One Reckless Decision

“Of course I have,” she said, too shocked to be careful. “Just as I wonder what the world would be like if Santa Claus were real, or if all manner of magical creatures walked among us.”

He did not take the bait. His inky dark brows rose, daring her, and she felt herself flush. Then, unaccountably, an edgy kind of anger swept through her, cramping her belly and making her pulse pound.

“I am not going to play games with you, Leo,” she said stiffly, a sudden, terrific storm swirling inside of her, clouds and panic and thunder. She shot to her feet and found her hands in tight fists at her sides. “I am not going to have fairy tale conversations with you, or salt the wounds with discussions of ‘what if.’”

“Coward.”

It was such a little word, said so softly, almost kindly—yet it set Bethany ablaze. She felt the kick of her temper like a wildfire and clamped down on it desperately. She would not implode. She would not give him the satisfaction of making her do so. She would not crack, not now, not after she had worked so hard to remain calm and cool around him. She only glared at him mutinously.

“You are a coward,” he repeated with a gleam in his eyes that she could not mistake for anything save what it was: satisfaction. That he was getting to her. That he could poke at her. He was not the only one with the ability to read things he should not be able to see. “You have complained at length that I did this thing to you, that I insisted upon it—but, when I ask you to imagine what it might be like if I did not, you lose your temper. You cannot even have the conversation. What are you afraid of?”

“I do not see the point of hypothetical discussions,” she said as icily as she could.

She recognized on some dim level that she wanted to scream. To let everything out in a rush, like a tidal wave. But why should she feel this way? Surely there were any number of things that he’d already said to her that were far, far worse than this game he suddenly wanted to play.

“Then by all means let us not dwell in hypotheticals,” he said smoothly—almost, she thought with sudden suspicion, as if he had planned this. He opened up his hands and spread them wide, as if between them he held all the world. “Consider yourself out of the box, Bethany. What happens now?”

She knew then, with shattering insight, why her reaction was this unwieldy surge of rage, this piping-hot furnace of anger—it covered up the dangerous longing beneath. The quicksand of her long-lost dreams, her once-upon-a-time, naïve wishes, the epic and impossible hopes she’d pinned on this frustrating man. Her prince.

For a long moment she felt suspended in his knowing gaze, lost in it, as if he was truly offering her the things she was afraid to admit she still wanted.

Wanted once, she amended quickly, but no more. I want nothing from him any longer—this is only a memory. Just a game. It’s not real.

It could not be real. What she felt as she stared at him was an echo, surely? Nothing more.

“Why would you want to do this?” she heard herself ask as if from afar. As if someone else had said it.

The drawing room, with its scarlets and golds, its exquisitely crafted furniture and graceful wall-hangings, disappeared. She could not feel the floor beneath her bare feet. She could not see anything but his fierce, focused gaze. There was only Leo and the vast sea of things she wanted from him that she could never, ever have.

“Why not?” he asked in the same tone, as if they stood together, yet still not touching, on the edge of a vast precipice and below them was nothing but darkness and turmoil. “What is left for us to lose?”

Bethany understood in that moment that she was every bit the coward that he had called her, and it galled her. Deeply. She felt her temper dissipate as if it had never been, leaving her slightly nauseated in its aftermath. But she took a deep breath, blinked away the sheen of anger and panicked temper in her eyes and confronted the facts. They were steadying, somehow, for all she would have preferred to ignore them.

There was truly nothing left to lose here, just as he’d said. So why was she so determined to protect herself? Why did she imagine her girlish, silly fantasies about who they could have been would matter once these strange in-between days were finished? Why did she act as if it would kill her to let him know how much she had once wanted him, and how desperately?

None of this had killed her yet, after all, and she had spent long nights wishing it would, hoping it would, so she would no longer have to live like such a broken, ruined thing. So she would not have to face herself and figure out how to survive him. The likelihood was that she would live through this, however unpleasant the process might be. And if that was the case why should she keep up the fruitless pretenses that had never protected her from him in the first place?