"I thought I was doing what was best?—"
"What you thought was best." I shook my head, anger and heartbreak warring in my chest.
"The great James Banks, so noble and self-sacrificing. So convinced he knew what was right for the poor, helpless princess."
He stepped closer, close enough that I could smell his familiar cologne, could see the desperate sincerity in his eyes. "I was wrong."
The simple admission stopped my train of thought faster than a speeding train on broken tracks.
"Wh…. What?". My breathing caught in my throat at his proximity to me, and the admission of fault.
"I was wrong to make that choice for you. Wrong to think I could protect you by breaking your heart. Wrong to believe that walking away would somehow make things better." His voice was barely above a whisper now.
"I've regretted it every day for six months."
I stared at him in shock, my mind struggling to process what he was telling me. "You're saying you lied when you said I meant nothing?"
"I'm saying I lied about everything except loving you." His professional mask was gone completely now, revealing the raw pain beneath. "Which is why I had to make you believe the opposite. Because I was a coward who couldn't face telling youthe truth—that staying together would come with a price I wasn't sure either of us could pay."
The room seemed to spin around me as six months of carefully constructed reality crumbled. James hadn't used me and discarded me. He'd sacrificed his own happiness—our happiness—because he thought it was what was best for me.
"You broke my heart to save my reputation," I said, my voice hollow with disbelief.
"I broke both our hearts," he corrected quietly. " It almost killed me, Evangeline."
Before I could respond, he seemed to catch himself, professional walls slamming back into place with visible effort. "But that's not why we're here. The Kozlov threat is real and immediate. We need to focus on?—"
"Stop." I held up a hand, unable to bear another word of his clinical detachment. "Just stop. You can't do that—you can't bare your soul one moment and then retreat into bodyguard mode the next."
"Evangeline, the situation with Dmitri?—"
"Can and Will wait five more minutes while I process the fact that the man I believed destroyed my life actually destroyed his own to protect me."
I moved to the window, staring out at the London street below without really seeing it. "Six months, James. Six months of believing I wasn't worth fighting for. Of thinking you'd used me and discarded me like trash."
"I know. And I'm sorry. More sorry than I can ever express." His voice was rough with emotion he was fighting to control. "But right now, we need to focus on keeping you safe from?—"
"From what? From Dmitri?" I turned back to face him, taking in the exhaustion etched in every line of his face, the way he was holding himself with rigid control. "Tell me something—ifI marry him, will that make you happy? Will it prove that your noble sacrifice was worth it?"
The question looked as if it had temporarily stunned James, disrupting his thought process. "No."
"No?"
"It would kill me." The admission was barely audible, torn from him against his will. "The thought of you with him, of him touching you, of you having to endure his—" He stopped, jaw clenching as he fought for control.
"Then help me," I said quietly. "Not as my former bodyguard. Not as a security consultant. As the man who claims to love me. Help me find a way out of this that doesn't involve sacrificing my happiness for political expediency."
For a moment, I thought he might reach for me. Might close the distance between us and hold me the way he had in Sicily, when the world had been simpler and love had seemed like enough.
Instead, he straightened his shoulders, slipping back into professional mode like armor. "I'll handle the Kozlov situation. The photographs will never see the light of day, and Dmitri will withdraw his proposal."
"And then what? You disappear again? Go back to pretending we never happened?"
Pain flashed across his features before he could hide it. "If that's what you want."
"What do I want?" I laughed, but there was no humor in it. "What I want is for you to stop making decisions about my life without consulting me. What I want is honesty instead of noble lies. What I want?—"
I stopped, the words caught in my throat. Because what I wanted was impossible, wasn't it? Too much had broken, causing too much damage. Even if James still loved me,and if his leaving had been a misguided attempt at protection, how couldwe possibly rebuild something that had been built on deception from the start?
