Chapter 44 #3
She released a sigh. Sky-blue eyes moved toward him, assessing. “You saved my life.”
David wouldn’t call it that. He’d sat there while other people saved her. Zero, however, was the amount of energy he possessed to argue with her.
She inhaled a painfully slow breath. “Thank you.”
He swallowed.
“Someone—someone tried to murder me today, David.” She gazed around her, lost.
“We’ll find him. He won’t get away with it.”
“I don’t understand why. The man who did it acted like he knew something. Something I don’t know.”
“We’ll keep searching,” he said, annoyed by the roughness of his voice. “We can figure out who your mother is.”
Her gaze returned to him and her head cocked. “We?”
David pressed his back into the wall. “I’d like to help. I know you don’t believe me, but I do care about you, Anna.”
She stared, unflinching, while shards of that same broken pain he’d sensed the day he ended their tryst sliced at him. “Yeah?” she asked. “Did you care when you broke my heart beyond repair?”
His gaze dropped to the floor.
“Did you know how I felt about you?”
The golden grain of the wood called his undivided attention. “Yes.”
Her small gasp struck an agonized chord in his chest. “Is that why you ended it? Because I was moving too fast?”
He opened his mouth, but neither truth nor lie emerged. This woman was the only person who had ever rendered him speechless.
“Did you know what my magic would do to me?” she asked in his stillness.
His throat grew thick. “I—I’d hoped it wouldn’t.”
Silence stretched, but she eventually filled it with a strange question. “Did you mean it earlier when you said you wanted to take my pain away?”
A trace of suspicion drifted through his mind. “I would,” he said, daring to glance at her, “if I could.”
“I think you can,” she said. “With your magic.”
The fickle organ in his chest doubled its pace as he put together what she meant. “You—you want—” He laughed, incredulous.
“I want you to take it away.” Anna pressed her palm flat to her chest, and he had to force himself not to look at all the drying blood.
“Those wounds in my stomach didn’t hurt half as much as what Morgan’s magic has done to my heart.
It feels like there’s a knife in my chest that saws my insides every time I move. ”
A prickling ache woke in his skin. “I didn’t want that for you. I just thought—a clean break…”
She clasped her hands tight and stared at them.
“I shouldn’t have fallen in love with you.
I picked the wrong person, and I hate that I have to come to you for this, but I’m desperate and you’re the only one who can help.
I can’t live with pain like this, David.
I’m putting my pride aside to ask you to take it away. ”
A rabid animal clawed at his ice. “Anna—”
“I have done nothing but help you since the moment you walked into this place. You owe it to me to take this pain away. This pain you caused.”
“I can’t—I can’t take away feelings,” he said. “You know that.”
“You can try. You can make me forget.”
“Forget?” David stared into her face—guileless, pleading—and the realization of what she wanted crashed over him. “You—you want me to take your memories?”
Shattered blue eyes stared up at him. “I can’t live like this. If I can’t remember falling in love with you, I won’t care that you—you don’t want me.”
“Don’t…want you?” He wasn’t sure why he was surprised. What other conclusion should she have drawn from such vague phrases as We don’t make sense and It doesn’t work? He’d tried to convince her it was all just physical. Of course she’d think he didn’t want her.
She ignored his confusion. “I would rip this love out of me if I could, but I can’t. You can.”
David pulled a breath in. It did little to stem the rapidly rising panic behind his ice, the animal howling at him to stop, to not do this. She wanted him to remove every good memory of him from her mind. She wanted to erase their entire relationship.
He swallowed, but his throat ached with pressure. It was only fair, right? He’d led her on, taken her virginity, then fallen victim to a woman who would forever come between them. He should be the one to suffer, not her.
“People know we were together,” he said. “They’ll remind you.”
“So make it like we were together,” she said, “but I never loved you.”
David laughed in disbelief, a bare puff of air as he dragged his hand through his hair. “You’re a pixie, Anna.”
“I don’t care!” she snapped, rising to her knees on the cot. “You will do this, David! You will fix what you broke. I didn’t deserve this, and deep down, I know you are not a cruel person.”
His heart squeezed, trying to hold onto something it hadn’t been prepared to set free. For a brief moment, he considered telling her the truth. Maybe she would understand.
I am in love with Isobel. She’s ruining my life. She’s taking everything from me. I would keep you if I could.
The words were at the tip of his tongue. He opened his mouth.
“You are the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she said before he could explain it. “You have the power to make that go away. If you really cared about me, you’d take it away.”
He froze. His words faltered as that perfect sky blue begged him for mercy. Telling her wouldn’t take her pain. It wouldn’t steal the chains to Isobel from his soul. It would only complicate things.
Maybe this was the simplest solution.
His gaze dropped to her bloody shirt. “Okay. Yeah. Whatever you want.”