“I expect,” he said, not bothering to disguise the edge in his voice.
“Mak …”
He let out a breath. “Traditionally, I’m not the one who answers questions. I ask them. My clients don’t need to know me. I need to know them.”
“And according to you, you can know someone from a file. Do you still think that’s true?”
Spoiled. Scandalous. Shallow. He looked at Eva as the descriptions he’d read of her flooded his brain. “No.” She was none of those things. Well, she was a fit of two of them, but it only added to her charm.
“Then maybe your methods need shaking up. Anyway, I thought we were through pretending I was only a client?”
He looked at her dark, luminous eyes, the dull flush of rose staining her autumn-gold skin. “Then ask away.”
“Would you do it again? Would you marry her again if you could go back and do it all over?”
The question that plagued him. Not because the answer unsettled him, but because the possibility was a joke. It wasn’t possible. There was no change to undo a rash decision. No way to stop and turn onto a different road. No way to swerve out of the way of the oncoming car. To avoid one man’s brief loss of control.
No way to atone for his own.
“No,” he said, the word biting into his throat.
“No?”
“If I could go back, if I had a way of knowing what would happen, I never would have married her. I would never have taken that chance with her life.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
He knew that. But sometimes the weight of the past decade was so crushing he felt as though he would give anything to go back and undo it.
“There was no planning. It was impulsive. Foolish. I gambled with life, but it wasn’t mine that I lost.”
“You aren’t a gambling man, Makhail. I’ll bet the only time you ever set foot in a casino was to drag me out of it.”
He looked at her, at her sweet, caring smile. So much emotion. So much more than he could ever hope to give back. “Perhaps it wasn’t gambling. But I led with my heart, not my head. I’ll never do it again.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
EVA couldn’t sleep. After Mak’s revelations in the cable car today, her mind was too filled with thoughts of him. Of what he’d suffered. And not only that, all the things he’d endured, only to come out the other side a man so strong it seemed there was no force on earth that could break him.
She slid open the door that led out to the terrace just outside her room. She flipped a switch and fired up the large, freestanding heaters placed at intervals along the length of the terrace. They brought heat, cast shimmering waves of it that floated across her field of vision, distorting the stars, shining brightly in the deep blue of the sky.
She was used to hearing the crashing of the waves, used to thick, salt-laden air that clung to her throat when she breathed in. Here, it was pure silence, the air thin and cold, drying.
She folded her arms across her chest and looked out at the black expanse of trees.
“What are you doing?”
She turned and saw Mak, standing in the doorway. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. It was honest, anyway. “So you decided to go outside at night. In this kind of cold?”
“The heaters make it bearable. What are you doing in my room?” She secretly hoped he’d come for her. That he would cross the terrace in an easy stride and pull her into his arms. That he would bring her in from the cold and blanket her in his heat.
“I heard noise, so I thought I should check. I am here to protect you, after all.”
“Valiant of you.” The still night air swallowed her words, made them seem muted.
“Don’t assign adjectives to me that I don’t deserve,” he said, his voice rough. “You imagine me to be some sort of white knight, but I assure you, I’m as far from that as they come.”
“So you say,” she said. “And yet … and yet you cared for Marina. And you won’t touch me. You want to, I know you do. But you won’t.” Her words hung between them, made her feel naked.
He took a step toward her and the moon illuminated his face, revealed the feral glow in his eyes. “But, Eva, I have touched you. Or have you forgotten so easily?”