“And how, mate, did I leave you hurting?” He snarled. “By not trusting you? By deceiving you and placing my life deliberately in danger? Deliberately choosing another over my mate! Did I do this?”
“What you did was so much worse,” she panted, her voice rasping. “You left me, Saban. You left when
you swore you would never leave me.” A single tear caressed her cheek. “You lied to me.”
Yes, he had. He wiped the tear from her cheek with his thumb, feeling the guilt that rode inside him.
“I came back.” He wasn’t going to be swayed by tear-filled eyes.
“At three o’clock in the morning,” she sneered.
Saban almost smiled. She sounded like a wife, and the knowledge filled him with a sense of excitement rather than anger. She could keep a time card on him whenever she pleased.
“Why did you go to him?” He asked the question, hating himself for it, hating the anger that filled him because of it. “I nearly lost you, Natalie. I would have lost my soul if anything had happened to you. Why? Why would you f**king take that risk? Is he so important to you?”
“You’re that important to me.” She jerked, raising her head until they were nearly nose to nose, flames flickering in her dark eyes. “I wanted him gone. I wanted him to leave, and I didn’t want you to have to kill him to achieve it.”
Saban shook his head in confusion. The way this woman’s mind worked, he would never figure her out.
“What made you think you could make him leave? Even if the Council soldiers hadn’t been involved, Natalie. What in God’s name made you think he would listen to you?”
She breathed out heavily and glared back at him.
“Tell me.” He snarled.
Her gaze became cutting, furious. “Because he knows me, Saban. I threw him out of our house; I divorced him despite his pleas. Once he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he didn’t have a chance, he would have left. He would have hated me, and that was fine, but he would have left.”
“And what could you have said to convince him of it when fear of me didn’t?” He growled. “For God’s sake, Natalie, there’s nothing you could have said.”
“I could have told him I love you!” she cried, shocking him to silence. “I could have told him that if he didn’t leave, then I’d not stand between him and your fists ever again. Damn you. I could have made him see reason.”
“Why would you want to?” He shook his head. She had said she loved him, and she meant it. He could see it in her eyes, in her face, he could smell the sweet, burning scent of it now. She loved him.
“Because I can’t stand to see animals or fools bloody and dying. Geez, Saban, letting you loose on him would be like letting an alligator free in a chicken house. Complete annihilation.”
“You were protecting him,” he growled.
She rolled her eyes! Right there, staring right at him, she rolled her eyes at him as though he were an idiot. It shouldn’t have pleased him, but it filled him with pride.
“No, ass**le, I was protecting you from defending yourself against a murder charge,” she snapped
back. “If you haven’t noticed, you’re not exactly rational where he’s concerned.”
“Because he’s consorting with Council scientists,” he yelled impatiently, glowering down at her. “For God’s sake, Natalie—”
“Well, I didn’t know he was that stupid,” she muttered. “Intense, yes; paranoid, sure; that’s Mike Claxton, but he didn’t used to be incredibly stupid.”
He shook his head, amazement filling him. “You’re serious.” He couldn’t believe it. “You expected me to be rational when he was clearly violent toward you—”
“He’s never hit me.”
“No, he would just turn you over to monsters.” His voice was rising. “Trust me, you’d have preferred that he try to hit you.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Not the point?” He was going to pull his own hair out.
“The point is,” her voice softened, “I love you, Saban. I’d have done just about anything, said anything to get him out of our lives. I thought Mike was smarter than he was. I was wrong. I was wrong, and it will never happen again.” Her voice hitched as her eyes filled with tears again. “But it won’t change the fact that you left me, that you couldn’t even look at me or find out for yourself why I felt I had to do it. Nothing will change that.”