No Love Lost (Masters & Mercenaries The Forgotten #5) - Lexi Blake Page 0,154

I proved I wasn’t worthy of you.”

“I was cruel to you.”

She wanted him to fight, wanted him to argue that he’d been justified. The fact that he was agreeing with her made her even madder. “Get me out of these ties, Beck. I’m not playing with you this way one second longer.”

But the thought of not getting one last night out of him threatened to break her.

He looked like he wanted to argue. “Please talk to me. We can’t go on this way. We have to find a way through this.”

“I told you what I wanted. Or was this one more trick? Beck gets what he wants. Beck gets to do whatever he wants and everyone forgives him. Beck fucks me over and still comes out of it with a family. I do everything I can to save his brother and do you know what I get?”

“Left alone. You get left alone.” He smoothed back her hair. “If I’d reacted differently you might have trusted me enough to tell me the secret.”

She struggled against the bonds, needing desperately to fight something because he was so close to the truth. “If you’d shown one moment of love to me, I would have told you. I would have broken my promise to Ezra. Do you know how alone I felt? Do you think I wanted all that responsibility? I had to smuggle him out of a foreign country. I had to keep the fact that he was alive a secret or he would have been killed. Do you think I wanted to fucking do it alone?”

“No.” He was staring down at her, a stark look on his face. “No. You didn’t. You saved my brother and I never thanked you. All I did was tear you apart. I made you the bad guy because I didn’t know how to handle my grief. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I’d lost most of my family by that point. My stepdad. My brother. My mom was sick. It was good to be angry with you. It was good to lose you, Kim, because if I went ahead and broke off that piece of myself, I could get on with my life. If I could cut you out of my heart, I didn’t have to mourn you, too.”

“You fucking coward.” The world had gone watery and she couldn’t even feel her nipples anymore. “I’m doing it. I’m saying my safe word. You let me out of here right now.”

A hollow look came into his eyes. “Kim, please…”

She was going to have to use his language. “Red. That’s my safe word. Get me out of these bindings or I’ll make sure Tag never lets you in this club again.”

“I won’t come here without you,” he said, but his hands were working the ties that held her to the cross. “I won’t be here without you. Baby, we need to talk.”

Naturally now he wanted to talk. And Beck always got his way. Always. “I tried it for years after our divorce. You didn’t want to talk to me then. You could have turned to me. I loved you so much I would have moved heaven and earth to help you. But you didn’t. You were scared? That’s your excuse?”

He moved to her other hand. “It’s not an excuse. There is no excuse. And at the time I didn’t think I was scared. I was angry at the world, and I took it out on you. I truly believed you made the mistake that cost my brother his life. I should have talked to you. I should have given you a chance.”

She was free, but she didn’t feel that way. Rage poured through her. He’d ruined it all again. She felt so stupid. “We could have had this, Beck. We could have had this one connection, but you can’t accept anything less than full submission, can you? This has all been bullshit. This has all been a way to get what you want.”

“Let me help you out of the clamps, baby.”

She wasn’t letting him do anything for her. She reached up and released the clamps, wincing as the pain hit her. It pulsed through her, oddly reminding her of everything she’d wanted out of the evening, everything he’d denied her.

“Damn it,” Beck said. “That had to hurt. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

She threw the clamps at him, hitting him in the shoulder with one and narrowly missing his head with the other. “You should have