Page 28 of Crowning His Innocent Assistant

“Yes. I do.”

“Is that something you had to learn?”

She shook her head. “No. I had to learn to pretend not to be. To put away concerns about whether or not I had truly hurt someone with my knife when I was defending myself. To eliminate any guilt that I felt over taking a loaf of bread from a bakery. For they had many and I had none. I had to unlearn humanity, and coming back to the palace allowed me to find it again.”

“A difference,” he said. “I think.”

“Yes. I believe so.”

“You left your family when?”

Matteo was treading on new ground somehow, with each spoken word. They knew these things about each other. Information dripped into conversations over years. But they didn’t speak of them. Not like this. Not with intention.

“My family left me,” she said firmly. “When I was ten. But you make a good point. For ten years, I was happy. For ten years, I felt a sense of security, a sense of love. The fact that it turned out to be a lie doesn’t erase it. And whatever my mother felt or didn’t feel, there was a time when I was surrounded by the warmth of that family group. There was a time when I felt...cared for. You never felt that, did you?”

It was her turn to push. Her turn to make him share.

He shifted his hold on her.

“Not until my father was dead. And even then, it’s not a sense of being cared for, it’s just being able to control the environment that I am in. And the environment all of my people are in.”

Her heart squeezed. She didn’t want to feel so much for him, but she did. This man who’d had to learn how to show an interest in others because he didn’t know how to show, not because he didn’t know how to feel.

Whatever he thought.

“You had to show a level of care that was never extended to you, to others,” she said, wanting to lean closer to him as she spoke, “and it is to be commended.”

He made a scoffing sound. “None of it is to be commended,” he said. “It’s basic human decency, and even without the ability to feel much of anything, I can show it.”

“Many people would choose not to. Has anyone ever taken care of you?” she asked, meeting his gaze.

His answer came quickly, firmly. “You.”

“Oh.”

They continued to dance without speaking and she let her focus go entirely to the way his arms felt around her, the way his body felt. He felt that she had cared for him. And she hated the way that it made her chest feel like it was broken open. Hated how much it made her feel. How she would like to be free of this. This desperate yearning inside of her. Hadn’t she just purposed to try and embrace her attraction to him only to fulfill a fantasy? Well, perhaps it would work if he were simply a fantasy.

But the knowledge that she, and she alone, was where he had experienced care...

Little moments of their life shared passed through her mind, from that night they had sat together on his bed drinking coffee, to the times that she had left him notes on his birthday, quite apart from the vast gifts that he received from heads of state, just personal things. The way that he had done the same for her, at least after that first, disastrous birthday, where she had dressed in red and he hadn’t known. He had found out later. And why? He claimed he didn’t feel, but that was... It was feeling. It was caring.

He was a man with shields erected all around his heart. And she understood that. But she could also feel that same heart beating.

So she knew it was there.

Don’t do this to yourself.

You came to Paris for a reason. You came to get away from him.

But she found herself leaning into him. Found herself stretching up on her toes and kissing his mouth. All that mouth. It held so many of her most dearly cherished fantasies. He tightened his hold on her, angled his head, his tongue sweeping between her lips, sliding against hers.

Her heart was threatening to beat right out of her body. Her pulse thrumming at the base of her throat.

Matteo.

Oh, Matteo.

She didn’t say it out loud but his name filled her like a prayer, like a promise, echoing in the chambers of her heart, making it feel too large for her body.

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