Run Wild (Escape with a Scoundrel) - By Shelly Thacker Page 0,121
on the covers beneath her. “She told me all about rogues and locks and safes and fairytales.”
“What?”
“And she said that you’re not worth losing my appetite over.”
This wasn’t making the least bit of sense.
“And I don’t care.” Her head came up, her eyes blazing now. “Why can’t you just leave with me and Masud?”
He folded his arms, realizing he was about to get the argument he hadn’t wanted. “Because I am not going to spend the rest of my life on the run.”
“You’re not going to have a life to spend if you insist on this insane plan!”
“I’m not asking for your opinion. I’m telling you where you’re going to go.”
Her anger finally ignited. “Well, let me tell you where you can go, Captain.” She grabbed a pillow and threw it at him with a frustrated oath, aiming for his head.
He sidestepped neatly and it landed on the hearth. “No sense condemning me to Hades, angel. I’m already halfway there.”
“Damn it.” She added a few more curses as she looked around for something else to throw at him. “I wish I’d never fallen in love with you.”
“Before you damage any more of Clarice’s—what?” he sputtered in shock. “What did you say?”
She went still, bent over the side of the bed, one hand reaching for her shoe.
Frozen in that position, she turned her head to gaze at him, hanging there half upside-down. “Uh... I said... that is... I meant...” Closing her eyes, she gave up and let herself go limp, her hair falling in a cascade around her and trailing on the floor. “I said I wish I’d never fallen in love with you.”
He remained rooted in place, not allowing himself to take one step toward her. Not one step. “You can’t love me.”
“Well, I do,” she said from beneath that blonde tangle.
“You shouldn’t.”
She finally righted herself, sitting up with a sharp toss of her head, her golden mane gleaming in the lamplight. “I don’t care.” Her jaw had that stubborn little tilt that he’d come to know so well. “I love you.”
He remained silent, struck dumb, unable to bear the joy pouring through him. Hatred, he could endure. Pain, he could endure. But not this.
Every fiber of his being urged him to cross the distance between them, to sweep her into his arms and kiss her breathless. But he didn’t. Couldn’t.
He knew he could only bring her misery. Knew her love for him wouldn’t last.
Because God had not made a woman like her for a man like Nicholas Brogan.
“Nicholas?” she murmured, a slow smile tugging at her lips. “I think the pillow is on fire.”
“Blast the pillow,” he choked out. “Let it burn.”
He couldn’t move toward her, couldn’t make himself turn away, couldn’t tear his gaze from her. For one long, glorious moment, he drank in her smile, the look in her eyes, the love—feasted on it like a condemned man devouring his last meal.
Then, in agony, he closed his eyes.
And turned his back on her. “We all make mistakes in life, angel.” He tried to sound careless, cool, but instead his voice sounded hoarse. “You’ll get over the mistake of falling in love.”
With a frustrated oath, she launched herself from the bed. “Listen, you stubborn... impossible...” She seemed to run out of words to describe him—and fell back on an old favorite. “Rogue. Clarice told me you’re not worth losing my appetite over. Foster told me you’re not worth dying for. Everyone you’ve ever met seems to have a low opinion of you—”
“Which should make you think twice about what you just said,” he retorted.
“It doesn’t. Because I’ve been thinking twice about what you said earlier—that ‘they’ are not always accurate.” She stopped a few paces behind him.
He could hear her breathing, rapid and shallow.
“Nicholas,” she said more softly. “I don’t think they really know you at all. I don’t think you’ve ever allowed anyone to know you. Not the way I do.”
Her words, so gentle, so caring, lashed him more painfully than any whip that had ever scarred him. And the sound of his name on her lips—his real name, spoken so tenderly—cut deeper than the hot iron that had branded him. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do, Samantha,” he said roughly. “You don’t know the truth.”
“I know that Clarice said you gave up piracy. That you quit. That’s when you went to the Colonies, isn’t it? You weren’t lying to me about that, were you?”