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Still, she stared into the darkness, blinking back her tears as she held on to the arm that crossed over her stomach and held her to him.
“Forever,” she whispered. A breath of sound. Too light for anyone to hear.
But there was no forever. A single tear fell, silent, wasted, because tears didn’t heal. They didn’t cleanse. Eventually, she let herself fall into a sleep she never thought she would know again. The sleep she had found once, only in her husband’s arms, and now in another man’s.
Behind her, Noah stayed still, silent. Unmoving. The sadness and the pain in her voice dug talons of agony inside his soul until he could barely breathe.
He held her, felt her, and inside, deep in that ragged wound that had once been his soul, he cried with her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“No more tears for another man while you’re in bed with me.”
Sabella turned slowly from the coffeepot to the man who strode into the kitchen, too big, too forceful, too dominant that early in the morning.
She still didn’t have a handle on what had happened last night, and had forced herself to escape from the bed and into the shower before she could allow a repeat of it.
Now, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, her boots tied firmly on her feet, she turned away and ignored him, fighting to ignore her racing heartbeat.
Something had happened last night that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something that filled her with a sense of dread. With a nervous energy she didn’t know what to do with. And there was something about him this morning that wasn’t helping the situation. It wasn’t just the dominance. It was something about the way he was standing, the look in his eyes. Something that had her chest tightening and her sex creaming.
He was pissing her off and turning her on, all at the same time. She didn’t consider that a good combination.
“My bed. My tears.” She moved away from the coffeepot and made room for him as he opened a cabinet door, and of course he opened the right one and pulled a cup free.
“You fuck me and then cry?” He snorted. “The next time it happens, Sabella, I’ll ride you until you can’t cry.”
“How would you know I even cried?” She watched him. The shift of his shoulders, the way his muscles bunched. “You fell asleep.”
“I don’t sleep that deep.” He poured his coffee and turned back to her, rugged and sexy, his black hair damp and falling to his shoulders, his beard and mustache darker than night when emphasized by his deep, dark blue eyes.
Dressed in the clothes he had worn the day before, he looked both rumpled and powerful. Not a good look for her peace of mind this morning.
“You won’t have to worry about it.” She finally shrugged. “I’m certain we have the sexual crisis out of our systems now. We can go back to sniping at each other. And you can sleep in your own bed.”
She set her coffee cup on the counter and gazed at him with determination.
He made her wait. He studied her over the rim of his coffee cup as he sipped at the dark brew, his eyes turbulent, sparking with something, not anger but definitely not agreement.
“One-night stand, was it?” he asked.
A frown wrinkled her brow at the tone, the flavor of his voice.
“It was expedient,” she lied. “Now you can get on with your own life and I can get on with mine.”
“Get on with building that shrine to your dead husband?” he growled.
It almost hurt, the way he said it. It should have hurt, but for some reason, it didn’t have the power it would have had before he arrived.
Where the hell was her mind? He hadn’t been here that long. She had slept with a man, had had sex with a man she had known for less than a month. It had taken her husband at least a month to get her into bed and she had been a virgin then. But this man rode into town on his black Harley with his riding chaps and his glare and the next thing she knew she was trying to eat him alive?
She shook her head at the thought of that.
“Whatever I do is no one’s business but my own. We’ll pretend last night didn’t happen.”
Because she couldn’t make sense of it. Because she couldn’t still the certainty that something had happened that was going to change her life forever.
“Will we now?” He sipped at his coffee again, finally finishing it as Sabella stood there observing him, forcing herself to be calm. “Just pretend you weren’t coming before I ever sank my cock fully inside you? That we both didn’t come like we’d never had sex before?”
