Page 118 of The Hunter
Ah yes, that night he’d been Bentley Drummle. Charming, amiable, wicked Bentley Drummle. And yet… she hadn’t detected artifice during the time they’d spent together that night. He hadn’t hurt her, because he’d wanted her. Because… perhaps he’d been enjoying himself?
“I would do it again, sometime…” She chanced a look at him to gauge his reaction. The darkness gathering in his aspect worried her, but she forged ahead. “Think of it, you could fetch me in your fancy carriage, escort me out, even back to the Sapphire Room if you preferred. We could waltz until we couldn’t stand it, and then find that dark corner and finish what we started that nigh—”
“Don’t you remember what you said to me?” he asked in a dark voice
“I say a lot of things. Half of them I don’t even mean, let alone remember.” A chill slid along her skin as she searched her memory.
“I haven’t forgotten.” He sat up so abruptly she was nearly tossed off him. Throwing his legs over the side of the bed, he gave her his back. “After this is done with, and we part ways. I never want to see you again.” His chin touched his shoulder, but he didn’t look back at her. “That’s what you said, and I gave you my word.”
Millie sat up, clutching the covers to her breast. “I—I changed my mind, obviously.”
“That’s not how this works.” He stood, retrieved his trousers and thrust his powerful legs into them.
Millie was so astounded it took her until he was punching his arms into the sleeves of his shirt to reply. “Don’t leave.” She hated how small her voice sounded, how vulnerable he made her feel. “We just…”
“I should have left before all this. I should have gone home.” How a man could sound cold and furious at the same time, Millie would never know, but he did. “I should have dropped you here and slipped away. Then none of this would have happened.”
Millie didn’t understand. Half of her was trying to figure out just where the conversation had turned, and the other half was desperately thinking of a way to make him stop, or at least slow down. “What we did just now, Christopher, it was wonderful. This, between us, it could be the start of something meaningful. Is that what you’re afraid of? Is that what you’re running from? Because I can help you. Just stay, and we’ll—”
He whirled on her. “I run fromno one!” he thundered. “And I fear nothing. I.Feel.Nothing.”
“Liar,” Millie accused. She knew better, she’d witnessed his emotions, had connected with them and let them feed her own.
“You thinkyou’reso brave?” He stalked closer to her, his features positively Siberian by the time he reached the edge of her bed. “You think you can help me withwhat,Millie? Clean the gore off my clothes when I return from a kill? Spend my blood money filling my mansion with expensive and meaningless things? Fuck life back into me when I’m dead inside? Don’t be ridiculous.”
Millie flinched at his cruel vulgarity, but she knew what he was doing. Lashing out, pushing her away. Testing her limits. Thrusting her chin forward, she fought against the hurt and reached for kindness and understanding. “You’ve been so empty these past years, dead inside, as you say, and you’re coming back to the land of the living. I canseeit. I can feel it.” She rose to her knees, still clutching the sheet to her chest and reaching for him with her other hand. “I want to love you, Christopher Argent, and I want you to let me. You don’t have to kill people anymore.”
“You’re wrong.” He pulled away from her, just out of reach. “I am a killer. I’m already bound for hell, I don’t need baggage for the journey.”
“Now who’s being ridiculous?” she snapped, her temper perilously close to doing that very thing. “Don’t you see? Everyone who ever mistreated you, hurt you, oppressed you, their villainy is perpetuated byyourhands. You’re letting those men who killed your mother shape who you are, or at the very least, what you do.”
“Careful, Millie,” he warned.
“It’s thetruth. No one has a charted course. Winds shift, tides change, and even if he’s fighting against all of that, a man can choose where his journey ends—”
“Unless a man like me ends it for him.”
Millie inched forward on her knees. “You could be a different man. A better man.”
“Why would you all unmake me?” he fumed, his eyes flashing with silver and blue lightning for the briefest moment as he seized her arm in a punishing grip.
She shook her head. What did he mean by “you all”? No one was trying to unmake him, just the opposite. She was trying to set him free.
He didn’t pause to allow her a reply. “I’m a hunter. I’m akiller. It’s all I am, it’s all I’ve ever been. If you love me, you’re in love with a murderer. Could you do that? Could you watch me leave the house knowing that every time I return there’s one less person in this world? One more widow, one more orphan, one more soul to condemn me to hell?”
“I—I…”
He actually looked disgusted as he released her. “I think you have your answer.”
“No.”She recovered her senses, reaching out and grasping the fabric of his shirt. “I was thinking about Jakub, I—”
She’d been thinking that they might have made a child. She opened her mouth to remind him that he’d vowed never to leave a bastard.
“Think of what kind of father I’d make.”
Her mouth snapped shut.
His features actually softened as he pried her fingers from his sleeve and held her hand in his. “You’re a good mother.” He kissed her hand and released it, backing away. “Men like me, we don’t survive long enough to grow old. We don’t have wives and children, we have enemies and allies. The people we care about are liabilities, do you want that for Jakub?”
