CHAPTER 24

No sooner had theyset foot on the street than Dariux turned on Kalli.

“What the hell was that about?” he demanded.

“What?” she asked, walking by him.

“Don’t play innocent.” He rushed after her. “Why did you offer the woman to stay against my express orders?”

“First, her name is Olivia. You might start referring to her as a person, seeing as we are about to upend her life once again. And second, I don’t take orders from you.”

She didn’t break her stride, and it infuriated him he had to chase her through Mayfair.

“You damn well do while we are on this mission. I’m the commander, Kalli. You had no authority to make that offer, nor a way to make good on it if she had taken it.”

“And you?” she said, spinning on him. “Do you have a way to force her to go if she hadn’t wanted to? What would you do, kidnap her? Drag her kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century?”

They were causing a spectacle. He reached out and grabbed her arm. She stiffened, and their eyes clashed. She was going to yank her arm from his grasp and march away. Why he found that so distressing, he couldn’t say. But after a moment of hesitation, she reluctantly consented to walk beside him. He blew out a breath.

“I don’t know. I have not considered the possibilities if she refused to go. After all, why would she want to stay in this century? The twenty-first may not be as advanced as ours, but it is still significantly better than the nineteenth.”

Kalli didn’t answer, just looked at him with pity and contempt. He would have preferred her anger.

“You truly don’t get it, do you?” She sighed. “I want to be mad at you. I am mad at you. But maybe what you deserve is pity.”

That infuriated him. How dare she imply he was deficient in any way? “Is that so? And why is that? Just because I don’t fully understand that fabled emotion they call love? What is it good for, anyway? You think you can prove human relationships are better, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something; this”—he gestured between them—“is not better. These arguments, disagreements, this... difficulty to get along, doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t make me happy.”

Her gaze became even more contemptuous. “It is not supposed to be easy. Yes, human relationships take work. But in the end, they are more rewarding than an artificial relationship with a piece of machinery. And I’m not talking about emotional benefits only. There are studies that suggest that oxytocin is necessary to protect certain functions of the brain. No telling what chronic low levels of the hormone might do to human brains in the future. How old are you again?”

“I’m thirty-nine,” he gritted out.

“Hmm, you may have fifteen or twenty years before your mental capacity starts to decline.”

The nerve. “Oh really? And if you are so superior, then why have you never had a relationship with a human before me?”

“Not having found the ideal partner to form a relationship with is not the same as not wanting said relationship.”

The hotel loomed in front of them now. Their angry strides had made quick work of the blocks.

“I am going to need my own room,” she said before entering the lobby.

Those words, all the more powerful for being delivered in a calm, steady voice full of finality, hit him like a blow to his solar plexus. No, he wasn’t ready for whatever there was between them to end.

“I thought you wanted to give our relationship a try.”

“I thought you wanted that, too.”

“I do.”

“Do you? It didn’t seem so a few minutes ago, in the duke’s drawing room, when you were extolling the virtues of parbots. It didn’t seem so now during this conversation when you just admitted that the difficulties of a human relationship didn’t make you happy. What do you plan to do once we return to the future? Put your parbot on standby and play at being in a relationship with me? What happens when we have disagreements? When I don’t obey your every command? How long until you tire of trying with me and go back to your parbot?”

“And yet it seems you are the one giving up before even giving it a chance.”

“Because I have realized it is a hopeless case. It will never work.”

“If you give up, you are just conceding my point. Wouldn’t you like to prove me wrong?”

“No. If, after all we have shared, you still don’t understand the value of love, it is useless. I will not spend my time trying to convince you of something you don’t want to believe. It’s not about being right or wrong. Maybe that is your truth. You are free to live your life how you feel is best for you. As for me, I want to be with someone who believes in love. I want someone to look at me the way the duke looks at Olivia. I may not find it. But I won’t settle for less.”

A cart was barreling towards them, so he pulled her away from danger into the relative safety of an arched doorway. They were in the middle of a busy intersection. Carts, carriages, pedestrians, and all sorts of chaos swirled around them. He couldn’t focus. Couldn’t come up with the right words to say to convince her. But it was important he did.

“This is a damn stupid place to have this conversation. Let’s go to our room and talk there.”

But Kalli shook her head.

“No. I don’t want to go into our room. It is too private. Too intimate a setting. It may alter our perceptions. I will go in and get a room for myself. If you wish, we can talk tomorrow. After we both had time to think things over. We should meet in a public place. Maybe in the dining room or the park.”

He didn’t like this. She was slipping between his fingers. And it shouldn’t matter, but it did. The worst part is he didn’t know how to hold on to her without losing himself in the process.