Page 81 of Dearest Protector

He never mentioned that we’d had a previous encounter.

Nothing.

Not a single word.

Not even after we’d become close as friends.

I’d told himeverything.Every single painful detail of my life, including my childhood.

I’d thought that I knew Ben, when, in fact, I’d never really known him at all.

The Ben Blackwood I thought I knew never would have held back this kind of information from me.

God, I feel like a total idiot.

I’d even told him how badly I wanted to know the truth about that night, and hestillhadn’t told me.

The fact that he’d been present at my accident was a pretty big exclusion for two people who supposedly knew and cared about each other.

“Why didn’t you just tell me, Ben?” I asked tearfully. “Why did you have to lie? I thought we were close. I thought we told each other everything.”

“If you had known the truth, would you still have accepted that job as my assistant?” he asked tersely.

I thought about his question for a moment before I shook my head. “I don’t know. If I thought you were motivated by guilt, maybe not. Although, I was pretty desperate, so you may have still convinced me to give it a try. I guess we’ll never know.”

“It wasn’t justguilt, Ariel. I wanted to help you. I wanted to get to know you.”

I swiped the tears from my face angrily.

I had to wonder if he’d been disappointed once he’d realized that the dramatic ballerina he’d seen on stage was really just an illusion.

He’d been fascinated and momentarily infatuated with someone who had never really existed.

When I was dancing, it was a role. I was pretending to be someone else. For the most part, I actually lost myself when I was dancing. I took on the persona of someone else.

“Was any of this real, Ben?” I had to ask. “I’m not and never have been any of those characters I played on stage. Once the costume and makeup came off, I was just…me. If I caught your attention while I was on stage, you must have realized at some point that I wasn’t really that person at all.”

Maybe that was why I’d always loved dancing.

I could be someone else just for a little while.

My whole identity had been tied up in the ballerina back then because I’d never had one of my own.

My value as a person had always been dependent on my ability to dance and do it well.

When I’d lost that ability, I’d lost myself completely.

But I wasn’t lost anymore.

I finally knew who I was without ballet.

I had to know that everything we shared wasn’t about the woman on that stage that night.

“Do you honestly think that all I cared about was that woman on stage?” Ben asked huskily. “We all have false personas, Ariel. By now, you should know that I’m not the Ben Blackwood that people see in the media, either, or the guy who makes hard decisions and deals in a boardroom. The real me isn’t that billionaire tech mogul and CEO of one of the biggest corporations in the world. That’s just one part of who I am, but because it’s the most provocative, sometimes that’s all people see and the only part of me that anyone wants to know.”

God, I understood that. I really did.

But did I really know the real Ben Blackwood?

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