“I said that I didn’t want to know anything more, not that it didn’t interest me. Two very different things.”
“Either way,” I bite out, reining in my temper, “you chose ignorance. That’s your prerogative, of course, and I was going to do just that. Lay off and let it be—begrudgingly, I might add, because it was obvious that something was brewing and knowing less is like throwing a white flag in the air and begging to be caught before the war’s even begun.”
“Brilliant visual, Isla,” comes his dry reply, “really.”
Stubborn.
Infuriating.
Man.
“Father Bootham tipped me off today. His and Peter’s stories lined up, even though they’ve clearly never met before.” Lifting my chin, I continue, “You might believe that knowing less is better, but I was always taught to gather the facts, then assess the situation when you have it all laid out before you. It’s what I did as a publicist. It’s what I did on the network, when they allowed me to actually do my job. And it’s what I had to do here, too, to make sure you wouldn’t be utterly blindsided.”
I step forward, only for my wet boot to squeak loudly against the floor. Following the source of the noise, Saxon’s attention drops south. He pauses, hands flexing at his sides, and cocks his head. Something in his expression . . . God, there’s a rawness there that I’ve never seen before, not from him. It’s not vulnerability, I don’t think. Not affection either. Like every other aspect of Saxon Priest’s icy exterior, it’s impossible to put my finger on it and yet I feel that look anyhow.
Slow heat thaws the perpetual chill in my bones when I say, “You should be thanking me, you know.”
“Is that so?”
His voice is deep, guttural, and matched with another deliberate perusal that starts at my feet and meanders its way up my thighs to the nip of my waist, and then, finally, to the delicate slope of my neck. I stave off a shudder. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the man—the professor—that I-I—”
Saxon’s gaze collides with mine. “Say it.”
Heat of another kind kindles in my chest. Remorse. Shame. Disgust. “No.”
“This is why you first showed up to The Bell & Hand, isn’t it?” Slowly, he stalks toward me. One foot in front of the other, the soles of his shoes echoing in the quiet of the room. A predator on the hunt. My heart skips a beat, timed with his heavy step. “That first day you told me that you had a proposition for me. One that I couldn’t refuse.”
Unease coils in my belly, and I stumble back. “This isn’t—what happened today wasn’t . . . isn’t what I wanted—”
“Except that I saw you.”
With my heart in my throat, my stare leaps to his. “What?”
“Today,” he says, coming closer still, severing the distance between us with each long-legged stride that intimidates as successfully as it entices me to watch him and never look away, “I saw you, the real you.”
“I-I don’t understand.”
“It means that I underestimated you, Isla Quinn. When I had you slung over my shoulder, I underestimated you. When I had you cornered in the confessional, and you held your blade to my neck”—a dark smile curls his scarred mouth—“I never thought that you would actually slit my throat. I underestimated you then, too.”
“You didn’t. Not at all.”
He speaks over me, as though I haven’t said a word. “When we met, you said that you had something that I couldn’t refuse. It’s my own fault for not realizing you’d been offering yourself.”
In this moment, I despise him just as much as I hate myself. Silly, foolish me had honestly thought I could work for Saxon as a pay-for-hire. I’d killed once, hadn’t I? What stopped me from doing so again?
But now—but now—it’s so clear that I was absolutely delusional. My hand throbs from the knife fight and my heart hurts from taking another life, no matter that Coney tried to take mine first. In two months, I’ve not even managed to overcome the night terrors of what I did to King John. I toss and turn; I slip from bed and stare out the window for hours, as though expecting the king’s ghost to appear on my front stoop.
I’m being haunted, and hunted, and whatever I thought myself capable of just last week is clearly a moot point buried so far deep it’ll never resurface.
Saxon never underestimated me. Because, beneath all my bravado, I’ve never catered to the darkness lurking within. Until today.
I swallow, roughly. “I’m not a . . . I’m not a—”
“Say the word.”
Killer. Monster.
“I can’t,” I whisper, inching backward. Because then it’s true. Because then it’s real. Because then where do I go from here, knowing that I’m wholly irredeemable? “Saxon, I can’t.”
“Then I’ll say it for you,” he grits out, backing me against the wall. His hands land on either side of my head, blockading me in, and hell. His damp chest rubs against my breasts and his muscular thigh slips between my legs, trapping me in place. For a man who radiates a chill factor rivaling the Arctic, his skin is so hot I’m convinced that I might go up in flames.
“Murderer.” The word is uttered roughly next to my ear, for me and for me alone, even though there’s not another soul in this abandoned building. “It makes you ruthless. It makes you broken.”
I battle back a ferocious cry. “Wrong. It makes me strong.”
“Strong,” he murmurs, as though tasting the word on his tongue and finding it unpalatable. “Strong is strangling a man like you did today and finding no remorse, no part of your soul that feels fractured or missing for doing what had to be done. Strong is what you tell yourself when you’re fighting your own conscience.”
“Then that’s your definition, not mine.” When his nose grazes the shell of my ear, sensation erupts along my spine. Gooseflesh. Heat. Need. My hips curl out of their own volition, seeking his hardness. No! I freeze, immediately. Focus, Isla. Focus! “Obviously, we’re nothing alike.”
“And yet, just yesterday you said that we could be friends.” His hand drifts down, never touching my body. But oh, he comes close, so close, to the swell of my breasts, to the flare of my hips, until his fingers land on the wall beside mine.
“You turned me down,” I say, my brain threatening to short-circuit.
“So I did.” Blunt fingers circle my wrist and drag my hand up, pinning it above my head. The position forces me onto my toes, putting me at the disadvantage. He towers over me, surrounds me, until I see nothing of the shop beyond the broad stretch of his shoulders. Wide-eyed, my gaze flies to his, just as he murmurs, “Guy was right about me, you know. I don’t do pets; I don’t do friends.”
My fingers wriggle in his grip, but I’m not exactly pulling away. Because you want it. The heat. The tension. The taste of fear from the unknown. I swallow the truth, keeping it buried. “I don’t imagine your charming personality keeps people around long enough to find out if they’d want the same of you.”
His thumb presses on my inner wrist, as if testing the pace of my pulse. Fast. It’s pounding so, so fast, a fact that Saxon must know because his eyes gleam. “Ask me why, Isla. Ask me why I don’t want you as a friend, as a pet.”