I drew back from her and folded my arms across my chest. I called out to the housekeeper, who I knew was in the next room hearing every word. Cora was a wise woman. After I told her she was good for the day, she emerged about two minutes later with her purse over her arm and didn’t look at either one of us as she made her way out the door.
Emilia fumed and—weirdly—she had tears in her eyes. She never cried. I was in full panic mode, my mind racing to figure out what the fuck to do. There was no nice quip from The Art of War about what to do when the other side found out about your spies and were pissed as hell about it. And, from the looks of her, this was about to turn into an all-out war.
I shifted my stance. “I fucked up.”
“At least I can agree with you there.”
“Can we sit down and talk about this?”
She clenched her jaw and wiped a tear with a brusque swipe of her hand. Then she shook her head. “I’m too pissed off at you right now.”
I let out a long breath. I wasn’t going to make the mistake of backing her into a corner again but goddamn if I was going to allow her to leave like this, either. “You have a right to be pissed off. But I did it—”
“Don’t say you did it out of love! Don’t you dare say that. You didn’t have a right.”
“I don’t have a right to know what’s going on with you, why you are acting so weird?”
Her eyes widened and she dropped her backpack on the floor next to where she stood. “You could have, I don’t know, done what normal people do and ask.”
“I did ask. Over and over again. At the restaurant, at Heath’s place. Here. An hour ago. You wouldn’t tell me. And you wouldn’t tell your mom. And I have a sneaking suspicion that you were avoiding both of us on Sunday and you never had plans to go out with her last night.”
“This has nothing to do with you being worried about me and everything to do with your need to control me and my entire life. If you can’t even acknowledge that, then we are done.”
“I’m not some kind of control freak—”
She huffed in disbelief. “That is absolutely what you are! Ever since before we even met in person, you’ve tried to control me. You took control of the auction, you strung me along, you held that money over my head. But that was okay, right? Because you were saving me. And I tolerated it because I fell in love with you in spite of it all.”
“I fell in love with you, too. I never planned that.”
“And you used it as your excuse to keep on controlling me. This is how it’s been between us since the beginning and I never should have allowed it. It’s how you treat everyone in your life. We all move according to your carefully orchestrated plans, like part of one of your codes, and if anyone deviates from what you want, you try to reprogram us. So Mia wants to go off to med school in Maryland? I’ll program her to become Mrs. Adam Drake and she’ll stay here instead.”
Fuck. I combed my hand through my hair, struggling for something to say. But what I should not have said is exactly what came out of my mouth at that moment. “You’re going over the top with this, don’t you think? Projecting anything you can because you don’t want to feel guilty over leaving me to go through with plans you had before you even met me.”
Her jaw dropped. “Oh my God. Oh. My. God. Really, Adam, you are the most brilliant person I’ve ever met, but sometimes you just don’t get it. You are this massive force of nature that blows in and overwhelms me, yanking me around like a helpless ragdoll. And I let you.”
“That’s the problem—you see me as the storm. The storm is life. The storm is the bullshit you find yourself in and I’m the anchor that holds you down and keeps you safe, from getting blown away.”’
She started to shake, her eyes filling again with tears. Her fists balled at her sides. I took a step toward her, my hand outstretched, but she backed away. “I wish I could trust you enough to be my anchor when I need you. But I can’t. You can’t be in control of everything.” Then the most stunning thing happened—she erupted into tears. A loud, messy sort of sobbing that I’d only seen from her one other time—also brought about because of me in a very similar circumstance.
I froze. I wanted to go to her, pull her into my arms, but she was unbelievably pissed at me and I knew that was a bad idea. So in my panic I did the lamest thing possible. I grabbed a nearby box of tissues and held it out to her.
Without a word, she grabbed handfuls of the stuff and buried her face in it.