“You left without a goddamn word. You just drove off.”

“Not true,” she said. “I had a word with Rowan.”

She could hear his breath sawing in his throat, a ragged, telltale sound. “You left without a goddamn word to me.”

She whispered, “Maybe I’m done talking to you.”

“Well, I’m not done talking to you.” He turned to face her. “I’m sorry.”

She was so braced for a fight anyway at first the words didn’t make sense. “What?”

“I said I’m sorry.” He strode over and took her by the shoulders. “Rowan told me what you said, about drawing a line in the sand. I didn’t realize I had pushed you so far.”

“You had a lot on your plate yesterday. Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore.” She pulled away from him, shrugged out of her jacket, set her purse aside, and went to sit on the sofa. Leaning forward, she rested her elbows on her knees. “We accomplished what you needed. You’re reunited with your people, and you have access to your home. I’m done.”

“You can’t be done.” Striding over, he crouched in front of her. “Come back.”

“No,” she said.

He braced one hand on the edge of the couch by her thigh and leaned closer. “Sophie, come back.”

“No, Nikolas.” She had cried so long and hard her well was dry, but her chest felt like a giant bruise. She focused on the floor between her feet to avoid looking at him.

There was a long silence. Then he asked, “Why not?”

Staring at the floor didn’t give her enough distance from him. She buried her face in her hands. “What do you mean, why not? You know why not. There’s no point to any of this fighting or apologizing, because we’re not partners. We’re not in this together—we’re not in anything together. I’m not coming back, because as soon as you get me out of your system, you’re gone, and I’m not going to hang around for that experience. Because I love too much and too hard, for too long. If I go back with you, I’ll invest even more of myself in you, when you have told me repeatedly you don’t have anything to give a lover, and you will break me even harder—”

Realizing where she was headed with the last of that sentence, she stopped abruptly, but the unsaid words still hung in the room.

You will break me even harder than you have already.

Gently he curled fingers around one of her hands and coaxed it down. Then he took hold of her other hand and coaxed that down too. He held her hands to his lips and said quietly against her fingers, “We’ve said some pretty awful things to each other at times, haven’t we?”

Her throat closed. She nodded.

He kissed her fingers. “There are different levels of truth, my Sophie. On the one hand, there is this—as soon as I get you out of my system, I’m gone. That was a defense mechanism, said in the heat of the moment when you told me you were making love to me for the last time. But on the other hand, there is also this—I will never get you out of my system. Never. Can you hear the truth in that?”

She could, and her heart started to pound.

“Then,” he said, even more quietly, “there are truths that change. Before I met you, I was adamant about not investing in a relationship. I was constantly on the run, my life in danger, and that is a terrible thing to take to a woman’s bed. And I met you. You’re stubborn, infuriating, courageous, inventive, generous, and kind. You make me laugh. You make me crazy. You make me rediscover things inside myself that I thought were dead forever. You make me hard as a rock until all I can think about is tearing off your clothes. How long have we known each other?”

“Maybe four days, or maybe seventeen.” At a loss, she shook her head. “Who the hell knows anymore?”

He gave her a crooked smile. “No matter how you calculate it, or how many time slippages we’ve gone through, it hasn’t been very long.”

“No,” she whispered. “It hasn’t.”

He paused. “Tell me you don’t love me.”

“I don’t love you,” she told him.

The falsehood lingered in the air between them. He smiled. “Tell me you don’t want me.”

She looked him in the eyes and said, “I don’t want you.”

Oh, that one. That was laughably false.

His smile died. “When you went to Raven’s Craig, I asked Braden how he and his wife made the kind of commitment they had, when we live such dangerous lives. He said, the love has got to be bigger than everything else. The isolation, the separation, the danger. When the love is bigger than all that—you just do it. You pay the price in uncertainty and sometimes bereavement, because every moment you’re together is worth the cost.”

“What a beautiful thing to say,” she whispered.

His grip tightened on her hands. “I can’t lie. Part of me is still struggling, because if I let you into my life I feel like I’m putting you in danger. Also over the last week, my life has changed somewhat. We have reinforcements now, which means we can create pockets of safety, but there’ll still be violence and danger. We didn’t kill Morgan. Isabeau still hates us. Oberon is still unconscious. Yet in spite of all that, I need to ask you. Can we make love bigger than everything else?”

With all his responsibilities, he had still left old friends and comrades, and the command of his army, to come this morning and ask her this. Well, and to bitch at her a little bit too, but she would get over that.