Page 97 of Masked in Deception
“Margot?”
She freezes, before turning to give me a stare over the top of her sunglasses. Clearly not impressed by what she finds, she turns to continue strutting away.
“Margot, please. Please, Princess. I came to apologize. I need to talk to you. I know I’m despicable. I know I fucked up and it was wrong…” I’m begging as she makes her way down the hallway toward the lifts, but something I’ve said has made her stop and turn to face me again. Thank fuck, if I can just beg, maybe kneel and kiss her feet, maybe she’ll…
“You. Fucked. Up?” she says lowly, and I realize that somehow I’ve already managed to say the wrong thing.Jesus Christ, Jack, never once in your life have you managed to say the right thingat the right time. I’m going to keep my mouth shut now, for once.
“You think that’s what you did? That you fucked up? Made a mistake, came to apologize, and we would what? Go back home to our little life we were having so much fun with?” Her voice is completely calm while she’s talking. I’m so happy to see her that I could cry, but I know calm is probably the worst possible reaction from her in this situation. She takes off her sunglasses and puts them in her bag, coming close enough that I can see her bloodshot eyes and the bags under them. Fuck, I did that.
“I don’t think your pathetic, pea-sized man brain will ever actually understand what you did, but let me at least try to spell it out so you have a fighting chance to feel as shitty as you actually should. A little recap, just for you. Iidolizedyou growing up, Jack. You were my knight in shining armor as a child, my crush as a teen, my only love as an adult. Mom wasn’t exaggerating. I thought you were perfect, and I was sure you were the only man I could ever be convinced to marry.”
Tears stream down my face now, but her expression remains blank.
“This is obviously too much pressure to put on one human. Nobody is perfect. But we had our night together, and I really thought you shared my feelings. Naivety of youth, clearly. You sent me away with that note and shattered my dreams, and blah, blah. Old history.”
She’s coming closer now, her blank gaze turning fiery when she stops inches away from me. God, just yesterday I was allowed to touch her, and now every inch feels like a thousand miles between us.
“I came back to New York, forced to work with you. And you wormed your way back into my heart. Saying all the right things, doing all the right things. The plays, the memories,the cuff links,God. That was so smooth. You had me fooled.”
“I wasn’t trying to…”
“No,” she spits. “You don’t speak. You don’t ever speak to me again. You only listen. The entire time you were wining and dining me, convincing me you were the same Jackie I always loved, and you had made a terrible mistake…you had me on a leash crawling to you on the floor!”
She realizes she’s screamed the last bit and takes as deep a breath as her dress will allow before continuing, again calm and in control.
“You knew who I was, and you knew full well that my consent to our activities would have changed had I known it was you, and that kind of deceit is so rotten and disgusting that I can’t even stand to look at you. I went back through the texts, Jack. Playing both sides to your advantage. One Jack enjoying the sex and the power, the other beingmy best friend againwhen I desperately needed one. You abused an inherent position of power over me as my Dom, while literally telling me I could trust you completely and build a life with you. I would never build a life with a man who could take advantage of a woman like that and then hold her close at night. You fooled me twice. There won’t be a chance for a third.”
She takes a deep breath, and her eyes flare, the anger there hitting me harder than any physical punch.
“We’re done. In every capacity. What we’ll tell the family isn’t my concern. We can cross that bridge when we come to it. You can lose my number and my address. Honestly, don’t even think about me. I don’t plan to exist in your world at all, anyway. I don’t plan to ever direct my gaze, or my voice, or my thoughts toward you again. Hopefully, you can’t do the same, and you miss me for-fucking-ever.”
Looking down at her watch, she rolls her eyes. “Now I’m late for my meeting. Goodbye, Mr. Carter.”
With one middle finger in the air, she’s around the corner to the lifts and gone. She was right that I hadn’t fully registered the depths of my betrayal, particularly the fact that she wouldn't have consented if she had known it was me. I’ll carry that shame for the rest of my life, and no amount of rationalizing will make that right. Her points about me playing both sides…it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, a means to an end, but she’s right again. It was despicable.
