Third a Kiss

This was a breach of everything between us.

This was unforgivable.

New tears trickled down my face, these born from grief and pain. Giving into the exhaustion, I planted my hands over my eyes, unwilling to look at the man I thought I knew and the stable hand I didn’t.

A buzz sounded. A click and a whirr.

I looked up.

The stable hand stood in front of me, the pitchfork at his feet. One hand dragged through his sandy blond locks, the other balled into a fist by his thigh. He wore a simple black shirt with tan patches sewn over areas of wear. His jeans were equally as filthy as Sully-not-Sully’s had been.

He was the exact opposite of the blue-eyed, miserably brooding mogul who ruled forty-four islands in the middle of nowhere.

But I knew him.

My soul recognised him.

He was familiar.

He was mine.

Or at least…he was.

He shifted under my stare, guilt flaring with brown fire in his gaze.

I frowned, once again sensing something wasn’t right.

But what?

Looking over his shoulder, I expected to see Sully’s imposter staring at us, watching this tender moment, ready to attack the stable hand and continue his assault on me.

Only…there was no one else.

No hint that there had ever been a third person in this complex, confusing illusion.

There was just me and this lanky boy who watched me with utmost desolation, knowing he’d fucked up yet remained tongue-tied on how to fix it.

With a weary sigh, I gave up any pretences.

I stopped playing this game of lies.

I looked the boy directly in his face and gave him the finger. A slur that needed no interpretation. “Fuck you, Sully Sinclair. Fuck you.”

Chapter Twenty

 

“HOW?” I shrugged with utmost vulnerability. Vulnerability I’d always kept buried. “How did you know?”

Eleanor swiped at her tears and straightened her spine. “The same way you’d know if I appeared in a different form.”

I frowned.

That didn’t answer my question.

I wasn’t psychic or gifted. I didn’t have whatever voodoo she possessed to be able to see past my hallucinations. Had my program glitched? Had she seen past the coding and seen the lack of humanity in my doppelgangers eyes?

Glancing at my hands, I scowled harder. The fantasy was still intact. I stared at the fingers of a stable boy, complete with blisters and thickened palms. I’d shed my usual tall height and operated the body of a younger man. For all intents and purposes, this blond-haired farmhand was a puppet, dancing to my jerks on his strings. Only difference was, the link between his actions and my own was flawless…she shouldn’t be able to know.

She should be crying out in delirium while the program I’d written—when I’d first dabbled with the parameters of Euphoria—pile-drove her against the wall.

She should be having sex with me…Sully.

Not watching some stable boy with a painful mix of unhappiness, hate, and condemning certainty.

The hand I’d inspected curled into a fist as my temper rose.

She should be happy to be fucked by him; grateful that our fight was seemingly over…not standing here with glowing confidence that the cypher that looked identical to me was the stranger and not this exact opposite standing before her.

“How?” I asked again, my temper bleeding through my voice, laced with a Southern twang and not as deep as my born attributes. “Tell me how you knew.”

Eleanor sighed heavily. For a moment, she looked as if she’d slap me—rage had turned her grey eyes into lashing quicksilver. However, she wrangled her anger back into controllable and pushed off from the wall.

My borrowed body reacted as she moved toward me. My cock thickened. My heart thundered. She would always be it for me. She would always be the one.

Yet she never did anything I expected.

Thanks to this little game, I was supposed to be the one nursing a broken heart. I was supposed to be living through a nightmare of watching the woman I loved with all my fucking soul make love to a man who wasn’t me. I was supposed to be mollified in my suspicions that trusting anyone—even those my mind had deemed safe—were entirely justified. That trust was the true traitor here. That humans were gullible and weak, and it wasn’t our fault that we betrayed each other because, in the end, we trusted what our eyes and ears told us over instinct. We had blinded and deafened ourselves to the animalistic part of our natures in so many ways.

I knew it was a shitty thing to do to her, but I’d done it for me. I’d done it so I could finally admit that, whatever I felt for her, would only break me and ultimately kill her because I wouldn’t be able to control myself if she betrayed me again.

That trigger wasn’t something I could control.

Therefore, I had to shove the truth in my goddamn eyes and accept that Eleanor was just human, and I was asking far too much to expect her to always have my back. To expect her to love me, regardless of shape or form or what her rational mind told her.

The carbon copy of myself—the man she’d tried to knee in the balls—had been an exact replica. In my mind, I’d already said a painful goodbye because how could I expect her to realise it wasn’t me when it was me standing before her?

I’d set her up to fail—digging that poisonous knife deeper into my useless heart.

However, Eleanor had just blown apart my theory with her determined one-finger salute. She’d made all my pain and fears slam to a screeching halt. She’d proven just what a twat I was by shoving the truth into my eyes.

She wasn’t like the others.

She was different. She’d always been different.

And she made me doubt…everything.

She stood up to me like she had that second day when she’d yelled at me in front of the guests. She’d torn into me without any concern for her safety after she’d finished.

She watched me the same way now.

She watched me come apart and splinter into worthless fragments.

How?

How did she know?

How was I so fucking stupid to hurt her this way?

Her teeth clenched as she pointed at my forearm. “Pull up your shirt.”

My thoughts bounced and collided, ratcheting my heart rate into a goddamn mess. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” She straightened her shoulders, as if conversing with me pissed her off. “Pull up your shirt.”

Pursing my lips, I did as she asked, yanking at the cuff until it bunched against my elbow. Blond hair scattered my sun-bronzed skin; the size of the arm smaller than my usual one. It felt strange to stare at a limb I had no connection with. No sense of ownership. My scars from my past were gone. My broken and healed bones no longer a part of me.

I had no kinship with this body, yet…Eleanor had known almost instantly that I hid inside it.

How?

Fucking how?

With another deep breath, she stepped into me. Hesitatingly, she raised both her hands, ready to touch me.

I stiffened with anticipation.

Her gaze caught mine with molten steel. “Close your eyes.”

I scowled. “What? No. I—”

“Close your eyes, Sully.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to know what this experiment would prove. She hadn’t answered my question. This was wasting time.