Seducing His Princess. Olivia Gates

huff escaped him. “You think I’m making this up? Why? To butter you up for my current purposes? I wish. As someone who knows what a bullet feels like ripping through my flesh, I would have preferred one to admitting how fallible I am, how unprofessional I was, how I risked everyone’s lives to protect a woman who didn’t know me...whom I believed could never be mine.”

      Steel mixed with gold in her gaze, clearly not buying his admissions. Funny. If he’d ever thought he’d confess this to her, he wouldn’t have dreamed this would be her reaction.

      Might as well confess the rest, let her make whatever she wished of it. “When I burst in and I met your eyes, saw that mixture of terror and courage and fury...I couldn’t imagine I wouldn’t be able to look in those eyes again, to get the chance to know you. My instincts took over...and I let them.”

      She averted those eyes, depriving him of their touch. “Yet after you went to such lengths to save me, you didn’t follow up on your wish to ‘know’ me. Not for over a year.”

      He exhaled heavily. “I might have saved the day, for you and for everyone else, but I knew how badly I messed up. I guess I was punishing myself for failing to fulfill my duty and couldn’t reward my failure by giving myself the gift of knowing you, the one behind my lapse.”