She’s wrong about one thing, though. She can’t cease to exist in my world. She’s the axis it turns on. I’m not fucking leaving. I let her go once and told her I wouldn’t do it again, and I meant it. I don’t care what she does. She can move to India, fuck a million men, or become a nun. I’ll be one hundred feet away in case she needs me. I don’t think that’ll happen, though. I think her soul will realize I have half of it, just like she’s walking around with half of mine. When that time comes, I’ll be right here.
For weeks, I follow Margot as she takes Paris by storm. Or tries to. She’s losing weight and looks terribly tired, with nobody to carry her bags for her and rub her feet at night. She sends back the flowers I send as mulch and donates any food to the local soup kitchen. Her schedule is too packed, and I worry that she’s getting close to burning herself out. My Princess is true to her word, though, never glancing in my direction once, regardless of how close I am. She’s so stubborn.Fuck, I love her.
Tonight, something is off. She’s wearing more makeup than usual, and she had an intimate dinner with a man at a romanticrestaurant, laughing and being way too tactile with him. This is clearly someone from her time here years ago, hopefully just another friend. My stomach falls when they make their way back out of the restaurant, and his hand slides past the small of her back to the top of her perfect ass. The red cloud of rage that falls over my eyes almost causes me to crash the motorcycle I’m using to follow them, earning me curses in French and getting my head back into the game.
Finally, we’re back at Margot’s apartment, and I watch to make sure she gets in safely before I can go upstairs to the unit I bought across the street. Instead of this asshole escorting Margot to the door of the building, though, she gives him a wide smile, and he follows her in, hand now fully on her ass.
Holy shit.I’m going to die on this sidewalk, in Paris, of heartbreak. The worst fucking part is I deserve it. I would honestly sit in a chair five feet away andwatchMargot fuck this guy if it meant I got to be near her again. But I see the lights turn on in her apartment, and their silhouettes come together too closely to be anything but an embrace. As she closes her curtains, I realize I don’t exist in her world, but she still exists in mine.
Chapter sixty-six
For weeks, my shadow has followed me around, navigating Paris as well as I do, a reminder of how much time he and Ledger spent fucking around Europe. A carousel of pictures flashes through my head, the memory of seeing them for the first time clear as day. I eventually stopped crying every time my brother would post a picture boasting the beautiful women he and Jack were always around, but it never stopped hurting.It still hurts now.Everything hurts.
I didn’t just lose one man. I inadvertently lost both Jacks in my life, and the hole left behind is twofold as well. Every day, my will to keep him at a distance wavers, my traitorous body coveting his touch. My traitorous heart longs for its mate. I’ve tried to deter him, but nothing I do seems to even slow him down. Not until tonight. I know he’s been watching. I’ve felt his eyes on me all night, and I can feel them now, as Michel leads me from the car to my apartment.
Tonight isn’t purely to shake my stalker. It’s in part for my own benefit. I held off for a while after returning to Paris beforerunning back into the arms of my old friend and lover. Even now, I have to convince myself this isn’t cheating, but Ihaveto fill this void. And a sexy Frenchman Iknowwill be a good, safe time just may be the answer to all my problems.
As soon as we’re inside, I make quick work of closing the curtains before practically jumping Michel. “Cheri, slow down, we have all night. Plus, I want to take in as much of you as I can in this little pink dress. You’re a vision, mon amour, more beautiful than any Parisian spring I’ve seen before.”
I honestly forgot he’d never seen me wearing my signature color. In all the time I was here, I avoided it, trying to distance myself from that girl I’d left behind. Trying to distance myself from the man I left behind as well. But the more I tried removing Jack from my life, the more I lost myself. This time, I refuse to become a shell of myself even if I have to live with a piece of Jack slowly burning a hole in my heart, killing me from the inside out.
“Michel, please,” Ibeg,looking up into his eyes. They don’t bring me to my knees like the blue ones I love so much, but there’s a familiarity there that calms my nerves. “I need a distraction. Please.”
