ever look at him the same way again? Could I trust him the next time he touched me?
Can I ever forgive him for what he’s done?
“Are you okay?” the stable boy murmured, placing himself in front of me while still angling the pitchfork at Sully-not-Sully.
Whoever the guest was had gone strangely silent. The rebuttal or rage that I expected was mysteriously absent.
Smoothing down my dress, I nodded. “I’m fine.”
“Did he hurt you?”
My tiredness made me want to slither down the barn wall and slump into a pile of hay. I was done playing this game. I was through being used in whatever way Sully intended.
This was a breach of everything between us.
This was unforgivable.
New tears trickled down my face, these born from grief and pain. Giving into the exhaustion, I planted my hands over my eyes, unwilling to look at the man I thought I knew and the stable hand I didn’t.
A buzz sounded. A click and a whirr.
I looked up.
The stable hand stood in front of me, the pitchfork at his feet. One hand dragged through his sandy blond locks, the other balled into a fist by his thigh. He wore a simple black shirt with tan patches sewn over areas of wear. His jeans were equally as filthy as Sully-not-Sully’s had been.
He was the exact opposite of the blue-eyed, miserably brooding mogul who ruled forty-four islands in the middle of nowhere.
But I knew him.
My soul recognised him.
He was familiar.
He was mine.
Or at least…he was.
He shifted under my stare, guilt flaring with brown fire in his gaze.
I frowned, once again sensing something wasn’t right.
But what?
Looking over his shoulder, I expected to see Sully’s imposter staring at us, watching this tender moment, ready to attack the stable hand and continue his assault on me.
Only…there was no one else.
No hint that there had ever been a third person in this complex, confusing illusion.
There was just me and this lanky boy who watched me with utmost desolation, knowing he’d fucked up yet remained tongue-tied on how to fix it.
With a weary sigh, I gave up any pretences.
I stopped playing this game of lies.
I looked the boy directly in his face and gave him the finger. A slur that needed no interpretation. “Fuck you, Sully Sinclair. Fuck you.”
Chapter Twenty
“HOW?” I shrugged with utmost vulnerability. Vulnerability I’d always kept buried. “How did you know?”
Eleanor swiped at her tears and straightened her spine. “The same way you’d know if I appeared in a different form.”
I frowned.
That didn’t answer my question.
I wasn’t psychic or gifted. I didn’t have whatever voodoo she possessed to be able to see past my hallucinations. Had my program glitched? Had she seen past the coding and seen the lack of humanity in my doppelgangers eyes?
Glancing at my hands, I scowled harder. The fantasy was still intact. I stared at the fingers of a stable boy, complete with blisters and thickened palms. I’d shed my usual tall height and operated the body of a younger man. For all intents and purposes, this blond-haired farmhand was a puppet, dancing to my jerks on his strings. Only difference was, the link between his actions and my own was flawless…she shouldn’t be able to know.
She should be crying out in delirium while the program I’d written—when I’d first dabbled with the parameters of Euphoria—pile-drove her against the wall.
She should be having sex with me…Sully.
Not watching some stable boy with a painful mix of unhappiness, hate, and condemning certainty.
The hand I’d inspected curled into a fist as my temper rose.
She should be happy to be fucked by him; grateful that our fight was seemingly over…not standing here with glowing confidence that the cypher that looked identical to me was the stranger and not this exact opposite standing before her.
“How?” I asked again, my temper bleeding through my voice, laced with a Southern twang and not as deep as my born attributes. “Tell me how you knew.”
Eleanor sighed heavily. For a moment, she looked as if she’d slap me—rage had turned her grey eyes into lashing quicksilver. However, she wrangled her anger back into controllable and pushed off from the wall.
My borrowed body reacted as she moved toward me. My cock thickened. My heart thundered. She would always be it for me. She would always be the one.
Yet she never did anything I expected.
Thanks to this little game, I was supposed to be the one nursing a broken heart. I was supposed to be living through a nightmare of watching the woman I loved with all my