Page 74 of Irish Rose
“I’ve got my car.”
“Leave it.” He took her arm again.
“That’s silly. I’ll just—”
“Leave it,” he repeated, pulling her into the elevator.
“Fine.” She bit the word off. “Since you’re sure you can bear to be in the same car with me.” She crossed her arms and stared at the doors. Burke stuck his hands in his pockets and scowled.
Neither of them spoke again until Erin stormed into the atrium. “If it’s all the same to you, I’m going upstairs. And you, you can take your foul mood out to the stables with the rest of the dumb animals.”
He wondered that her neck didn’t break from holding her head that high. Burke gave himself thirty seconds to calm down. When it didn’t work, he strode up the stairs after her.
“Sit down.” He spit out the order as he slammed the bedroom door behind him. Erin simply narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms. “I said sit down.”
“And I say to hell with you.”
That was all it took. Before she could evade him, he had scooped her up and plunked her down on the bed.
“All right, now I’m sitting. Don’t tell me you actually want to have a conversation with me?” She tossed her hair back, then slowly crossed her legs. “I’m all aflutter.” She saw his hand close into a fist and angled her chin. “Go ahead, pop me one. You’ve been wanting to for days.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“It was quite clear last night I couldn’t even do that.” She pulled her shoes off and tossed them aside. “If you’re so fired up to talk to me, then talk.”
“Yeah, I want to talk to you, and I want some straight answers.” But instead of asking, he shoved his hands back into his pockets and circled the room. Where to start? he wondered. His fingers brushed over the ring he’d carried for days. Perhaps that was the best place. Burke pulled it out and held it in the palm of his hand.
“You found it.” Erin’s first burst of pleasure was almost blanked out by the look in his eyes. “You didn’t tell me.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“No, I didn’t, because I was sick about it. Dropping it in the stables was stupid.”
“Why did you?”
“Because I couldn’t think of anything else. I knew I couldn’t get away from them. They were already tying my hands.” She was looking at her ring and didn’t see him wince. “I guess I thought someone would find it and take it to you, and you’d know. Though I don’t know what I expected you could do about it. Why haven’t you given it back to me?”
“Because I wanted to give you time to decide if you wanted it or not.” He took her hand and dropped the ring in it. “It’s your choice.”
“Always was,” she said slowly, but she didn’t put the ring on. “You’re still angry with me because of what happened?”
“I was never angry with you because of what happened.”
“You’ve been giving a champion imitation of it, then.”
“It was my fault.” He turned to her then, and for the first time began to let go of the rage. “Twenty hours. You lay in the dark for twenty hours because of me.”
The words could still bring on a cold flash, but she was more intrigued by Burke’s reaction. “I thought it was because of Durnam. You’ve never seemed willing to talk it through, to let me explain to you exactly what happened. If you’d—”
“You could have died.” There was really nothing else but that. No explanations, no calm recounting, could change that one fact. “I sat in that damn hotel room, waiting for the phone to ring, terrified that it would and there was nothing, nothing I could do. When I found you, saw what they’d done to you... your wrists.”
“They’re healing.” She stood to reach out to him, but he withdrew immediately. “Why do you do this? Why do you keep pulling away from me? Even at the hospital you weren’t there. You couldn’t even stay with me.”
“I went to kill Durnam.”
“Oh, Burke, no.”
“I was too late for that.” The bitterness was still there, simmering with a foul taste he’d almost grown used to. “They had him by then, where I couldn’t get to him. All I could do was stand in that hospital room and watch you. And think of how close I’d come to losing you. The longer I stood there, the more I thought about the way I’d dragged you in with me right from the beginning, never giving you a choice, never letting you know what kind of man you were tied to.”
