HE’D seen her. And, while nearly killing him, it had been the key to his sanity. The free pass he’d taken and run with. Claire had moved on. Taken that irrevocable step and given up on the marriage they’d stopped fighting for years before.
He’d been sickened and relieved all at once. Reluctant and determined that night when he’d gone out and found a woman—one who wasn’t looking for anything more than he was.
It hadn’t been beautiful or meaningful or intense. It had been an act. An escape. One he’d hated himself for taking. But after that he’d been free.
And he’d refused to look back.
Only now, the confusion painted across Claire’s face had him twisting with denial, scouring the gritty details of a memory he’d tried to forget.
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, taking the clothes he’d so recently stripped her of and pulling them on in jerky movements.
He wanted to help. To reach out and straighten the sleeve that had somehow turned around and inside itself. But, God help him, he couldn’t touch her right then. Couldn’t stand the feel of his own damn skin as the framework of who he was, the choices he made, and how he lived began to crumble around him.
“Back in New York. I went to your apartment. You were finished with school. You’d told me you weren’t coming back.” His teeth ground down as he dragged a breath through his nose. “I’d flown in on the red-eye. And when I got to your place, I saw him. Saw you walk him out to the front stoop. Put your arms around his neck.” Had he known she hadn’t slept with him—
What would it have mattered?
Even if she hadn’t been interested in another man, she hadn’t been interested in him either. He would have been waiting around like a fool for something that would never have happened.
An old knife twisted through his gut, making him push back and cross to the far corner of the room before she could see the reaction he didn’t want to acknowledge to himself, let alone her.
New York. Claire remembered. She knew whom he was talking about. Only one man had spent the night with her since she’d left Ryan. But he’d slept on the couch, not in her bed, and sex had been the last thing between them.
God, to think he’d flown through the night to see her and instead saw that. If only she’d known he’d been there, she could have explained. Saved him the hurt or betrayal or whatever it was he’d felt.
No. There weren’t any if onlys. She’d stopped playing that game a long time ago.
“That was Joe Nevin. He was a good friend, and he did spend the night. Only, we didn’t….” Her words trailed off. She couldn’t say it. “He’d lost his wife. It was the anniversary of her death and he needed a friend. He drank too much and I let him stay on the couch. But even if the circumstances had been different, I wouldn’t have been able to spend the night with him the way you’re talking about.”
Ryan caught her reflection in the glass. “Because of me?”
“Not you. Me.” Partly because her body hadn’t physically recovered from the trauma that put her back in the emergency room the week before—one she hadn’t told Ryan about then and wouldn’t burden him with now. Especially not now.
But that was only half the reason.
Claire wrapped her arms around herself, refusing to think about how warm she’d been in Ryan’s arms just a few minutes before.
All that was gone now.
“What happened between us. The way things changed after I lost our baby. The way I stopped responding to you… It was everything, Ryan. I didn’t feel. I didn’t care. I barely existed. It was as if my entire world went gray.” She straightened her shoulders. “I’ve been working for a long time to get back to living rather than just existing. And mostly I’ve done it. But in some ways…” She drew a slow breath, held her hands out helplessly before her.
“Only, then you showed up and, I don’t know how or why, but suddenly it’s like a switch flipped. You make me feel. And I wanted that. I thought you’d take me to bed and I’d finally have all the pieces of myself I’d lost, back again.” It wasn’t the whole truth. She knew she couldn’t be put back together the same way she once was, that there were parts of who she’d been that were lost forever. But of those that were salvageable, this was the last one.
“You weren’t going to tell me.”
“No.” If she’d been able to keep that secret, Ryan never would have known. It exposed a part of her she didn’t want shared. Worse yet, she recognized the toll this truth had taken on him. It was written in the lines of his face. Ryan didn’t take his responsibilities or commitments lightly. He’d married her because she was pregnant and he would have stayed with her through those dark times no matter what it cost him…if she’d let him. He wouldn’t have left because that was the kind of man he was.
That day in New York she’d unknowingly given Ryan the permission he’d needed to move on. And now he’d just found out everything he believed was wrong.
She reached out to him, only to drop her hands at the last second. Better she just leave. Quietly she gathered her bag, surveying the devastation they’d left in their wake.
