Chapter 141: CAN’T MARRY YOU
ROWAN
I had poured two cups of coffee before I caught myself.
I stood there looking at the second one for a moment, at the steam rising off it, and then I set it on the windowsill and turned away from it and sat back down on the edge of my bed.
The light had already shifted from grey to pale gold outside. I had no memory of watching it change.
I kept coming back to the courtyard. To her face when I told her about the bloodline, about what Corvin had been doing with her from the beginning, watching the exact moment she understood all of it at once. She did not cry. She did not fall apart or throw anything or demand to know why I had taken so long to tell her. She just stood there and absorbed it, and I watched her do that and felt the tightness I had been carrying for weeks shift in a way I had not prepared for and could not put back.
Tonight she would be bound to my father.
I had been pressing on that all night the way you pressed a bruise to confirm it still hurt.
It hurts every time.
I heard Ryker’s door down the hall sometime before seven. That sound it made when he had finally stopped arguing with himself about his questionable choices and committed to the wrong decision. I did not get up. I had nothing useful to say to either of them. I was not angry. I was just tired because I was probably more broken than him.
Not comparing brokenness here but I had a fiancee, I was cheating on with a woman I couldn’t have.
I was still sitting there when my door opened without a knock.
Speaking of the devil.
Lila stepped in and closed it behind her. She was dressed for the ceremony, black fitted dress, heels, hair done, and then she reached back and pulled the zip down slowly, watching my face while she did it, and the dress dropped to the floor.
Nothing underneath it.
Ohhhhh not this again.
She walked toward me slowly because she had always known whatever she was walking toward would wait for her, it was that elegant confidence she always exudes. She stopped directly in front of me and took my hand without a word and pressed it to her breast.
"I have been patient long enough," she said. "Weeks, Rowan. You have been somewhere else for weeks and I am done pretending I don’t notice."
I looked at her face.
She climbed onto my lap, her bare skin warm against me, her hips rolling slowly, her mouth going to my neck. Her hand slid between us and wrapped around me and she started stroking with the ease of someone who had never once doubted the outcome.
"I have been thinking about you all morning," she murmured against my jaw. "About you bending me over this bed and fucking me until I can’t stand up straight."
Her lips moved to my ear, her hand working steadily. "I want your hands on my throat. I want you to remind me who I belong to." She pressed closer. "Touch me and feel what you do to me. I have been wet since I woke up thinking about this."
I reached down and took both her wrists and lifted her off me.
I stood up and stepped back.
"I’m not in the mood."
Lila looked at me.
"What did you just say to me?"
"I’m not in the mood."
She laughed, one short disbelieving sound, and then stepped forward and grabbed my hand and pressed it back to her breast, holding it there with both of hers.
"Feel that." She took my other hand and dragged it down her stomach, her hip, pressing my palm flat against her skin. "Every single bit of this is for you. Look at me properly, Rowan."
I looked at her.
She let go of my hands when she read my face. Took a step back. Her chin lifted.
"Do you have any idea how many men I turn down every single day?"
She did not wait for an answer.
"Alphas. Men who have power and money and would give me everything, and they beg me. They get on their knees and beg."
Her voice was climbing, the smooth surface of it cracking down the middle. "And I say no to every single one because I am with you."
She stepped toward me again, her finger pointing at her own chest.
"I keep myself for you. I choose you every time, without exception, and you are sitting here telling me you are not in the fucking mood."
I said nothing.
She stared at me.
"No man has ever said that to me."
Her voice pitched higher and she gestured at herself, at all of it, jaw tight and eyes blazing.
"Not one. Not in my entire life."
She let out a short furious breath through her nose.
"You must have completely lost your mind, because I am standing here and you are looking at me like I am furniture."
I stayed quiet.
She bent and grabbed her dress from the floor and stepped back into it with shaking hands, yanking the zip up herself, not looking at me while she did it, her breathing loud and uneven.
"Is it the ceremony." Her voice had dropped back down, clipped and controlled. "His mating tonight. Is that what this is."
"No."
"Then what." She snatched her bag from the chair and turned to face me fully. "Tell me what it is. Say it."
I looked at her standing there by my door, bag in hand, jaw set, and I thought about Amaris in the courtyard and the second cup of coffee sitting cold on my windowsill and tonight, and the words came out without any ceremony attached to them.
"I don’t think I want to go ahead with our wedding."
Lila’s jaw tightened. She looked at me for a long moment with her eyes steady and her face giving nothing back.
She turned and walked out and slammed the door so hard the window rattled in its frame.
