Page 68 of Seduced By the Enemy

The pain was instant, right in the side of his head. He felt as though he’d been thumped. It was just a response to her hurt, a physical reaction to the way her words cut through him.

“If that’s what it took, yes.”

She stared at him with a look of absolute shock, then held her hand up, palm outwards, in the universal gesture of stop. Silence fell. He sat still, and he waited.

“Are you trying to tell me you were lying? That you did that out of a misguided belief it was best for me?”

He tightened his jaw. Hearing it from her, he recognized how stupid it sounded. Of course, she was missing a vital piece of information. He’d gone to her brothers to win them over, and had gone away with only one possible path to win Emilia her family back. To fix what he’d ruined, by falling in love with the wrong person.

“I just wanted to fix it,” he muttered, lifting his undamaged hand to drag through his hair.

“But you didn’t,” she said, with disbelief. “You broke it. You broke me. You broke us.”

That was so final. So devastatingly absolute. “I didn’t want you to wake up one day and resent me. To realise you’d made a mistake.”

“Bullshit,” she said, tearing her hand through the air. “You just panicked. You’re so scared of hurting someone that you go through life acting like some big, alpha male protector, and you took away all my agency.Ichose you. Ichoseyou, and that was my right. I knew what I was doing. I knew what I was losing. And I accepted that, because I got to live my life with you. The man I loved. The man I chose to be with. How dare you take that away? How dare you override my decision?”

“I know. I know. I fucking know. Don’t you think I see that? Don’t you think I’ve regretted that every minute since I left? But I thought you were okay. I thought you were okay. Better than okay, I thought you were fine. I thought…I really thought it was only me that was suffering.”

She turned her face away then, sucking in a deep breath. In profile, she looked so utterly wounded. So disbelieving.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Please don’t apologise.” She turned back to look at him, her jaw shifting as she glared him down. “Why did you think I was ‘okay, better than fine’?”

Damn these pain killers. He would never have usually made such a stupid mistake. Not with someone as intelligent as Emilia.

“Because I wasn’t okay, but you sounded so confident…”

“I just presumed…”

“If you lie to me,” she said, holding up a finger in the universal gesture of warning. “I will walk out that door so fucking fast you will never catch me.”

The world tilted. He felt desperate—more desperate than he’d known he was capable of feeling.

“I asked about you,” he said, a little hesitantly. He was still trying to work out how he could get through to Emilia without sabotaging her relationship with her family.

“You asked who?”

“Your brother.”

“Max?”

“Leandro.” To hell with it. He had to be honest. Emilia was right. It was her life, her family, and she had agency. She could do what she wanted with all the information. He wasn’t going to hold anything back. “I went to see him, that day,” he muttered, holding his hand out, wanting her to take it. But she didn’t. She stayed where she was, resolute, and his whole body throbbed with a soul deep need to fix everything. Not with her family, but with them. At one point, they’d been a team, unified against their problems. He’d split them up, and it had been completely wrong. He would never make that mistake again, if he could be lucky enough to get her back. That felt like an incredibly long way away, but he didn’t care. If it took years, he’d keep trying.

“I went to him, that afternoon,” he said, slowly. His throat hurt like the devil, but he wouldn’t stop talking.

“Which afternoon?”

He didn’t need to answer. He saw the moment she realized.

“The day you came home and said you didn’t love me?”

Shame curdled in his gut. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“To try to explain. To convince them to give us a try.”

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