Page 42 of No Going Back

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Maddie closed her eyes and swallowed hard. With one word, she’d brought her whole world crashing down around her head.

The deception she’d maintained for the last month was over. The truth had finally caught up with her, and she couldn’t help but feel she’d subconsciously engineered that downfall herself through her Freudian slip. She was so tired of the pretence. Hiding her natural responses from the man she’d never stopped loving had become an impossible, daily battle. She’d been living on borrowed time—now the debt was due, and it looked as if it would be repaid with the annihilation of their relationship.

Perhaps it would be better if it ended. Unless she was mistaken, her whole life was about to implode anyway, for reasons that had nothing to do with Guy.

“I’ll ask you one more time—who are you?”

The harshness of his tone cut through her like a Samurai blade. Having just proved she wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was, it was no worse than she deserved. When she confirmed what she was sure he already suspected, he’d show no mercy.

Maddie dropped to her knees. She lowered her head and popped out the coloured contact lenses that had hidden the truth for so long. Her eyesight was fine without them—their purpose was purely cosmetic, because she didn’t need them any more than she needed her glasses. Once Guy saw the true colour of her eyes, the fire she’d been playing with would burn her alive.

A fitting metaphor.

Maddie lifted her gaze to meet his and took a shaky breath. Whatever happened, she’d do this with as much dignity as she could muster. “You know who I am. Hello, Fawkes. It’s been a long time.” Understatement of the century.

His initial reaction was plain—utter disbelief. She wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t often you saw a living ghost, one you’d buried a lifetime ago, on a freezing winter morning, with your breath misting in the frigid air. In his eyes, a thousand questions fought for prominence, yet he said nothing.

Maddie waited. This wasn’t about her—not in the sense of her feelings taking centre stage. After all, how she’d spent the last decade was no secret to her, but she’d just made a mockery of whatever coping mechanism Guy had used to deal with her loss. And if he didn’t hate her now, he surely would once he learned the whole story.

“Spare me the platitudes, Liz—”

“Maddie.”

“Whoever.” He spat the word, leaving her in no doubt about the contempt with which he viewed her. “I thought you were dead.”

His tone made her wonder if he wished that were true. “As you can see, I’m not.”

“Oh, I see all right. All these years, you let me carry on believing I’d lost you.”

“Yes, and you let me believe you’d walked out on me—walked out on us.” The pain boomeranged back, all of it, every bit as raw as it had been all those years ago. “When you came back that last time… It nearly killed me when you abandoned me without a word of explanation. When you didn’t tell me anything about why you left the first time, or why you came back? The only thing that made any kind of sense was that all you wanted was a quick fuck—”

“You were never that! You hear me? You were never that to me. When I heard you’d died, I called in every favour I could to get back in time.”

For her funeral. She knew. Not about the favours, but she’d known he was there. “I saw you. What do you mean about calling in favours? Get back from where?”

“You saw me? You were there? Jesus, this just gets better and better.”

His sarcastic tone cut her to the quick, but what concerned Maddie more was a growing suspicion that there’d been factors at play of which she’d been unaware. “I asked you a question. The favours you called in? What did you mean by that? Why did you need to call in any favours? Where were you?”

He raked a hand through his hair. She knew that gesture of old, and now it was a knife thrust through her belly, a poignant reminder of how well she’d once known him. Or thought she had.

“What the hell does it matter now. I was on a mission, and I begged them to get me back in time for… They’d asked me to go deep undercover in the Middle East. Asked.” He made the word a derisory snort. “I was over there when I found out you’d been killed. I raised hell about getting back. Matthews wouldn’t approve my return, but I wasn’t about to let that oily bastard get in my way. I nearly screwed up the mission, and transport for the journey back was where the favours came in. I landed at Brize Norton that morning, and got to the service with about fifteen minutes to spare.”

“What mission? You never told me about a mission.”

“I was the only suitable candidate, and it was on a need-to-know basis. I couldn’t tell you—I couldn’t tell anyone.”

He seemed calmer now, almost defeated, in a way. Maddie didn’t like it. The picture she was putting together was screaming misunderstanding based on a fatal failure to communicate. What hurt more, though, was the growing realisation that there hadn’t been sufficient trust between them. Oh, there’d been more than enough for them to have the kind of relationship where her masochistic needs had satisfied his sadistic desires, but when it came to their relationship outside the playroom, Guy had put his orders above all else, including her.

But she wasn’t an outsider—at least, she hadn’t been back then—and other officers who were more than just colleagues to one another had discussed mission details. It was an open secret. “Why not? What was so different this time?”

“There were complications.”

“What sort of complications?”

Silence created a chasm between them. Guy stood and crossed the room, as if he couldn’t bear to be near her. He even turned his back to her, so she couldn’t read his expression. Judging by the rigid set of his shoulders, she wasn’t sure she’d want to know what was going through his mind right now, anyway.