Strong Enough(45)

I interrupt her. “Your father knows that he needs to get me some information and that he needs to do it fast. He knows that as long as I have you, he’s under no threat from me. I have no reason to hurt him because he has every reason to comply. You are his reason to get me what I need.”

“So I’m like insurance?”

I seesaw my head. “Sort of, if that’s how you want to look at it.”

“You keep me until he delivers?”

“Yes.”

Her brows knit together. “Why would he keep that from me? Why wouldn’t he just tell me? He has to know that I’d go along with it if it meant keeping him out of danger, out of trouble. I mean, hell, I left South Carolina and moved across the country to keep him safe.”

“At least that’s what he wanted you to think,” I add. I probably shouldn’t get involved in their arrangements, but she might as well know that he did it all for her.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Think about it. Is the Colonel really the type to let his daughter uproot her entire life and move away from him just to keep him safe?”

She pauses to think. “I knew it didn’t really seem like him, like something he’d do, but . . .”

“But you trust him. I get it. And that’s good. He’d never do anything to hurt you, so your trust isn’t misplaced.”

“No, but he obviously thinks nothing of lying to protect me.” There’s an angry set to her jaw, an aggravated angle to the tilt of her chin.

“People do that for the ones they love.”

As she looks at me with those big, exotic eyes, I see the anger fade into a curious sadness and I know before she speaks that she’s turning her attention back to me. I admire that she’s always ready to throw herself so completely into the life and trust of another person. It’s inadvisable as hell, but I love the haphazardness with which she lives. It’s the absolute antithesis of everything about my life.

“Like you did for your mother.”

Leave it to Muse to go there, to take what I’ve told her and paint me as some sort of martyr. But she’s wrong and I can’t let her think otherwise.

I meet her eyes, baring all the coldness my soul possesses for her to see, driving home my point before I even open my mouth. “Don’t mistake me for a good guy, Muse. My motives were purely selfish. I didn’t want the pain of my mother’s disgust. I didn’t want the heartache of her being captured or tortured because of me. Letting her believe me to be dead was anything but a selfless act.”

“Maybe those were the main reasons, but still, you loved her enough to spare her that pain, too. Has it ever occurred to you that you might be selling yourself short, Jasper?”

“No, it hasn’t,” I reply, deadpan. “If I stand in a room full of people anywhere in the world, I know who the monster is.”

She tips her head to one side to consider me, a sweetly pained expression on her face. I recognize it for what it is. And I hate seeing it.

Pity.

“Is that what you think? That you’re a monster?” I don’t answer her. I hold my tongue, gritting my teeth against all the uncharacteristic emotions swirling through me right now. Anger, disbelief, bitterness. Hope. Cruel desire. “Let me tell you something, Jasper,” she says, dropping the sheet and moving to straddle me.

Despite the fact that I just slaked my hunger for her, despite the fact that I hate this subject and my obvious weakness in telling her so much about myself, I feel my cock stir instantly to life, rising toward her warm moisture.

She does things to me, things no other person has ever done. She makes me feel . . . Hell, I don’t know. She just makes me feel. And that’s dangerous. For both of us. But will it stop me? No. Because I’m a cold, calculating man who puts feeling and consideration aside for what must be done. It’s who I have to be in order to be able to do what I have to do. So whether she believes it or not, I am the monster.

“You’re a foolish woman if you believe otherwise,” I bite, holding on to my anger like a kid refusing to give up his candy. After so long of never letting emotion in, letting some of my fury take hold is darkly invigorating.

“Maybe I am, but monsters don’t love, Jasper. And whether you see it that way or not, you love your mother. You love her enough to never see her again just to spare her pain and suffering.”

“My father loved her, too, but he made her more miserable than anyone on the planet. It is possible to love someone so much that it hurts them. Or love them and still hurt them.”

“I’m sure it probably is, but that’s not what you do. I can’t believe that.”