Dare Collection October 2019. Margot Radcliffe

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

      Sebastian

      I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND what was happening. But then, when it came to Darcy, I didn’t understand much of anything and wasn’t sure I ever had—a sensation that hadn’t gotten any easier to bear over the last few months.

      I hadn’t expected to feel like this. I hadn’t expected to feel.

      I’d imagined the initial madness would fade, but it hadn’t. If anything, I hated being away from her even more now. Even in these last weeks, when being with her had meant making sure she was fed and cared for and could sleep. Almost as if the sex was secondary, no matter how fantastic it continued to be.

      I didn’t like to use words like joy or happiness, because what did I know of either?

      If I viewed her as a particularly prime deal I needed to close, it was easier. Or it all made better sense, anyway. I just needed to get the contracts signed and settled. That was what would make things more palatable and less overwhelming, I was sure of it.

      But she still wouldn’t marry me.

      “What do you mean, you don’t deserve it?” she asked quietly now.

      I already regretted my outburst. And everything that had preceded it, like telling her about my family. About me. Something about this woman made me forget all my own rules.

      “I’m not a good man, Darcy,” I said when I could be sure I was under control. And I was absurdly, ridiculously glad that I had moved over to the window, because I wasn’t sure what would become of me if she touched me just now. “I haven’t hidden that from you. But you don’t seem to want to accept it.”

      “Maybe you’re really not a good man. But you’ve been nothing but good to me, so I can only take your word for that.”

      “I bankrupted my brother. I betrayed my mother.” When she only stared back at me, I upped the ante. “I purchased you. For sex.”

      I expected her to look poleaxed. Instead, she looked as if I was making her sad. “I sold myself. To you. For sex. Does that make me dirty and undeserving of happiness, Sebastian?”

      “Of course not.”

      “It might have been hard for her, and of course you feel badly about that, but you didn’t actually betray your mother by choosing to have a relationship with your brother.” She shook her head when I started to argue the point. “Your father might have betrayed her, and you, but he’s your brother. It makes sense that you wanted a relationship with him. It makes sense that she doesn’t. But you’re not actually required to hate him just because his existence reminds her of a dead man’s sins.”

      When she said it like that, it landed differently. It even felt different. It was almost as if—

      But I knew better.

      “I’ve been paying penance as long as I can remember,” I told her, my voice low and full of all the ways I’d let down the people closest to me. And all the ways I’d earned their enduring dislike and disdain. It was the axis that kept my world spinning. “But I welcome it. I can’t change the past. I can’t make my father faithful. I can’t restore Ash’s trust in me. Most of all, I can’t be the man you want me to be.”

      She sat up a little straighter on the leather couch, drawing the soft throw tighter around that body of hers that regularly made me imagine I was a religious man. “I don’t recall asking you to be one way or another.”

      “Do you truly think I don’t know that you feel things for me?” I demanded. “Do you suppose I can’t see it?”

      She didn’t flush. She didn’t look the least bit flustered. She tilted her head to one side, regal and beautiful and entirely too composed.

      God, she was so beautiful it hurt. All these months later, it still hurt.

      “I could say the same, Sebastian,” she said quietly. As if she was rendering a judgment. “The only difference between you and me is that I’m not over here lying to myself about it.”

      And the storm in me…broke.

      “I can’t be that man!” I thundered at her. “I can’t. I told you from the start that I want you. But not this. Happiness. Joy.” And that other thing that filled the rooms we inhabited, no matter how hard I worked to ignore it. I decided to stop pretending I couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it. “Love is for other people, Darcy.”

      I braced myself for a storm in return, but all she did was sigh.

      And then she rose to her feet before me, sinuous and mesmerizing. She wasn’t wearing those wings of hers tonight, but I could almost see them there. Not as part of a costume, just a part of her. Angelic in the fiercest, most gloriously fiery way.

      Her gaze on me was intense. It made that storm in me rage all the more. “I have a radical idea, Sebastian. What would happen if you accepted the possibility, just for one second, that you actually deserve to be loved?”

      I would have preferred it if she’d hauled off and punched me. Then kicked me a few times for good measure.

      “I don’t want to have this discussion.”

      “Because let me tell you what this has been like for me,” she continued in that same ferociously calm way. “I went to Paris to live out a fantasy. And now, looking back, I realize that none of it would have worked at all if it hadn’t been you. I looked up from that performance and I saw you, Sebastian. I think I fell in love with you then and there.”

      There was so much thunder in my head it should have drowned her out, but instead it seemed to amplify her.

      “Stop it,” I managed to grit out.

      But she didn’t. Instead, Darcy unwrapped the throw from her perfect body and dropped it to the side with a certain dramatic flourish. Or maybe it was a dare.

      Because she didn’t need to hide a thing. I was the one who felt as if I needed to lock myself away somewhere until I could figure out how to handle this. How to handle her. And not just metaphorically.

      “I can’t believe I actually imagined that I could just…have sex with some stranger like that,” she was saying, as if she was knocking down all the walls inside me on purpose. “Because of course I couldn’t have. Don’t get me wrong. It might have been fun. Erotic, certainly. I would have been glad I did it, no matter who it was, if only so I’d stop fantasizing about it. But it was you, Sebastian. And it changed everything.”

      I wanted to shout at her. Or whatever else would make this stop. Make her stop. But I couldn’t seem to move, much less make noise. I felt frozen solid and rendered mute, there before the window with the cold, careless city at my back.

      Maybe I should have known that I could never have her. Not the way I wanted her. And not because she didn’t want me. But because deep down, as everyone who had ever been close to me had discovered at one point or another, I was defective. No one who truly knew me wanted anything to do with me.

      That was why I’d wanted to marry her before she could get to that point. That was why I’d hoped that sex could confuse the issue and keep her from realizing what everyone else had.

      “Sometimes,” she was saying, as if she was wholly unaware of what she was doing to me, “it’s easy to get lost in a rut even when it doesn’t feel good any longer. And particularly if it hurts, because you’re so desperate to make the pain mean something.”

      “I’m fine,” I seethed at her.

      “Congratulations,” she shot back at