Strong Enough (Tall, Dark, and Dangerous #1)(59)

I slump in his hold and lean for a few seconds against the doorjamb. “I’m not afraid of you,” I admit. And I’m not. “I’m only afraid of what knowing you and falling in love with you has done to me. I’ve never met someone who destroyed my hope. Until you. As much as I hate you right now, I know I’ll never love someone this much again. But you warned me, didn’t you?” I spit bitterly. “You told me you’d hurt me and you knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Not one damn thing.”

I turn my hateful, disgusted glare up to him as I yank my arm free and walk proudly to the car. I open the back door and throw my suitcase in, completely disregarding the supple leather of the seats.

Everything beautiful is getting trashed tonight, I think harshly, blinking back a swell of tears. I refuse to crumble. I. Refuse.

I climb in the passenger side of the still-running car and I wait. I see Jasper come through the door, turning to lock it behind him. He stands tall and imposing as ever, but something about his shoulders, the way they’re set a little lower, assures me that this ordeal has left its mark on him as well.

Good. I hope you’re hurting, too.

Although that should make me feel better, it actually makes me feel worse. Jasper has been hurt so much in life already, I only wanted to heal him, to love him. But that wasn’t to be because he only wanted to kill me.

The reality of our circumstances hits home again, bursting through my anger with a sucker punch to the heart. I gasp in the quiet of the car and reach for my aching chest. But when Jasper opens the driver’s side door and slides in behind the wheel, I let my hand fall away and turn to look out the window, into the inky blackness of the surrounding woods.

We ride in silence for miles and miles before Jasper speaks. I wonder that he didn’t think I was asleep, but knowing him, he can probably hear my heartbeat or something.

“My father was the first person I killed,” comes his hoarse voice in the dark.

Despite my upset, despite my disillusionment over him and what happened between us, my heart lurches behind my ribs. I say nothing, though. Just close my eyes and lean my forehead against the cool glass, willing myself to remain unaffected.

I listen as he continues, almost absently, as if he’s merely thinking aloud. “I enlisted in the Army as soon as I graduated. I had to get away from him, even though he wasn’t around anymore. I could feel him everywhere, everywhere I looked, everything I heard. Even in me. So I went through basic training, kept my nose clean, and stayed to myself. But it was during one of the aptitude tests that they picked up on what kind of person I really was. They could spot whatever’s wrong with me. And they used it. Ruthlessly, they used it. When they showed me the X-ray reports from one of my mother’s many trips to the hospital that I knew nothing about, they explained to me the years of abuse she’d suffered. They showed me the evidence of it. And then they told me that my father was going to be released, that his case had been overturned on a technicality. They knew how I’d react. They knew all they had to do was point me in the right direction, get me inside that prison, and I’d take him out. So that’s what they did. They made sure I turned into the exact kind of machine they needed.”

I steel myself against the rush of heartbreak for the young man that Jasper was, for all that he saw and experienced, for all the hurt that marked him so indelibly. Mercilessly, I remind myself that he was going to kill me. I can’t afford to feel for him.

“Somehow my mother knew. When I went to tell her that he was gone, she cried. But not for him. She cried for me. That’s when I knew that she couldn’t survive what I had become. She couldn’t watch me walk down the only road in front of me. Or at least that’s how I saw it at the time. So when I was recruited into the Colonel’s covert ops team, he, with all his connections and questionable associations, helped me fake my death. From that day forward, Jasper Lyons ceased to exist. I officially became Jasper King. Or Jason King. Or James King. Or whoever else I needed to be. But they were all men you never wanted to meet, guys you prayed never had reason to come to your door.”

Jasper Lyons. How fun.

Lyons.

King.

Lion, king of the jungle. It’s fitting and somehow acerbic that he’d choose the name.

Both names suit him. Lyons . . . it speaks to the man he was born into, his animal ways and instincts, his tiger eyes and bloodhound nose. But King . . . King speaks to what he has become. The cream of the killer crop, the top of the assassin list, better at what he does than anyone in his field. He wears the crown.

If that’s anything to be proud of.

It’s fitting for his personal life, too. For me, he’s the king of heartache, something I can personally attest to. Even though I’m currently in a state of denial, refusing to deal with the havoc he’s wreaked on me, I can feel the devastation, the utter destruction lurking right around the edges of my consciousness, lying in wait. It’s biding its time, holding on for the moment when I lower my guard, my anger, my determination. Then I can be crushed, smashed, gutted like a bug on the windshield.

That’s my future.

So much to look forward to, I think waspishly.

“The worst part is that I never really minded my job. I knew I was taking bad people out of the equation, wiping them out of existence and saving others from their particular brand of terrorism. Whatever that was. I never questioned it. Not once. Not until you.”