Clenching her jaw, she shook her head vehemently. “Never.” She lifted her luminous eyes to his. “You know, you saved me from making the greatest mistake of my life yesterday. And you are keeping your promise to me. So you can’t be all bad. I was thinking you can’t be…”
“I am,” he bit out. “All bad.”
“But you’re risking everything to save Laetitia,” she said softly. “That is hardly selfish.”
“I am saving her for my own reasons. Because…”
“Because?”
“Because I made a promise to protect her.”
Rose gave a slow nod. “Which just proves my point.”
Xerxes gave a low laugh. He took pride in keeping his word, starting with the promise he’d made to himself as a young, scared, lonely boy of five, abandoned by both parents, when he’d sworn he would someday find them again.
“I keep my promises,” he said grimly. A flash of lightning illuminated the dark clouds. “That doesn’t make me good.”
“Who is Laetitia, Xerxes? Tell me.” Rose moved closer, looking up into his face. A moment ago, she’d been angry, but now, she was touching his arm, her gaze curious and tender. “Is she your friend?”
Her small hand rested lightly on his skin, and he shuddered beneath that gentle touch. He had to fight the impulse to draw his arm away—or crush her small body beneath the force of his embrace. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Your…lover?”
He looked away.
“Do you love her?”
Xerxes turned to look down at her, his eyes locking with hers as the first drops of rain started to fall from the gray sky.
“Yes,” he bit out. “I love her.”
Chapter Nine
XERXES loved this other woman. His stark words caused a tremble through Rose’s heart, a whisper of pain that she couldn’t understand. She swallowed. “And you think once she’s in your care, you can save her. You think you can wake her.”
“Her marriage has doomed her to die,” he said in a low voice. “I won’t allow that to happen.”
Rose looked at him, her heart in her throat. He loved a woman so much he was determined to save her at any cost to himself. That was true love, she thought. The kind that would sacrifice anything, do anything, for the beloved. “You really love her,” she breathed, “don’t you?”
“So?” he said coldly, then his black eyes widened. His lips twisted sardonically. “Ah. You are imagining I am some white knight in a fairy tale.”
“Aren’t you?”
He snorted scornfully. “You are quite the romantic, aren’t you?”
He said the words like an insult. Rose blushed. “Just because I can see the best of people, then—”
“You are wrong about me.” Xerxes’s eyes glittered. “And you’re wrong to have such blind faith. Your noble-hearted knight does not exist.”
Rose took a deep breath. “I believe he does. I’ll wait. I’ll have faith.”
He laughed, a hard, ugly sound. “Faith is a lie that fools tell themselves in the night.”
She stared at him. “Do you really believe that?”
Xerxes turned out to face the sea.
She looked at the taut lines of his body. The tanned, muscular arms. Her eyes traced the dark shadow of his jaw, the mussed wave of his black hair.