t want these hands to touch you? These hands that have sacrificed so much to protect you.”
She shakes her golden head, but she doesn’t stop me.
“Your husband’s hands.”
45
Isla
I can’t think. Whatever I was expecting to hear tonight, not even in my wildest imaginings, my darkest nightmares, could I have concocted even half of this.
For my whole life, I’ve thought I was alone. Oh, I had Sandy and the boys, but I looked after them, not the other way around. I’ve been living a lie, but how could I have known that Niko has always stood between me and harm?
And foolish, impetuous, and desperate to be loved, I married another man.
Silly little Isla.
“You ask me how I’d never become a father. The answer,” he says as he stands, “is because I was waiting for you.”
Oh, Niko.
My heart is full. Regret and love are a painful combination.
“It’s always been you.” His hand feeds into my hair, twisting at the nape as his mouth dips to mine. But he doesn’t kiss me, not because he’s waiting for permission because I’m sure it’s there, shining in my wet eyes. The move has to be mine. A move that’s a declaration, a promise, more than it is a kiss.
Closing the space between us takes courage. Or recklessness. But that’s what I do, pressing my lips to his. His grip tightens, creating a whisper of space between us.
“There’s no going back, Isla. You’re a fool if you ever thought there was.”