he stared.
I could feel him.
“Will you talk to me now?”
He didn’t startle at the sound of my voice, didn’t shift his posture or do anything that would indicate he’d heard me. It was just like when we were kids.
The silent specter.
A stalker that hid in the shadows when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.
I always knew.
Always.
Minutes passed before I was reduced to begging.
“Please, Callan, talk to me.”
Silence.
Such heavy, unbearable silence.
Just like years ago.
But while I couldn’t see his face, my body could feel his eyes. His gaze left a cold trail over my naked skin. My breasts felt tight, my thighs squeezed together, the friction only reminding me of what we were doing when he left.
I wanted to open for him, to give him a show. To seduce him like I’d always done when I knew he was watching.
My knees parted, legs hesitant, but I summoned the courage to seduce him from his trance.
A low rumble of laughter whispered across the room.
“Is that meant to entice me?”
He paused, his voice a blade that cut when he spoke. “Am I good enough for you now?”
My legs snapped together so hard and fast that pain shot through my knees. It was nothing compared to the way my heart clenched at the bitter tone in his voice.
It was never that Callan wasn’t good enough for me.
He was brave while I was a coward.
He was a survivor while I was weak.
He was a boy I was never allowed to know beyond his role as my servant.
Callan was the one thing I couldn’t have because I was too afraid of pissing off my father. But he had tried to know me, even if he thought I never saw him.
He had tried, and I’d crushed him for the effort.
“You’ve always been good enough,” I confessed.
He laughed again, the sound disbelieving and exhausted. “Is that so?”
He pushed up from the seat, a shadow that was somehow larger than the room. He swallowed the space around us, consumed it, made it his own.
On slow steps he approached me to tower over where I was bound to his bed. I could barely see his eyes now, the whiskey color lost to darkness, only a glimmer of light allowing me to watch how he took every part of me in.
“Is that why you treated me like a dog?” he asked, his voice far too tender for the question.
“Is that why you had me beaten every chance you could get? Is that why you toyed with my mother’s job? With our life here?”
He leaned down, his hands planted on the mattress on either side of my head, the tip of his nose brushing mine. “Is that why your little game was so fucking amusing? All because I wouldn’t fight back?”
Silence as his eyes pinned mine.
“Did my life mean so little to you?”
Tears pricked my eyes, an apology caught in my throat that I couldn’t speak or swallow down. He was too close. Too angry. Too hurt.
Callan was tortured.
The two sides of him warring.
There was goodness there. I saw it. It was in his face every time he talked to the cook when he ate breakfast. It was in the rules he’d changed to make the lives of the servants easier.
Even when it came to me, his cruelty was eclipsed by his guilt for the vengeance he was taking.
I’d done this to him. Franklin wasn’t wrong.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said because there was nothing else I could say. If I could change the past, I would, but it was a stupid offer. An impossibility.
“Always with the apologies,” he murmured. “As if they could fix anything. As if they’re worth the breath used to speak them.”
“I don’t know what else to say.”
His face dropped closer, his fingers closing over my jaw in a threatening hold. “Why don’t you try being honest with me for once?”
My voice was feather soft. “I can’t change what I’ve done. But I’m not lying. You were always good enough.”
He didn’t respond, the only sound between us the rapid beat of my heart, a damn hammer that knocked at my chest, begging to leap out. I realized then just how much I’d hated Callan’s silence.
Just say something.
Just be honest.
Just tell me you want me as much as I want you.
That is what I should have been saying in the years I’d hurt him, but I’d been too afraid. Too ashamed. Too bound by vanity to admit what I felt.
His thumb swept down my cheek and he was so disturbingly