Page 19 of Taming the Beast (Fairy Tales of New York)

“She told me to go away.” That was putting it politely.

Mercy looked at him. “When was this?”

“A couple of days after you told me where she was.”

Mercy nodded thoughtfully. “I went to see her maybe a week after that. She didn’t mention you’d been to see her.”

“She must have forgotten.”

“When I saw her she wasn’t really aware of anything. She’d come off the drink and the drugs. She must have been suffering.”

“Yes.” He’d seen that, been deeply shocked by how gaunt his sister looked, how ill she was, and had then buried it beneath yet more guilt and shut himself off even further.

“You must have suffered too seeing her like that.”

He shrugged, locking the memory away. “It meant nothing to me.”

“Then why did you go?”

“A momentary lapse of reason. It was a mistake.”

She tilted her head. “You might convince yourself of that, Seb, but you won’t convince me. It was a good thing to do.”

Good or bad, who cared whether she was convinced or not? He certainly didn’t. “I don’t need your approval, Mercedes.”

“You have it nonetheless.”

“Is that all?” he said, planting his hands on his desk and about to stand up because now he really was kind of keen to end this conversation. “If it is, I’ll call you a cab.”

“Not quite,” she said slowly, and stifling a sigh he sat back down. “I have another question.”

“About what?”

“The night we slept together.”

Seb went still his body tightening and his pulse spiking. “What about it?” he asked, slightly beginning to regret his recent decision to face things head on.

“Was your aim solely to distract me?”

Well, no, it hadn’t been, he thought, keeping the memories that clamored to be let in at bay. Not remotely. He might have initially kissed her to shut her up, but within a moment of having her in his arms it had been all about the lust. However to tell her that, to admit to having wanted her so badly he’d nearly lost his mind, would make him come across as being, well, possibly a little bit vulnerable, and he wasn’t having that. There was facing up to things and then there was self-destruction.

“What else would it have been?” he said.

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

“My aim was to stop you talking, nothing more.”

“Then why not just throw me out?”

Right. So. A perfectly reasonable question. Just not one he wanted to answer. “Look, if you’re after an apology,” he said, opting for deflection, “you can have one. You were absolutely right, Mercedes. I took advantage of you and your adolescent crush on me. But I shouldn’t have. It was a lousy thing to do. I’m sorry.”

She raised her eyebrows as if she didn’t think much of that, which was a shame because as apologies went he’d been getting in a lot of practice and it wasn’t a bad attempt. “So why make love to me all night long?”

Another excellent question. “There’s no point to this,” he said, reaching for his phone because despite his resolve the sooner she was out of here the better. “No point at all. Rehashing the past won’t change it. I’ll call you that cab.”

He scrolled through his list of contacts until he found the one he was looking for and tapped it, wondering why the hell this process couldn’t be quicker.

“Seb?”

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