Page 25 of Sherwood
“Didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t bothered by that. I’d almost be disappointed if she hadn’t.
“I have no right to ask you what she said or implied about me, so I’m not going to. But I want you to know that you can ask me anything you’d like about myself or about my relationship with her. I don’t want our past with Lox to interrupt what we have now.”
“And what do we have now?” Marian murmured, her eyes searching mine.
How could it have been so, so true for me to say what I said next? “Whatever you want,” I told her.
More birds. More waves. I knew the way Marian was assessing me because I did it to her, because I did it as my job.
I also knew what she would see as she looked at me: a dominant who was quickly growing obsessed with her. It was what I wanted her to see; it had always been the plan for her to see it.
It just also happened to be the truth.
“How did you meet Lox?” Marian finally asked. “And when?”
“Two years ago,” I said. “I was doing a footprint survey for an expansion of the NSA campus at Fort Meade, getting into stupid fights about the size of parking lots and the location of solar panels. I found an unexpected ally in her. She’d been a Ranger, I’d been a Green Beret. We immediately recognized something in each other, I suppose.”
Except for the Ranger and Green Beret part, this was entirely a lie. I met Robin Loxley for the first time on a freezing, muddy mission in Carpathia, and we’d starting fighting the moment we met. We never stopped, really, not even after we fell into bed and I fell into reckless, miserable love.
“Unfortunately,” I finished now, “we were far too much alike to make it last.”
“Because you’re both dominants.”
Laying on her like this, braced on my elbows, left my hands free to play with her hair as I spoke. “Lox and I were mismatched from the start, and I knew it. But I believed it wouldn’t matter. What was dominance but the way we liked to fuck? Surely that wouldn’t affect anything else,couldn’taffect anything else?”
Marian didn’t say anything, and I gave a small, unhappy smile at her silence. “I see you can guess that it did affect things, in the end. There were other factors in our split, but that was the root of it. Neither of us could bend, so we broke instead.”
Marian bit her lip. “Why does she think you’ll hurt me?”
Because she knows I’m using you. Because she knows that I’ll choose my job—my country—over even someone I love with my whole heart.
“She used to call me a wolf, and it’s not…an inaccurate word. I am greedy, Marian, I am ravenous. I won’t hesitate to devour you if you let me.”
She trembled a little underneath me, and I felt the unconscious lift of her hips against mine at my words. She liked that.
I liked it too.
“Can you tell that I’m jealous?” Marian asked, a twist to her mouth. “That the two of you were together?”
“Marian, I’ve been jealous of you for two years.”
Her lips parted. “You have?”
I could have laughed if it didn’t still sting so much.
“You know Lox—emphatic and transparent to the last. She told me everything I ever wanted to know about her, except when it came to you. You were the only secret she kept, the only answer she wouldn’t give. Once, when drunk, she confessed to me that the memory of you followed her around like a ghost. Another time, she told me that if she ever died, her last breath would be speaking your name. I loved her, and she loved a girl she’d left behind and couldn’t bring herself to see again. You can see how I’d have occasion for jealousy, I think.”
“But…”
I couldn’t believe I was saying what I said next, from a professional or a self-preservation standpoint, but the dominant in me needed to give her this. “Whatever reasons she’s had for staying away, or even for leaving in the first place, it wasn’t because she didn’t love you, Marian. If you know nothing else, please know that.”
Marian closed her eyes a moment.
“I don’t know what to think,” she said, her voice tight. “It feels impossible to trust that she could care for me that much and yet still stay away…”
