“He guessed,” she said on a tired sigh. “He saw your shirt. The one you gave me the other night.”
“Great. That’s great.” Shaking his head, he felt the last of his plan shatter out from under him. He’d thought he had it all figured out. The perfect revenge. Now it was all gone, and he was left standing alone with the woman he’d dragged into the rubble.
He pushed one hand through his hair and tried to figure out how this could have gone any worse, but he didn’t come up with anything.
“Now I need to know something from you,” Rose said.
His gaze snapped to hers. “What?”
“Was Dave right? He said you were only with me to get back at him. Was this all for revenge?”
He hadn’t planned to tell Rose about the revenge plot. He wasn’t interested in hurting her, after all. It was Dave he wanted to make pay. But looking into her eyes, he couldn’t lie to her, either. There’d already been enough lies between them. “Yeah. That was the plan.”
“The plan.” She huffed out a breath and shook her head again. “Wow. There was an actual plan.”
Her cool blue eyes locked on him, and Lucas shifted uncomfortably under that steady regard. It had been a long time, years maybe, since he’d felt the stirrings of guilt and regret that were starting to burn through him right now. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d felt like this.
And he didn’t like it. Damn it, he had done what needed doing. Dave had had to pay for his betrayal, and now he would. Collateral damage wasn’t pretty, but sometimes it was unavoidable.
Going for a bravado he wasn’t really feeling, Lucas said, “Rose, I didn’t set out to hurt you.”
She nodded jerkily as if she were a puppet having her strings yanked. “So, just a bonus for you, then.”
Another sharp stab of something hot and painful poked at his insides. He looked at her and felt completely torn. She was the sister of the man he considered his enemy. But she was also the woman he had spent the last couple of weeks with, laughing. Talking. Loving.
No. He pushed that last word out of his mind so fast, it was really nothing more than a blur on his consciousness. He didn’t love Rose. He didn’t love anyone. What he felt for her was…hell, he couldn’t even name it, but he knew it wasn’t love. How could it be?
That wasn’t part of the plan.
He took a breath. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out.”
“Really? Then what? You were just supposed to get me into bed and then you would disappear? Never to be heard from again? Was that it?”
“Pretty much,” he admitted, though the words tasted bitter and had to be forced from his throat. When he’d first come up with this scenario, it had seemed pretty straightforward. Now, it was all tangled up in things he didn’t want to identify. Now, he was looking into a pair of blue eyes glittering with pain and humiliation and he felt like kicking his own ass.
She was still staring at him as if he were a stranger that had somehow wandered into her home, so he tried to make her see this from his side. “Rose, I didn’t know you when this started.”
“You still don’t, if you think I’m going to stand here and listen to you try to explain away what you did.”
Frustration boiled through the regret. “Dave stole from me. Betrayed my friendship.”
“And what have you done, Lucas? Is it really so different?” She glared at him for a long minute before looking away and adding, “At least Dave had a reason for what he did, all you had was your own petty need for payback.”
“Petty?” He grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face him.
Fine, he deserved to feel like a jerk for using her. He could accept that. But damned if he’d stand there and have her tell him that his need for revenge was nothing more than petty. “I trusted him. My brothers trusted him. He turned on all of us. I don’t think it’s petty to want some satisfaction for that.”
She pulled away from his touch, and instantly, his hands felt cold and empty.
“And I was a tool to be used.”
“Not just a tool, Rose,” he said, hating the words as they came out of his mouth, but somehow, he was unable to stop them. “You were—”
“Pitifully easy to trick?” she finished for him.
“Rose, try to understand,” he said, even knowing that she wasn’t listening to him anymore.
He reached out to her again, but she jerked back as if protecting herself from something foul.
Which, he thought, was just about right.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, shaking her head and swallowing hard. “God, you’re just like all the rest of them. You used me. Like my father. And Dave. And Henry. My God, I didn’t see it.”
She laughed, and it was a harsh, brittle sound that tore at something inside Lucas that he refused to recognize.
“You weren’t supposed to see it,” he said.
“Well then, big congrats to you! Mission accomplished! Saint Rose taken down a peg, and big bad thief taught a very important lesson, I’m sure.”
“Look, Rose—”
“No. You look,” she interrupted, anger churning in her voice now and fury coloring her porcelain cheeks. “Whatever was between us? You’re right. That’s over. You got what you wanted, so we don’t ever have to see each other again.”
He didn’t like the sound of that even though he’d gone to her house to pretty much say the same damn thing. And that didn’t make a bit of sense. Lucas didn’t like confusion. He liked order. He liked knowing where he was going, how he was going to get there and what he’d find when he arrived.
But ever since getting involved with Rose, he’d been wandering around in a daze. Why was he only noticing that now?
“Get out, Lucas. Get out of my house.”
She was looking up at him as if he were the enemy. He guessed he’d earned that. He’d never been tossed out of a house before, but he supposed that he’d earned that, as well.
But he wasn’t leaving until she understood one more thing.
“I’ll go,” he told her. “But we’re not completely done until we know if you’re pregnant or not. And if you are, Rose, I’ll be back.”
Ten
“He sent me a check.”
Three days of silence, Rose told herself. No contact at all from Lucas and this is what she gets in the mail?
In the mail?