A trickle of warmth tried to work its way into the heart I had been trying to freeze up toward him. “I wouldn’t think you would care if I was safe or not. After all, I’m the one that got myself into this mess.”
I rolled my head to the side so I could look at him and noticed that the tick he got when he was trying to hold whatever he was feeling inside had started to work at his jaw. His big hands tightened on the steering wheel and he bit out, “We can’t always control what or whom we care about. Didn’t you learn that lesson the hard way with Roark?”
I jerked my eyes back to the road and felt ice take up the spot where the heat had been sneaking in. “You’re right. I don’t need to learn any lesson more than once. So how did you get Hartman to agree to this setup? If he went to all the trouble of building a castle for his queen and princess, why would he let the wicked witch in the gates?”
He gave me another hard, sideways look. “Because he has his own agenda, and now I owe him. Race is neck-deep in stuff he shouldn’t be in, and being able to call in a major favor like this isn’t an opportunity a smart guy like him can pass up.”
A heavy ball of guilt and something uglier, something dirtier, lodged in my throat. “So you are compromising yourself for me, for this plan of yours? You would never give anyone a free pass otherwise.” I didn’t want Titus to go against his own code just to get me close to Conner. I didn’t want him to change at all. I loved the way he was . . . loved the way he came off as heroic and brave. Knew I could so easily love him with my entire heart if it didn’t seem so impossible.
He swore softly under his breath and then wheeled the noisy muscle car down a ramp that looked like it led to an underground garage. He turned to look at me, his eyes almost at bright as the headlights shining in the dark in front of us. He sounded resigned and tired when he told me, “I can’t tell the difference anymore between the bad guys and the good guys that are bad because they don’t have any other choice in the matter. I’m not compromising, I’m adapting. Isn’t that the first rule of survival?”
It was, but I didn’t want him to adapt. I wanted him to stay just the way he was, and I would die before being the reason he felt like he had to change.
Chapter 6
Titus
THIS WAS SOME SPECIAL kind of hell that I wasn’t sure I was going to survive.
It had been a week since I moved Reeve into the loft at Race’s compound. A week in which I killed myself at work trying to figure out why exactly Roark had declared war on the city. I called the marshals and got shut down because they didn’t want anyone else to know they had a viper in the nest, so I was working around them instead of with them. I was also going to the condo at night and pretending not to watch Reeve while she paraded around in clothes that were too tight and too short for my sanity or peace of mind. A week in which I tiptoed around her because the loft was just that: lofty. It was totally open, so there were too few walls and not enough places to hide. The bedroom was just a platform set above the open-plan kitchen, so there wasn’t even a door there to shut and hide behind. I heard her in the shower, I saw her kick off the covers in the middle of the night, I heard the sound of clothes rustling as she got dressed and undressed. The noise scraped across my skin, and all of it was making my insides itch and my temper quick to boil over. It was all a frustrating waste of time and I was almost at the end of my rope.
I gave her the bed and took the couch. I tried to find other places to be so that I didn’t have to breathe her in, and pretended to ignore the way every part of my body reacted to her. I was walking around with a constant hard-on, and even if I decided to ignore the pulsating sexual tension between us, Reeve didn’t. I caught the way she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. She was waiting, watching. I wasn’t sure what she expected me to do, but whatever it was, I refused to give in to the allure of her or the temptation of us together.