“My father was counting on you marrying Fayette. I was terrified you would find out I was obsessing over you. My family was so awful and I didn’t want you to think I was out for the money or prestige of marrying an Archambault. There were so many reasons. Your lovely comments on my body added to them.”
“That makes no sense. What about in the chapel?” he demanded. He’d been shocked and elated to see that his bride was the one woman he’d wanted always. There she was, his woman, already legally tied to him. He’d fantasized about her for far too long. The reality of her was far better than any fantasy, but she had rejected him.
Color crept under her skin. She hesitated. Took a breath. “I knew I already was so crazy about you that if I was around you, I’d fall so in love with you that if you never loved me back, you’d shatter me. I can’t take much more after my family’s rejection. I’ve lived alone for a long time, Elie, and I made myself all right with that, but I dreamt of you for so long. I knew if you threw me away, I wouldn’t recover.”
For a few moments her confession didn’t penetrate his closed mind. He’d been so certain she didn’t really care for him that he couldn’t conceive of her being afraid of falling in love with him. He could only stare at her, not comprehending what she was saying. When he finally did, Elie couldn’t believe her. It didn’t matter that her voice rang with truth or that her body language portrayed honesty. He just couldn’t believe her.
“If you really had the slightest feeling for me, Brielle, why would you risk leaving me alone in the world again? Why would you do that?” he challenged. Now the anger was bubbling to the surface, a slow seeping of fury escaping from under a tightly controlled lid. “I’ve never had anyone in my life until you, and you’d just throw that away over and over without a thought for me or what it would be like for me if you died.”
Elie didn’t care how selfish he sounded. He knew she’d saved both Leone’s and Raimondo’s lives. She had, and on many levels, he was proud of her for saving them. But she was a female shadow rider. For that alone she should have gone into that safe room and been protected. That was why she had bodyguards—to ensure she didn’t die and so shadow riders could continue. But she was also Elie’s wife. She should have gone into the safe room or ridden the shadows out of harm’s way in order to protect their union. It was all he could do not to leap across the room and shake her until her teeth rattled.
“Elie, when you take a rotation, do you think of me, or do you do your job? You’re a shadow rider, born and bred, taught from age two, the same as I was. I began my training at two. I have the same mindset as you do. I can’t just change what I was shaped into.”
“You stopped training.” He wanted that to have changed everything.
“For a very short period of time I stopped officially taking rotations. I immediately started training again when I left for Spain. There were three months that I stopped going into the shadows, and during those months, I kept up physical training and stepped up mentally training to cope with the sickness I had to combat.”
What was he supposed to say to that? It was instinctive in a shadow rider to protect others. He would have done exactly what she did. He didn’t have to like that she had protected her own bodyguards, but he understood the need. It was ingrained in the riders to use the shadows. Her mind would have been calculating the odds against them and already making the decision. Her body would have just done it, taking the dive into the shadows almost before she was even aware that she’d made the decision.
“We haven’t talked about how sick you get when you go into the shadows.” Deliberately, he switched tactics. He couldn’t think too much about what had happened to her. Or what she’d admitted about her feelings for him. Or even what he’d admitted to her.
Elie studied her features closely as she settled back against the headboard and pulled the blankets around her carefully, clearly stalling for time. Yeah, the sickness was very bad. What had she said? She’d used the three months off to mentally train to cope with the sickness in the shadow tubes.
“Brielle? I expect an answer. An honest one.” Originally, he had been going to go with her into the shadows, but her internal injury had her sidelined for a few weeks. That was a good thing, but it also meant he couldn’t see for himself how bad her reaction was. He had to rely on her actually telling him.
She bit down on the side of her lip, always a sign of nerves with her. “I apparently feel sensations on my nerve endings very easily; at least that was what one of the doctors said to me. When I go into the shadows, all my nerve endings become inflamed and my mind plays tricks on me. I start to hallucinate. When I’m on a mission, I’m very focused, so I don’t have a problem. I complete the mission without a problem, but once it’s done, then I have a difficult time keeping the hallucinations from merging with the sensations I’m feeling on my body because they’re so intense and extreme.”