Once Upon a Marriage

His forehead lined, he nodded. “I was seeking permission to tell you the truth. The way I was feeling...the way it was between us... I feared that something was going to happen between us in spite of my attempts to keep things platonic.”

A trickle of warmth spread through her. A welcome respite to the cold. But not enough to begin a thaw. “You told her that?”

“Not in so many words, but she knew how badly I needed to be able to tell you.”

“And she refused.” It was a piece of the puzzle that she’d needed. As she tried to sort through everything. There were more.

“Yes.”

Did that mean it wasn’t until Vegas that he’d begun to feel the development between them? She gave herself a mental shake. There were bigger issues here. She just had to get everything in order and then see what she had.

She understood his job. She just didn’t...

“You seemed to imply last night that I put the job before you. I don’t. Your mother demanded that I stay away from you, and I married you instead. And the other night, it was... I was... Sometimes, for the safety of the client, it’s better to appear to be part of the party, not a bodyguard. I was working, Marie. Nothing more. It’s the first time I’ve had to pose as someone’s escort. And if I

can help it, it will be the last. I will never willingly accept such an assignment again.”

He knew her well. And in the moment, that made her angry. Because she didn’t know him that well. She’d laid herself at his feet for months, while he’d been holding back all but a very few personal details about himself.

Because he’d been working?

He’d just told her about a job that was none of her business. Put her before the job.

Marie stared at her toes. The polish she’d had applied that night in her mother’s hotel room looked almost as good as new. No chips. Funny...nail polish had seemed to have more resilience than she did.

They had enough bad energy coming at them from Liam’s stalker. Didn’t need it coming from the inside.

She’d worked that much out during the long hours she’d put in at the shop.

Which was partially why she’d let him in her door. And shared her salad with him. It was how she’d justified giving in to her incredible longing to see him.

“I took a job, Marie. Like every other day of my life. I get up. I go to work. So do you. You make coffee. I watch over people and do what I need to do to keep them safe from real or perceived harm.”

“I know.”

“How was I to know that when I met you, my whole life was going to change?”

He couldn’t have known.

“And you were in real danger. You still are. What kind of man would I be to walk away from that? Through sheer dumb providence I’d walked into the ‘in’ with Liam. A way to protect you without you knowing that your mother was having you protected.”

She nodded. “It’s not really the fact that you married me without telling me that bothers me, Elliott. At least, that’s not what bothers me the most. It’s that I didn’t know you were lying to me. How am I ever going to know? And knowing that I can’t trust myself to know...”

She broke off.

He leaned toward her as he said, “I love you. Everything I did was to protect you. Not to deceive you. Trust me to help you with this, at least?”

She loved him. So much. “What about you, Elliott? Are you going to tell me that when Liam called to tell you I’d seen that picture of you on the news Saturday night you didn’t die a thousand deaths? Because you knew you couldn’t count on your wife to trust you?”

Elliott’s silence told her all she had to know.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

ELLIOTT COULDN’T JUST stand there forever, raw, with his life a puddle at her feet. He’d trusted her heart to hear him. And she wasn’t saying a word. “If I hadn’t understood your issues regarding the trustworthiness of the men in your life, I would have told you who I was before I married you. By the time I knew you were far more than a job to me, I knew about your mistrust of my species. I was between a rock and a hard place. In the end, what it came down to was that if I told you, I lost you for sure. If I didn’t, we had a chance at making it. That was the gamble I took. From my perspective, I didn’t have a sure thing to bet on. So I took the choice that gave us the best chance at happiness. Your mother and I were the only two people who knew that I’d worked for her. I figured, at the time, which was when we were in Vegas, that the chance of you ever finding out, of being hurt, were minimal. Neither your mother nor I would ever hurt you that way. It wasn’t until after we were married, and back home, that I couldn’t live with myself, knowing there was a lie between us. I didn’t have to tell you, Marie. I chose to. Because I understand your issues. I took them on. And I trust you to be accountable to them.”

Starting right then. She needed to see that this was just her issue cropping up and let him come home.

Except that it wasn’t just her issue. It was his, as well. He needed things, too. Like the security of knowing he wasn’t going to come home some night to find the locks changed on his doors for some perceived wrong.