“I don’t hurt people who are innocent, Julia,” Devin snapped. “I don’t give anyone more than they can take.”
And that was the crux of it, the detail that would help me understand him perfectly, if I could only unpack it. I was sure of this, and yet I couldn’t make the pieces come together in my head. The only thing that was fitting for me was that this must be why he’d had that ridiculous extreme reaction to my virginity revelation. He felt like I’d manipulated him into doing something to me he wouldn’t have, if he’d known.
My disgust at that realisation made my first response an aggressive one. “Are you saying… I deserved to be kidnapped, somehow? To be scared like that? Is that something you did to me to make a point?”
“Why would you draw such a conclusion, Julia?” He was pacing in front of me, more discomfited than ever before, and I couldn’t feel pleased about it. Devin’s distress was the last thing I wanted right now. I wanted him to be calm, honest. On my team, the way he’d claimed we would be if we arranged to marry. “Did I not give you the respect of taking you on as an equal partner in this scheme as soon as I judged you were worthy of it? Perhaps you do not like my judging you at all… but if I gave you everything at once, with no filter, it would be worse for you. You should be honoured that I care enough to protect you—”
“Protect me, yes! Thank you,” I told him, “even though you haven’t always gotten that protection right. But what bothers me is not that you seem to want to protect me… it’s that you seem to want to do it by keeping me in the dark. If you really want us to ever be a team, you have to let me in sometimes. Not all the time maybe, but sometimes!”
“You’re asking a lot of someone who only met you a few days ago,” Devin started, but I wasn’t having any of that.
“You’re asking a lot of me to trust you when you’ve started out deceiving me like this. I’ll accept that some things, some omissions or evasions, might be for my own good in the short term, but not this. Not the whole reason I’m here in the first place. I need to know why you took on my parents’ debt, Devin… whether your plan all along was to make me marry you. And if so, you need to make me understand why if you want me to continue with this charade.”
I sank back onto the couch, suddenly exhausted, and to my surprise Devin crossed the floor and sat down next to me.
He took hold of my hand still wearing that stupid ring—it was a pretty damn gorgeous ring, as if I’d want to take it off—and squeezed it. “I had no plans to make the marriage offer long before I made it.”
“But you were planning to take on that debt so you had an excuse to take me.”
Devin shook his head, but he wasn’t rushing to give me an alternative understanding of the situation.
“Devin, this isn’t enough. I…” The thing was, I was on the edge of declaring it enough.
Not forever—I would have to get what I needed from him sooner or later. But with him here right now, knowing how it had felt to be about as close to him as anyone could be and then to have that snatched away for reasons I could not quite understand, I wanted to be softer about it. Try to leave open some chance that we could continue exploring this thing that was happening between us.
Exploring my possible future with a man who smashed kneecaps and took women from their beds. But maybe I had to be done with trying to make sense of it for the moment. Apparently I had been born into this life, the same as he had. We both had to learn to live with that.
“If you won’t be honest about that situation right now…” I was not going to give him any reason to believe I would accept that, but we could wave it aside for a moment. “Can you at least tell me whether I’m going crazy?”
“Excuse me?” He studied me with the look of someone rather inclined to reply in the affirmative.
“I didn’t just imagine it all, did I? There was something between us that got us to this point. That made you go, oh, maybe I could marry her. That made you decide to…” I was blushing, and he’d looked away, though he was still squeezing my hand as hard as if I was supposed to be supporting him in childbirth. “I’m more of a pathetic idiot around you than I’ve ever been with anyone else, but I’m not being a complete idiot, am I.”
Not looking at me, he shook his head. “I shouldn’t have allowed things to get to where they did.”
“But you wanted it.”
“It doesn’t matter what I wanted,” said Devin, which wasn’t a denial.
I let the tears that were starting to fill my eyes do whatever they wanted. It wasn’t like he needed my body to tell him I was frustrated. “Devin… you need to pay attention to this. I have to know more about this situation. What made you target my parents out of all the losers in debt in this world. If I can’t get my head in a place where I’m okay with you lying to me about this in the first instance… I don’t know if I can keep going with the wedding plan. With anything.”
Devin scrambled for my other hand then, his eyes wide as usual when he turned to me, but blazing. “Julia, you need to make sure you sign the documents. I had them updated, there’s no condition that you stick around to organise a wedding. So you can get paid even—”
“I don’t care about that money you promised me, Devin.”
I felt like shock started radiating through my body as I said it. Of course I cared about that damn money. What was I going to do otherwise, if I walked away from him now? The whole point of that money was to give me that choice.
Well, maybe when it came to men like Devin, there was no choice once you’d taken the money. Maybe there was no way to accept that allowance from him and still keep my dignity. My sanity. My heart.
Of course I’d set Devin off. “Don’t be stupid, Julia. You’ve more than earned that money already as far as I’m concerned. The necessary point has been made. You—”
“Which takes me back to the question that keeps you here, Devin. Why w
as that point so necessary to you?”
His eyes on me were intense, but I could tell they were the only answer I was going to get that night. I chewed on my own lip, in part to stifle the ongoing urge to give up on it for now. To just set it aside and kiss him—there was something in the way he was staring at me that told me he would allow it, even welcome it—
And that was a point I should care about. He was just handing over the bare minimum confession so he could wriggle out of telling me what I really needed to hear now. Was this how it would always be, trying to be with him? One deflection traded off for the next?