Page 39 of Marrying the Enemy

“He was.” His face closed up, becoming shuttered and remote. “My mother had the sense to leave him, but my stepmother was forever trying to pull redeeming qualities out of him. Because she loved him. It was painful to watch.”

“Painful to be his son?” she surmised.

“Yes,” he said with a blink that was a small, unconscious flinch. “He taught me that living without love is easier, especially if it was never there in the first place.”

A vast plane seemed to open before her, empty and desolate. She had the sense he was out there somewhere and had the fleeting thought, I’ll never reach him. An ache arrived in her throat.

“You grew up believing your grandmother running away with your grandfather was a demonstration of love, but for who? Herself?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Just be honest about it. Where’s the cushion for her family in that?”

“She was nineteen. She couldn’t have known your grandfather would react so harshly.”

He ran his tongue across his teeth behind his lip, studying her as though weighing whether to say something.

“What?” she prompted.

“I believe my grandfather felt something for her. That’s why he was so devastated by her eloping with someone else. I think my father never got over my mother leaving him, which added another layer to his bastardish behavior. Love is not the great, wonderful entity you want it to be, Evie. It’s destructive.”

She turned her face to the window, trying to hide how much it hurt that he was reducing her yearning for that emotion into a girlish notion.

“Have you never felt anything like it?” she asked. “A crush? What about the woman you were engaged to? Are you this jaded about it because of her?”

“No,” he said without hesitation. “Our marriage would have been advantageous in many ways and she blew it up because I didn’t carve out my heart and offer it to her. I have no hard feelings because I had no soft ones.” His lip curled. “No, I’ve only felt anything remotely like a crush once.”

Who? A scald of envy, of threat, engulfed her.

“That sexual crush has been torturing me for four years,” he continued, voice pitched low with intensity. “I’m determined to turn it into something productive. Otherwise, I’ll burn down the world around me. Or your world, anyway, like my father and his father before that.”

It hurt to hear that she was only a sexual crush to him, and that he felt it was destructive, but his words also sent the unsteadiness of anxious anticipation infiltrating her belly, sending out fingers of tension and ready heat.

“You?” he asked with gentle mockery. “How many crushes have you had?” His eyes narrowed to golden, laser-sharp slits.

“I wish other men interested me,” she admitted with a pang of despair. “Women. Anyone. I hate how helpless you make me feel. But I can’t devote my life to being your...sex doll. If that’s all we have between us, I’ll need to find personal fulfilment elsewhere.”

“Meaning?” The way his voice dropped to subzero raised goose bumps on her skin.

“Work. I just told you no one else interests me,” she reminded him.

Dom blinked, then shrugged with something like impatience, as though this was a topic completely lacking in importance. “If you want to work, work.”

“At a real job,” she stressed. “Not some lame portfolio picking out wallpaper and cutting cake. Not something that’s handed to me like a toy to keep me quiet.”

“I’m insulted.” He sat back to frown at her. “Do you see me as sexist? One of my sisters is a human rights lawyer. She has joined an organization that sends her to countries where men don’t think women should speak, let alone have the level of education she brings to the table. I hate it. I think constantly about how I need to be available to fly at a moment’s notice to bail her out of trumped-up charges, but I’m so proud of her, I can’t stand it. If you want to work, I won’t hold you back. I’m perfectly capable of finding my own dinner if you’re not there, barefoot and pregnant, to cook it for me.”

“Well, I don’t have her level of ambition. If that’s the bar she sets, you’re going to be disappointed in whatever goals I pursue.”

“I’ll be happy with whatever makes you happy. I don’t want to come home to a miserable wife, Evie. She won’t want to have sex with me.”

She rolled her eyes and buried her reluctant grin against the rim of her champagne flute. Damn him for being arrogant, truthful, and self-deprecating. For being charming in his crude way.

“We’ve covered children and work. Do you have a preferred religion? I have none.”

“Judging by the way we behave, I don’t think either of us do.”

That earned her a snort of appreciation.

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