“Who destroyed you, Jordan?” Her arms crossed over her breasts as her lips set mutinously. “Who ruined you before I ever had a chance at your heart?”
The question wasn’t asked in regret or in pain. Hell no, not with Tehya. She was too damned confrontational, as though it were somehow his fault that he’d had a life before he met her.
It took a second to process the question as well as the anger in her expression now. How was he supposed to answer her?
“You’re making me pay for what another woman has done.” Her lips tightened, her gaze glittered furiously as she made the statement.
“This has nothing to do with another woman, Tehya,” he growled.
He wished it had something to do with a single woman, with a broken heart, with a young man’s disillusion. How much easier it would then be to give in to the dark hunger he could feel brewing in his soul.
Kira had always accused him of giving up on love because he couldn’t save Killian Reece’s wife, Catherine, and their unborn child. That he had blamed Catherine, and Killian’s love for her for the change Killian had undergone after her death.
That had been a deciding point. It wasn’t the whole reason.
“What does it have to do with, then?” Her eyes sparked furiously as he almost gave into the lust beginning to rise inside him once again.
Damn her, he’d no more had her than he wanted her again.
“It has to do with reality,” he snapped. “It has to do with watching friends betray friends, countries betray their own soldiers, and lovers turning their backs on the very love they’ve pledged themselves to because the battle has become too difficult or because their own pride was more important. That is where it comes from.”
She shook her head, her gaze filled with pity. “You’ve watched your men love, Jordan. You’ve watched their wives give all they have to them. You’ve seen loyalty, Jordan, and love, and you deny it.”
He reached out and touched her cheek, her silken flesh heated and warm, beckoning him. “And sometimes,” he said, “the illusion is stronger than the truth. For a while.”
Tehya shook her head, mocking anger enveloping her as she read the belief in what he was saying in his eyes. He truly believed love didn’t last forever.
“I’ve met your father,” she finally said softly.
A dark frown drew his brows together. “What does Dad have to do with anything?”
“He still mourns your mother’s death. He goes to her grave daily, and he still weeps for the woman he lost.”
She knew Riordan Malone, the father who looked over the Malone sons and grandsons that his union with his Irish bride had produced.
Jordan’s jaw tightened as the battle to find an argument against her raged in his brilliant blue eyes.
Tehya shook her head. “I’m going to bed, Jordan, but perhaps you should consider this. It’s not reality that destroys the dreams, it’s your lack of faith. And it’s your own fears of facing what you believe your father and Killian Reece faced. The loss of that dream and the
only woman who could touch their hearts.”
She turned, pulled her arm from his grip, and moved through the doorway to the bedroom.
She wasn’t arguing with him, she wouldn’t fight with him. She would fight for him, she would fight over him, but never would she battle him over something she knew he had always refused to face.
The loss of his mother had been hard enough, but for years Jordan had watched the aching loneliness and Riordan Malone’s inability to ever lose the bleak sadness that had filled him with his wife’s death. Catherine Reece had disobeyed Jordan’s order during an operation involving Sorrel and a young girl he had kidnapped. She had managed to get herself killed as Killian and Jordan watched in horror, unable to stop it.
No, it hadn’t been a broken heart that had destroyed Jordan’s belief in love. It hadn’t been any single woman who had disillusioned him. The woman who had broken his father’s life, as well as his with her death, and the friend who hadn’t known how to survive, had given him the belief that no love could truly last forever.
Moving through the darkened bedroom, Tehya shed the shirt he had given her and crawled between the chilled blankets. From where she lay, she could see the light from the door, and Jordan as he stood in the doorway, simply watching her.
He was at his most dangerous when he was so still and silent. When he was plotting, planning, or worse yet, when he was thinking.
He had a wicked, devious mind. He was a man who believed what he believed, and there would be no forcing his beliefs to change.
“You’re wrong.” His voice reached across the room, so icy, so emotionless, that a chill raced over her soul.
“Of course I am.” She swallowed tightly and fought back the tears she would have shed if it would have done any good. If it would have won her the heart of the man she loved, she would have cried a river.