On Her Master's Secret Service (Masters and Mercenaries #4)(23)

His eyes darkened. “That’s only because there’s so much you don’t know about me, honey.” His mouth flattened, and he let his head drift back. “I really do care about you, Eve. And not simply because you were Alex’s wife.” He took a long breath and looked back down at her. “Are you sure you’re done with him?”

She could answer that honestly. “No. I don’t know that I’ll ever be done with him, but I also don’t know that we can live together again. I’ve changed since we got married.”

“You got stronger. I actually thought you weren’t a good match for Alex. You were too submissive in the beginning. Alex needed a challenge. It’s one thing to have a sub in the bedroom, quite another when your partner, the woman you rely on, is utterly dependent on you for every decision.”

She felt her eyes narrow. “I certainly was not.”

“He picked out your clothes every morning, Eve.”

It had started out as a game. He would pick out her clothes for their dates and he always selected her lingerie. Somewhere along the way, they had fallen into the habit of him laying out her clothes and admiring her. “It was just for fun.”

“Was it?”

“I wasn’t completely dependent on him.” She said the words and she meant them to some extent, but looking back, she knew she had been far more dependent on him than she was really comfortable with. And yet those were some of the sweetest times of her life. “I can’t be that girl again. I don’t know that Alex will accept anything less.”

“Alex has accepted the crumbs you’ve given him for years. He’ll take anything. If I met you today, I would say you’re too cold for him. Back then you were too submissive.”

Ian didn’t pull punches. Damn, hearing that hurt. “So you think I should let him go.”

Let him go to the likes of the Amandas of this world? Younger women or subs who weren’t damaged and set in their ways? Women he could settle down with into a happy, congenial partnership where he made most of the decisions?

“I think you need to take all the sweetness of the woman you were and merge it with the strength you have now. I think you should stop f*cking lying down and fight. We’re all f*cked up, Eve, but at least the rest of us are walking wounded. At least we’re trying to get somewhere.”

A little kernel of anger lit inside her. “Oh, really? Just where are you going, Ian? Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve been in one place for a really long time, or are you trying to tell me that you go through a sub a night because you’re looking for ‘the one’?”

He snorted, a sound sure to be ridiculous on a lesser man, but Ian made it sound elegant. “Yeah, that’s my story. No. I already found ‘the one’ and she’s dead and I think Eli Nelson had something to do with it.”

She felt her mouth drop open. She’d known Ian and Nelson had a history, but how far back did it go? “What?”

“Fucker sent me a card. I already tossed the flowers out. I nearly hit Phoebe in the head. She’s going to quit one of these days.” He nodded toward the envelope at his feet.

Eve pulled the card out. It was all hearts and flowers, sappy and sentimental, and it announced Happy Anniversary. It was unsigned, but the mailing address was London, England, Eli Nelson’s last known whereabouts. The rogue CIA agent had been causing trouble for the entire group since he’d attempted to use them to steal industrial secrets for his Chinese handlers. A few months ago, they’d all learned that their ties with Nelson went back much further than they had known. He’d ruined the operation that cost Liam years of his life and then tried to kill both him and Avery after running off with the information he’d been willing to kill for.

And Ian had struck back, rendering that information useless. They were two titans taking massive swings at each other.

“Why would he send this to you?”

Ian shrugged. “He wants me emotional. He wants me off my game. And he definitely wants me to think he killed my wife.”

Eve felt her eyes go wide and her heart drop into her stomach. His wife? Ian had been married? “How long has she been gone?”

Maybe he’d been right when he’d said there was a lot she didn’t know.

“Years. Minutes. Sometimes I think I still see her. What am I doing? She played me. She was working for Nelson all along, and she got burned. This is stupid. I need to be working on a case and I’m sitting here like some f*cking teenager listening to music and crying over a girl.”

He wasn’t crying. His face was a block of stone. Eve had about two million questions, but it seemed wrong to intrude. He was so private. He would regret every word he said later, and she couldn’t stand the thought of anything humbling him. She laid the envelope down and moved to her feet.

“I’m going to hug you now.”

Ian’s eyes came open and a wary look crossed his face, as though she’d just warned him something terrible was about to happen. “Why?”

“Because you need it, Sir, and you can’t accept it from one of the other subs because they all want something from you. I only want something for you.”

“Everyone wants something, Eve.”

She made the bold play. She sat in his lap and put her arms around his neck. He was the brother she’d never had, and she couldn’t leave him sitting here like this. “I want you to be happy. And I think I finally want to be happy, too. You’re right. I’ve been a zombie for years, and I need to start living again. And you need to figure out what you want.”