Gaze blurred with tears, Alex walked over to the bookshelf where she had placed the Weston Cooper Justice Award a week ago. With a quivering hand, she picked up the piece of glass, shaped like a scale, and walked into the kitchen, where she dropped it into the trash.

Eli followed, but didn’t acknowledge what she had done with a word or glance. “Alexandra, I am not my father.”

Yes, but right now it was so hard to separate them. “I know you’re not. I know I can’t hold you responsible for the sins of your father, Eli, but you’re responsible for your sins. Your actions. You’ve used this to win votes.” Her vote. “You’re still using it to win votes.”

She’d known what he was like from the beginning. Eli Cooper had more moves than a roach in a bowl of cereal. Every decision was calculated to the infinitesimal detail. Nothing was left to chance. He wanted to win the election.

He wanted to win her.

But now those niggling doubts about her usefulness to him and his campaign nipped at the edges of her querulous mind. Knowing all those things he was capable of, the lengths he’d go to ensure victory—it was all mixed up in her head and her heart that hurt so much.

“I trusted you—” Her voice broke, and what came out next was a rusty whisper. “I—I defended you to my family. Took hits for you. I let you inside my body with no protection because I trusted you would protect me. We all trust you to protect this city, Eli.”

He cupped her face with those weapons of pleasure that had taken her to heaven so many times. “I have protected you, Alexandra. From day one, from moment fucking zero when I saw you in Smith & Jones last summer, that’s all I’ve wanted to do. That’s why I’m telling you everything now, so there are no lies between us. This . . . this thing with my father. It’s not pleasant, but I’ve been trying to distance myself from it. From him. Forge my own path.”

She jerked from his grasp. “How can you ever do that? You’ve lived with secrets and lies for so long that you don’t know what it’s like to be open. Would you have even told me if that reporter hadn’t called?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

Well, at least he was honest about that.

“Alexandra, listen to me—”

“So you can needle and debate and convince me with that smooth patter of yours? When can you tell a politician is lying? When his lips are moving. And your lips are always moving, Eli. You’re always talking and kissing and making me feel amazing, but those lips of yours are just broadcasting your lies.”

“I love you,” he husked out. Strong hands pushed her back against the kitchen island. Pinned by his hard body, hearing those desperately uttered words, she felt herself sinking under his thrall again. “That’s not a lie. That’s the God’s honest truth. And I know you feel the same way.”

She shut her eyes against what should have been a dream come true. This man she loved telling her exactly what she wanted to hear. But that was the problem—he was playing her again. It was like Cubbies fans thinking this year would be different when they’d been screwed over time and again. Still, they returned to Wrigley, bought more shitty hot dogs and overpriced beer, because they were at the ball game. They were on hallowed ground and getting screwed was part of the experience.

Well, screwing wasn’t enough to rose-color this experience. The Eli goggles had to come off.

“The truth, Eli? Since when have you been on even the barest speaking terms with the truth? Everything out of your mouth is said with one goal in mind: how will this help me win? Whether it’s sabotaging a rival during a date or inventing a lawsuit when you don’t get your way.”

She had almost been fooled, sensually bludgeoned by these plays of a man used to getting everything he wanted. To have someone want her badly enough to employ such black-ops tactics—how flattered she had been. Her friends thought the stunts he had pulled were romantic. For God’s sake, Kinsey had fallen for it. Even if Alex could get past this deception, how could she continue looking into those eyes and not see the gaze of the consummate liar?

He held her face, leaned his forehead to hers. “Honey, we can get through this. Look how far we’ve come already. All the obstacles we’ve smashed to get here.”

“You mean the rivals you’ve crushed and the pieces you’ve moved around the board?” She pushed him away. Her heart felt like it was shredding inside her, layers stripping off one at a time. “You got the firefighters’ union endorsement because I made you look good. But not just me. My family of heroes made you look good. You appropriated the legacy of my dead father and brother because your own is corrupted. Soiled.”

She struck her breast where the memory of Sean and Logan lived. The men she honored every day. All along, she’d worried that Eli was using her to win over her tribe of fire, but it was worse than she could ever have suspected.

“You haven’t just used me, Eli. You’ve used them. And I’ll never forgive you for that.”

She had no idea what impact her words made because she was already running toward the door, swiping at her leaking emotion, pushing away her pain with every step.

He didn’t try to stop her.

Eli Cooper had finally given up.

 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It wasn’t every day that someone managed to get a jump on the mayor of Chicago’s security team, or the mayor himself, but then Eli supposed that after the last few weeks, nothing should surprise him.

That Eli had been sucker punched by a Dempsey? Not shocking in the least.

What did surprise him was that (a) this particular Dempsey made an appointment to hit the mayor soundly on the jaw and (b) the strike did not come at the hands of Luke or Beck, who were generally acknowledged as the ones with homicidal tendencies.

Eli rubbed his sore jaw and marveled at how his ten o’clock—one Wyatt Fox—could stand before him with such calm. He would have loved to have this man in his Marine unit.

“Huh. So, would you like to sit?” Eli asked his attacker, one hand still holding his jaw as the other gestured to the chairs in his office on the fifth floor of city hall.

Firefighter Fox flexed his punching hand, tweaked a knife-straight eyebrow, and took a seat in one of the comfortable leather chairs across from Eli’s desk. Endeavoring to keep it friendly, Eli sat in the other armchair a few feet away from Wyatt.

Who then crossed his arms and stared as if it was Eli’s job to make conversation with the man who had just committed a Class 2 felony. One would think he punched out public officials every day.

Eli’s jaw hurt, but better to feel something, anything, than this numbness in his chest, this lump of ice where his heart should be. The last two days without her had been a living nightmare. He had damned any chance of a future with her by going against type and making honesty the best policy.

There was irony in there, somewhere.

“How is she?”

“She’s a Dempsey,” came the gruff reply. In other words, she had her family and all their strength running through her veins. She would survive this. She would survive Eli.

Eli wasn’t entirely sure that he would survive her. Or that he wanted to. Without this woman in his life, he felt like a big fat heap of zero.

“What has she told you?”

“Nothin’. But I found her cryin’ in her cornflakes yesterday morning. Would have come sooner but this was the earliest I could get on your calendar.” He shrugged as though that was enough of an explanation, and Eli supposed it was. He’d made the woman he loved cry and she would never trust him again.