Folders and reports were strewn across the floor and only a single leaf of paper remained atop the table that had once been nearly covered. “I thought we could give each other a last night together, something good. But I see that all I’ve done is take something away. I’m sorry, Ryan. I didn’t mean to.”
Moments after watching Claire collect herself and leave, Ryan shoved through to the master suite, only vaguely registering the door bouncing shut behind him. Blindly he stalked the length of his floor and back, straining for control as adrenaline and testosterone, mixing at toxic levels, beat a violent path through his veins. Hammered past his ears in a deafening roar.
Six years, he’d been completely, perfectly, contentedly ignorant. Wielding that damn image of a man leaving her place like a weapon every time guilt tried to gnaw at the comfort of the life he’d built.
He hadn’t been the one to give up. That’s what he told himself. He hadn’t quit first. Because that wasn’t the kind of man he was, it wasn’t how he’d been raised. He may not have had a man at home to teach him about being a father or husband, how to be there for a wife who needed him, but he understood commitment and responsibility.
Only, he’d been wrong.
He hated that. Hated himself and hated Claire for disrupting the reality he’d so easily accepted. For making him wonder. Doubt. For giving him one more failure to heap on the pile building since nearly the day he’d first met her.
Why hadn’t he just gotten out of that damn car? Walked up to her door and confronted her. She would have told him the truth, and they could have gone forward from there.
Not together. Even then it had already been too late. Their marriage had died years before. There was no resuscitating it.
That part of the story wouldn’t change no matter what he’d known or when.
But if he’d manned up and talked to her—instead of letting the months slip past, turn into years—they would have had to face facts. It was over. They could have ended it then.
And now Claire would be nothing more than a distant memory.
Right. Because she was so easy to forget.
Hell, he could still taste her skin on his tongue. Smell her hair in his clothes. Feel her burning beneath his hands, against his chest…around his hips. His fists clenched at his sides. She’d been ready. Hot and wet and so damn eager.
Desperate. For him.
Because in nine years she hadn’t had another man.
Why did it have to affect him so much? Knowing he’d been the only one. That on some primitive level he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge, she was still his.
His hand sliced through the air in aimless aggression.
He didn’t need this. It wasn’t what he’d planned or expected. But then nothing was going the way he expected with Claire. That truth had been bombarding him since the first minute he laid eyes on her in Rome. He’d wanted her then, even if he hadn’t wanted to admit it—because he’d known it would be a mistake.
Except it didn’t feel like a mistake. Not when she’d been burning like wildfire beneath his touch, and, damn it, not when she told him he was the only one. The only thing that felt wrong had been the one thing he should have been used to by now. Watching her go.
Claire paced the winding pebble path of Ryan’s interior garden, waiting for her cab to arrive. A tremble ran through her and, wrapping her arms around her middle, she sank onto the driftwood chaise. The garden, like everything else in the house, was a masterpiece of balance between contrasts and complements. Colors, textures and scents. Time, motion and light. Young bamboo shoots, hip height, slender and vivid green, rustled in the night breeze opposite a twelve foot sculptural installation of petrified bridge supports preserved from a river in China. Brightly colored birds of paradise craned above chubby-leaved ground cover. And cocoa husks buried beneath the varied foliage and brush infused the otherwise briny sea air with the rich scent of decadent comfort.
A comfort Claire couldn’t embrace.
What a disaster. The last thing she’d wanted to do was add to the guilt and responsibility Ryan already carried on his shoulders because of her. But that’s what had happened tonight. And now, so much damage had been done she couldn’t fathom a counter to it.
Tomorrow she’d have to return. She’d have to face Ryan knowing how close they’d come to making love. And how everything had gone to hell because of it.
A horn honked twice. Her cab.
Pushing up from the bench, she walked to the gate. “I’m coming.”
Only, after a dumbfounding moment, she realized she had no idea how to open it. Every time she’d come or gone, it had been through the side driveway with an electric gate she didn’t know how to access. This exit was a six-foot-wide square that had once been a Buddhist temple ceiling. Elaborately carved in an intricate floral relief, the smoke-blackened panel was stunning and stupefying all at once.
