DEFY (The Billionaire's Rules, Book 8) by Kelly Favor Page B

have kept all of this from her.
“Were you still planning to get married at this point?”
    Nodding his head, Cullen smiled briefly.   “Perhaps selfishly, I insisted that we
set a wedding date, even as our relationship fractured.   Jillian was struggling emotionally, and
the seizure medication wasn’t always helping.   She had more seizures.   The tumor was growing fast, and so I was
forced to schedule the next surgery sooner than I’d have liked.   I should have known I was too close to
it all,” Cullen said.   “But I was
desperate.   I had the sense that I
was watching a slow motion train wreck and there had to be something I could do
to stop it.”
    “And you had to be the one conducting her surgery?”
    “I didn’t trust anyone else to hold
Jillian’s life in their hands.”   He
stared at Ivy as if challenging her to disagree.   “I’m the best brain surgeon in the
world,” he said.   “I’m not about to
let someone else crack the skull of the woman I lo—“ he stopped in
mid-sentence.
    “Go on,” Ivy told him.   “You can say it, Cullen.”
    “I was talking about the past, Ivy.”
    She shook her head.   “You weren’t, actually.”   She smiled sadly.   “And we both know it.”
    Cullen licked his lips and grimaced.   “Whatever you’re trying to prove, it’s
not true.   What happened to Jillian
is all behind me now.   She’s
gone.   Why are we rehashing this?”
    “None of it is in the past, Cullen.   You’re still having nightmares about
it.   Why is that?”
    His jaw set.   “Everyone has regrets.   Maybe I have more than some.   But I won’t apologize for the things
I’ve done to help those closest to me.”
    “I don’t expect you to.”
    “It seems that you do.   You think I owe you an explanation for
the death of the woman I loved.”
    “I think I should know about it, yes,”
Ivy said, laughing that he could be so clueless.   “And even now, you’re trying to avoid
the subject.”
    He threw up his hands.   “You want me to pull my guts out in
front of you?   Is that what would
make you feel better?” he said, his voice rising.   “You want to hear that in my arrogance,
I insisted on conducting Jillian’s final surgery?   And that I made a
mistake—a simple mistake—that cost her everything?   That cost a human being her life?” he
said, and now his cheeks had turned red and there was a vein steadily pulsing
in his temple.   “I watched her bleed
out, Ivy.   I killed the woman I
loved and there’s nobody else to blame for it.   I did it,” he said pointing at
himself.   “Me.”  
    Ivy looked at him and he stared back at
her with a gaze that burned with anger.   She didn’t know if he was angry with her for making him discuss his
past, or if he was mad at himself.  
    Perhaps both.  
    “I just wish you’d told me that you were
planning on marrying her,” Ivy said.   “That you loved her.”
    “People fall in love sometimes,” he said.   “It happens.   Did you think that I lived in a bubble
before I met you?”
    Ivy smirked.   “No.   But I didn’t know that you had another
‘student’ like me.   A student that you
disciplined in the same way as me.   That you loved.   That you
wanted to marry.”
    “You’re the one I married,” he said.   “Not Jillian.   Not anyone else.   You.”
    “But if she’d lived, it would have been
her,” Ivy said.
    Cullen’s hands clenched.   “But she didn’t live.   She died.   So everything worked out for you, didn’t
it?”
    Ivy felt sick.   “That’s not what I meant and you know
it.”
    Ivy shook her head as she thought about
it.   How could she ever have
believed that he was falling for her, that he felt something real for her?   He’d done this exact same thing
before.   He’d gotten involved with a
woman that was forbidden by the nature of his work, and then he’d taken control
of her life.  
    And he’d wanted to marry her, too.   Everything