Chapter 29 #2
“Oh my God.” I took a breath. “Do you think this is amusing?”
“How mad would you be if I said yes?”
My nostrils flared.
“Very mad, I see. I can’t help it.” A full smile appeared. “You’re…adorable when you’re mad.”
“Adorable?” I stomped my foot.
“See. Just there. It’s cute.”
“I am going to physically harm you.”
“Versus mentally?” he queried.
The fact that he was teasing me, that he wasn’t taking this seriously at all, infuriated me even more.
“You had no right to do what you did.” I took a step toward him.
“Do you know I spent the last hour or so listening to Ivy and Ren and Faye talk to me as if I’ve never held an iron dagger before?
Do you know that if this gets back to Miles, I could be removed from the Order? ”
His gaze sharpened. “Ivy nor Ren would inform on you.”
He was right. Ivy would never do that. At least, I hoped not. “That doesn’t mean someone like Tanner or Kalen or Faye won’t say something to someone that eventually gets back to Miles,” I pointed out. “What you did was wrong.”
The King pushed off the wall, unfolding his arms. The shirt parted, attempting to distract me. “You left me no choice. You would not stop. I thought maybe they could talk some sense into you.”
“Guess what? They didn’t.” I smirked when his jaw tightened.
“And I’m going to repeat this for, hopefully, the last time.
You do not get to tell me what I can and cannot do.
Even if you and I were a thing, which we’re not, you still would not get to tell me what to do. I don’t know who you think you are—”
“The King?” he suggested.
“—but you have no say over what I do. Stay out of my way and out of my life,” I told him. “I mean it. There is no reason for you to interfere.”
The King looked away, a muscle thrumming in his temple.
Having said my piece, I started toward the door.
“Has it ever occurred to you that I am trying to protect you? That I’m trying to keep you safe?”
Slowly, I turned to him. “No. It hasn’t. For a multitude of obvious reasons. And besides that, I don’t need you to keep me safe or to protect me.”
“Everyone needs someone to protect them.” He tipped back his head, his eyes closing.
“Even you?” I scoffed.
“Even me.”
My brow smoothed out. I’d seen what he was capable of, so the fact that he’d admitted that was rather shocking.
“I do not want to see harm come to you.” His voice was quiet. “I do not have to be with you to want that.”
I flushed to the roots of my hair. “I know that.”
“Then why are you being so difficult about this?” he asked.
“Because…” I toyed with the strap of my purse. “Because I need to do this. I can’t sit by, not when Aric is still alive. You have to understand that.”
The King was quiet for several moments, and then he looked at me. “If you knew that someone you…you looked fondly upon was doing something that would surely lead to their demise, would you not try to stop them?”
“Are you saying you look fondly upon me, King?”
His head tilted, and then he looked away.
I laughed, but the sound lacked any real humor. “Yeah, okay. But to answer your question, I wouldn’t stop you, even if I knew it was dangerous.”
The King’s gaze cut back to mine. “But you’d still look fondly upon me.”
I gave him a tight-lipped smile. “No. Because it would get you out of my hair.”
“Now, Brighton, you and I both know that’s a lie.” His chin dipped. “If something were to happen to me, you’d be devastated.”
I didn’t even want to think about that. I didn’t want to acknowledge how thinking about that made me feel and what it meant. “You value yourself a little too highly.”
“And you don’t value your life enough.”
My hand tightened around my purse strap. “I value my life. And I don’t think of myself poorly.” I took a step toward him. “Aric and those fae took more than just my mom that night.” Something in my chest cracked open as I spoke. “They took…”
“What did they take?”
I bit my lip. “They took my feeling of security, my belief that I could protect myself and my mom—that I was capable of taking care of her. They took my purpose.”
“Your purpose?” He faced me fully.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I shook my head.
I was not getting into this with him. “I’ve said what I needed to say.
You don’t have to like that I’m out there, but you can’t stop me.
If it ends with me getting myself killed, then so be it.
And I don’t say that because I don’t value my life.
I say that because at least I would die taking back what they stole from me. ”
“I can… I can respect that,” he said, his gaze meeting mine. His eyes were pools of golden fire. “But I won’t.”
For a second, I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “You won’t?”
He shook his head as he approached me. “I will watch you. I will have others watching you. Every time you step foot on that street in some silly disguise or near any location where Neal has been sighted, I will intervene.”
My lips parted as disbelief swirled through me.
“I will become your shadow, always present. That is what I’ll do.”
“You…you are…”
“Determined to keep you alive? Yes.”
“You are out of your mind!” I didn’t stop to think. I cocked back my arm and swung my fist—
He caught my wrist with shocking speed. “See how easy that was? I didn’t even blink.”
Fury erupted in me like a volcano. I swung my purse around like a bat toward his big, egotistical head—
It never made contact.
The purse flew off my arm and from my grip as if an invisible hand had grasped it.
“And now?” he asked, his grip on my arm firm but not painful.
I twisted, angling my body to his as I jerked up my knee, aiming for his groin.
The King shifted, using his thigh to block my strike. The impact caused him to grunt. “And how about now? What else are you going to do?” He flipped me so my back was to his front. An arm clamped around my waist, yanking me back against him.
The heat of his skin seeped through the thin material of my blouse, scorching my flesh as his other hand curved around the underside of my jaw.
He forced my head back against his chest, causing my back to arch as I met his gaze.
“Do you know how easy it would be for me to snap your neck? Just like that?” His thumb slipped over my thrumming pulse.
I reached both arms up, one hand fisting the soft strands of his hair.
“Are you going to pull my hair, sunshine? Is that your—?”
The soft click of my blade sliding out of the cuff silenced him. His eyes widened slightly.
I kept the edge of the blade a scant centimeter from pressing into his jugular as I smiled at him. “What are you going to do, King? I can’t decapitate you from this angle, but I can make a hell of a mess out of your throat.”
His eyes flared with heat as he stared down at me. I felt his chest rise and fall against my back. I saw his gaze move to where my breasts were straining against the delicate strip of buttons along the front of my blouse.
It happened so fast.
One second, we were fighting. The next moment, it all changed.
I didn’t protest as he lowered his mouth to mine, utterly unfazed by the iron at his throat.
I didn’t say a word or pull away. Anger and frustration crashed into something far stronger, something rawer, and the moment his lips touched mine, I was lost.
He was no longer the King.
He was Caden.