“I said I love you,” he whispered. “I should have said it before. I shouldn’t have waited until impending death dragged it out of me. You were talking about your mother, remember? You said she’d always been a bitch to you, but she was getting elderly and you wanted to be available in case she changed. I thought, how like you to be so loyal to someone who doesn’t deserve it. I’d fallen in love with you long before then, but that was the moment when I knew for sure.”

She released a shaky breath. “I love you too, but you sure don’t make it easy sometimes.”

“I will,” he said into her hair. “I swear it.”

She snorted. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I’m keeping this one. Sometimes you’re too loyal for your own good, and sometimes I hold on to my promises for too long. I should never have asked you for more time. It was easy to risk my life when I was the only one involved. Then it became unbearable.”

“I understood.” Her fingers couldn’t stop roaming the expanse of his wide, tense back. “It made me frustrated and angry, but I got it. You’ve had other people depending on you, and you were right—you wouldn’t be the kind of man I would want to be with if you could abandon them so easily.”

“Fuck this fucking camera,” he muttered viciously. Shoving away, he stalked around the room like a caged animal, then rounded on her. “Go back to California.”

She shook her head, mouth grim. “That genie’s out of the bottle.”

His eyes flashed yellow fire. “It isn’t. You flew back under your own name. That leaves your new ID intact. We can get you out of the city, to another airport.”

“I’m not leaving.” God only knew what their watchers were gleaning from this furious confrontation. She walked toward him but stopped with her back to the camera, keeping her expression obscured, because God only knew what it revealed. “I meant what I said. The agreement we made has blown up in our faces.”

He slashed at the air with a hand. “That’s not acceptable!”

“I don’t recall asking for your permission.” She searched his expression as his anger boiled higher. “You said it wasn’t an accident.”

“It wasn’t!” he snarled.

The sick feeling returned to the pit of her stomach. “What happened?”

“I got T-boned,” he bit out. “Twice. First on one side, then on the other. If I hadn’t already started to swerve and accelerate, I would have been crushed. I threw the communication spell to contact you just before impact.”

She felt the blood leave her face again. “Who did it?”