She pulled at the handle. It didn’t budge. Searched in vain for a latch and felt her face heating at the notion of having to seek out Ryan just so she could leave his house. No. There had to be a way.
“One more minute, please,” she called to the waiting cab, going up on tiptoe to feel for a release or catch. Nothing.
“Like this.” The deep murmur came from startlingly close behind, and Claire jumped as Ryan reached around her to push a recessed button while simultaneously pulling the handle. The gate swung soundlessly open, forcing her to step back into the heat of his body. But already he was moving around her, his eyes holding briefly with hers.
“We’re not done.”
Ryan jogged to the waiting cab and handed off a few bills through the open window with an apology for the inconvenience.
And then he was back. A dark silhouette amid the shadows, Ryan was unreadable in his features, but radiated a tension that was unmistakable nonetheless. Intimidating.
He closed the gate behind him. Preventing her exit with his presence more than his physical form.
“I drove you over here. I can take you back. Later.”
Pressing her lips together, she nodded. After what happened, or nearly happened, she supposed they should talk. Clear the air, if only to agree to leave the incident behind them. Now more than ever they needed to be able to work through the division of the assets as a team. Finish the job quickly. Finish everything.
“I’m sorry,” she began, then let her gaze drift as she tried to pinpoint from where exactly the remorse welling inside her originated. It was there, a tide of regret, but for what? What might have been? Hurting Ryan? She didn’t even know.
The silence stretched taut until the rough edge of Ryan’s voice cut through it. “Are you still broken, Claire?”
“What?” She jolted at the unexpected direction of his inquiry, wondered if he’d somehow figured out what had happened. If he knew—
“Your soul. Your heart. I look at you and I almost see the woman I married. But you’re not. I don’t know you the way I knew her. You look strong. Alive. Whole. But I don’t know… So I have to ask. Are you still broken?”
Her heart rattled, unsteady in her chest.
“No…” Her life was nearly what she’d hoped for it. And yet, at times… “Not the way I was.”
“That guy in Rome,” he asked. “Did he make you feel…anything?”
She closed her eyes, thinking back. Everything had happened so quickly, she hadn’t really had time to ponder her response before Ryan’s name alone had killed the chance for anything more. At first it had been enough to know the man’s touch hadn’t repelled her. She’d been aware of it on a superficial level, aware that it might have been nice, but not connected closely enough to the experience, to the man…
“No.” She swallowed. “But I wanted it to.”
She couldn’t be sure beneath the thick shadows, but she thought she saw a muscle jump in his jaw. “Because you found him attractive.”
“Because I wanted to be normal. I wanted to have my life back. I wanted a chance—” Her throat constricted tight around the emotion tinged with hopes and dreams she told herself not to imagine.
“And with me?” he asked, stepping closer and drawing her out of her quiet turmoil. Breaching the moonlight, the hard set of his jaw and taut lines of his face stood out in sharp relief. “You feel when you’re with me?”
This wasn’t cocky arrogance or ego speaking. It was the man she trusted above all others asking her for a truth he deserved to have. “I don’t want to.”
Because she didn’t want Ryan to be the answer to another one of her problems. Didn’t want to put another obligation out in front of the man who met them as though it was a compulsion.
His lips slanted into a wry twist. “But that’s not what I asked.”
Forcing her chin up, she met his eyes. “Yes.”
He moved into the space she occupied. The flex of his fingers at his side set her every sense on wild alert. This was worse than she could have imagined. The one thing she wanted—the one way she couldn’t live with having it.
“I know you want to feel complete again, and you see this as the last step to getting there. But I need you to understand something, Claire.”
She shivered beneath the heat of his breath washing over the column of her neck. Aching with a need she couldn’t sate.
“I’m not here to help you heal so you can learn to be with some other man. I’m not selfless—” his lips grazed her collarbone “—and I’m not heroic. I’m here because I want you so bad, the idea of not having you kills me. But there’s only one way this is happening, and that’s if you want me.”
Her breath burst free in unburdened relief. Ryan was wrong. He was all those things. Just not, thank God, tonight. There was no doubt, no hesitation or second-guessing. Nothing but a trembling desperation. “I want you.”