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rubbed between her brows with two fingers, like tension sat there.
“I knew I’d have to tell you,” she mumbled in a disheartened tone. “I was putting it off because I know what you’re going to say, and…” She dropped her hand and said firmly, “I don’t want to marry you.”
In his lifetime, there were a handful of words that had gone through him like bullets. Trella’s been taken. Your father is gone. Now, I don’t want to marry you.
He’d been trying to ignore what she’d said earlier about wanting children with the man she loved. He had been fairly convinced she was in love with him, even though she’d never said the words. Then she had left him.
Today, all that rage she’d aimed at him? His brain told him that came from a scorned heart. He had scorned her. Bye-bye, Cinnia. Yes, he had let her go without a fight. What was he supposed to have done? Denied her the family she had told him from the beginning that she wanted? If she had been telling the truth on her way out the door, and really had wanted to run off and find Mr. Right, to make a family with that unknown man, Henri had been honor bound to let her.
She hadn’t been telling the truth, though. She’d been testing him.
He’d failed, obviously.
Had his rejection killed whatever she had felt?
He pinched the bridge of his nose. It didn’t matter.
“You still have to do it,” he informed her.
“No. I—”
“Cinnia,” he interrupted, unequivocal. “I will accommodate your career if you want to keep working. Dorry can be our nanny. I will give you just about anything you ask of me, but you know that you are coming with me today. Our children must be protected. You know I won’t negotiate on this.”
“No.”
Cinnia had never been a pushover, something he had always admired in her, but Henri had written the book on how to get your way. He didn’t bother saying anything, only gave her a look that warned she was wasting both their time.
“Divorced people raise children apart. If you want to amp up my security, that’s your prerogative, but I’m handling things just fine.”
“Are you?” He scratched his cheek and glanced toward the draped window. “Shall I open those curtains and we’ll see how well you’re keeping the world at bay?”
“Oh, you didn’t drag a swarm of those buzzards here, did you?”
He could have taken steps to lose the cameras they’d picked up at the airport, but he’d been too intent on getting here. “You know what my life is like.”
“I do!” she asserted with a crack in her voice as the words burst out of her. “And I put up with your guards and all the awful trolls who post those nasty things and I never made a peep because it was my choice to be with you. I could have walked away anytime if I didn’t like it. And I did! So don’t ask me to sign up for a lifetime of it. Don’t try to make me.”
His fuse, the one that had slowly been burning down since Killian had set a match to it, reached powder.
“Do you honestly think either of us has a choice?” He managed to keep his voice under a roar, but it was fierce with the bitter vehemence he normally kept pent up. “Don’t tell me how hard it is to live under such attention. I know, damn you.”
She sat back, intimidated by his muted explosion, but he couldn’t contain it. Not if she was going to throw it in his face as the reason she didn’t want to marry him. Damn it, she would understand, if nothing else, that it wasn’t just a nuisance, but a life-threatening menace.
“Trella wasn’t kidnapped because we’re rich. We were valuable because we’d been portrayed as a national treasure. I didn’t sign up for that. None of us did! And did they have the decency to give us privacy after she was rescued? Hell, no! It was worse!”
He thought of all the ugly conjecture that had followed them for years.
“They pushed her into a breakdown and I swear they caused my father’s death. He might have withstood nearly losing his child, but trying to keep us out of that microscope? There was no pity for the pressure he was under! If he showed signs of cracking, they turned it higher. I know.” He smacked his hand into his chest. “I stepped into his shoes. The corporation is enough for any man and then to be worried sick for the rest of your life that another attempt would be made? All because those vipers insist on making us into demigods?”
He threw an accusatory point at the closed curtain, vainly wishing, yearning, for the ability to incinerate every camera on earth.
“I hate them. I bloody well hate them. They’re vile and they set us up to be victimized in every way—by trolls, by opportunists, by criminals who want to steal a child for profit.”
He ran his hand down his face, trying not to think of such a thing happening to his child. He pointed a railing finger at her.
“You have no idea what they’re really capable of. And you definitely don’t have the resources to hold them at a decent distance. So, no. Do not think for a minute that I will leave it to you to ‘handle’ security. I can’t even say I will take the babies and let you live your life away from us because you are part of this now, like it or not. So you will come to Paris with me and I will handle security.”
At some point she had pulled a cushion across her chest and had drawn her knees up, buffering herself against his outburst.
He pushed his fingers through his hair, scratching at his tight scalp, feeling like a bully now that the worst of his temper was spent, but—
“This was why I didn’t want children. This is how I knew it would be.” He was defeated by circumstance. “But we’re here now, so we’ll do what we must. You’ll marry me.”
“No,” she said in a husk of a voice, lips white.
He drew in a tested breath, frustration returning in a flood of heat. “Did you hear what I just said? You can’t stay here.”
“Yes, I heard you. Fine. I’ll live behind your iron curtain, but—” She swallowed. “But I won’t marry you.” Her chin came up in what he knew was her stand-ground face.
His ears buzzed as he sifted through her words. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll live with you, but I won’t live with you.” She flushed and pulled her shoulders up defensively around her ears.
“You don’t want to sleep with me?” His heart bottomed out. She couldn’t mean that.
She flinched and looked away, blinking hard. “No. I don’t.”
“Liar.” It came out of him as a breath of absolute truth. A dying wish.
She made a face that held shame and guilt and self-contempt, but when she brought her gaze back to his, she didn’t try to convince him she was being honest. She couldn’t.
The naked vulnerability in her expression caught at something inside him, though. It was out of character and gut-wrenching, making him tamp it down with resistance. Cinnia was tough. He had always liked that about her. He needed her to be resilient and as impermeable as he was. It was too much on him if she was fragile.
Despite the revelation of weakness, however, she was resolved.
“We can carry on pretty much as we did before.” Her voice was a tangle of conflicted emotions. “I’ll work remotely around your schedule and go into my office when I can. I’ll have to see what my doctor says about travel, but I’m not up for a lot. I was planning to take a few months off work when the babies come, but I don’t care where we are when that happens. We can figure that out as we go along, but I’m not going to take up with you again.”
“It’s not ‘taking up.’ It’s marriage.” Did she realize how deeply she was