Sucking in a breath, he asked a question that shocked her. “Are you seeing anyone?”
“A man? No!”
Aleksy’s chuckle rasped her nerves. “Why do you say it like that?”
“Because—” Clair’s heart clenched. She felt her eyebrows pull together in a pained frown and turned to the windowsill to hide it, tracing some long ago child’s initials carved into the wood. She couldn’t find her voice to continue.
“You told me that’s what you wanted.” He sounded confused.
“I did. I do! I’m just not ready yet.” She wasn’t over him yet.
He didn’t say anything. She found the courage to glance back at him and found him eating her alive with his eyes, a tortured expression on his face.
He still desired her. It made her insides quiver with yearning. She felt the same way. Pulled.
“Aleksy, don’t,” she pleaded softly, increasing his agitation.
“I know, I know. Not with me.” He grimaced.
The bottom dropped out of Clair’s world. She wasn’t sure if she understood. “Aleksy,” she said haltingly, his name like honey on her tongue, “I thought you understood… Oh, I wish I could make you believe that you’re as entitled to happiness as anyone. Why do you have to say that? ‘Not with me.’”
“You said that,” he countered harshly.
“When?” But even as she said it, she remembered and closed her eyes.
“That last day in the kitchen,” he growled. “You went off about how I should subscribe to the Happy Ever After channel, but not with me.”
“Why on earth would I say with me when I’d just gotten off the phone with Lazlo and knew you were already sending me away?” she cried, aghast at how her voice cracked, revealing the stunning pain that still reverberated through her when she recalled it. “You didn’t even want me as a mistress anymore.”
She clenched her teeth, throat scraped raw as she thought of how she’d laid it on the table as plain as she’d been able. He’d stared at her with that same impenetrable stoniness he turned on her now.
“You spoke to Lazlo that morning?”
She jerked her shoulder. “He called me. To tell me that you were downplaying our relationship in the press,” she added in a charge. “Not even wanting to acknowledge we ever had anything between us—” She kneaded the place between her eyebrows, making her eyes sting.
“Clair, I was doing everything I could think of to protect you. Giving you an easy way out. You know what my life was like then.”
“No, actually, I don’t,” she railed, lifting her glossy eyes to him, vision too blurred to see the way his expression contracted with pain. “You barely told me anything. Never looked to me for comfort or… You hardly looked at me at all!” She snatched up a tissue with a shaking hand, mortified she was falling apart like this. “Not that we had that sort of relationship,” she reminded herself. “But I would have listened. I was trying to be there—”
“You were.” He was suddenly close, far too close, big warm hands covering hers as she tried to dab at her eyes. “You have no idea what it meant to me that you were there. The only bright spot I had. Don’t cry. Don’t let me make you cry. I can’t bear it.”
She was shaking even worse, swimming in the scent of his aftershave. His heat and strength reached out to her, making her want to sway into him and hold on tight.
She swallowed, trying to brush away the solicitous hands wiping the tears off her cheeks. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” He cradled her damp cheeks in his firm palms, making her entire body tremble. “Don’t try to protect you from every possible thing that could hurt you, including myself?”
“Is that why you sent me back to London?” she asked, stretching to understand what had seemed impossibly cruel and was far beyond what she could accept as reality.
“You wanted to go, Clair. I’d already forced you into an affair you didn’t want. I couldn’t keep you when you said you wanted to go.”
“You didn’t force me.”
“Don’t say that.” He dropped his hands and took a step back. “I showed all the finesse of a Neanderthal, conking you in your tender heart for this place, threatening your reputation, practically throwing you over my shoulder to carry you to my cave.”
“You really are your own worst critic. I know how to dial the police if I need them. I wouldn’t have gone with you if I didn’t want to.”
“You really are naive,” he countered with a feral glint in his eyes that made her pulse skip. The way he sobered and watched her so closely made her heart beat even faster. “Did you want to go when you left Russia?”