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It had been making her ever-so-slightly nervous that he’d instead seemed to be going with the flow, which was something she did not think was possible for him to do. Not that she hadn’t loved it, because of course she had.

But she’d been waiting for reality to hit and here it was.

That he’d simply been waiting for her to cut and run made a lot more sense than him suddenly being perfectly okay with what was happening.

Raemy expected him to come into the shower and continue telling her what she could and couldn’t do, so it was pretty surprising when he didn’t. But she didn’t hear the door to her room slam, so she was not all that surprised when she came out to find him sitting there on the end of the bed, looking like he’d been sucker punched.

Repeatedly. Directly in the solar plexus.

She went and sat down next to him, tucking the towel she’d wrapped around her a little bit tighter.

When he glanced over at her, he looked...

This poor man, she thought, probably with more fondness than he would have appreciated in that moment. He looks traumatized.

She could easily believe that he was. On some level, she’d been expecting this kind of reaction from him. There was a reason, after all, that she hadn’t told him her plans. She’d known what he was likely to do. How he was likely to take this news that she thought was nothing but terrific.

If she was honest, Raemy had kind of been hoping that she could just...move here. Settle into her new rental cottage with its beach roses and thundering ocean views. She’d been thinking that maybe it was better to keep postponing this inevitable crashout until they were even more enmeshed.

Okay, if she was really honest, maybe she’d been thinking that he might not notice until they were living together, and it was all too late, and he’d been living with her and sleeping in her bed for a year or two. That was obviously a piece of fantasy.

Even the most charmingly oblivious of men would probably notice a complete and total change of address, especially one who lived in community housing with a bunch of smartass veterans who would have been certain to point it out to him.

She blew out a breath, picking at the bedspread between them, and made herself wait to see what he was going to say.

“I don’t think that I can live like this,” he said, his voice low and raw. “I don’t think I can live with myself.” She made a noncommittal sort of humming noise, but that seemed enough to keep him going. “I’ve known the entire time that this was wrong. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. I’m no hero, Raemy. I didn’t deserve the way your brother felt about me and I doubt he would have kept feeling that way the longer he’d been in the service. I knew better than to kiss you, but I did it anyway.”

He looked at her as if he expected her to react to that, and Raemy just nodded, to indicate she was listening. She kept picking at the bedspread, which was actually a sailboat motif instead of a sand dollar. Food for beach cottage thought, she told herself.

It seemed to agitate him that she didn’t react to him mentioning that first kiss, because he amped it up. “The fact of the matter is that I destroyed your family. I don’t know why you seem so compelled to ignore that, but I can’t ignore it. Not any longer.”

And that actually did require a response.

“My family has a William-shaped hole in it,” she told him, calmly enough, because it was no more and no less than the truth. “It’s not even a hole. It’s just William and he’s not going anywhere. None of us will ever forget him. I wouldn’t know where to begin forgetting him, in fact. We love him. We miss him.” She looked at him, and her heart squeezed at that stark, bruised sort of look on his face. “But you didn’t destroy my family, Noah. I don’t know how many times I have to say this.”

“I’m aware of what I’m responsible for even if you refuse to give it the weight it deserves,” he said gruffly.

With all of that misplaced honor that made her want to shake him and hug him, maybe at the same time.

“I don’t know what you’ve been doing since you got out of the Marines.” She waved her hand in the general direction of the main street outside and up on the other end, the Salty Dog. “I know what you do with your days, but I don’t know what you’ve been doing with yourself. Except, I guess, a whole lot of self-flagellation.”

He let out a sound, making it clear he didn’t like that description. That didn’t make it any less right-on.

Raemy kept going. “Maybe that feels better than sitting in the sticky, unpleasant reality, that bad things can happen. Probably it does. But they can happen to any of us and that doesn’t make us responsible for them. It doesn’t make us victims, either.”

He turned and looked at her then, with a hollow sort of expression that very clearly stated that he did not consider himself a victim.

Raemy smiled at him, and clearly, he didn’t like that either.

“I think, and I fought this for a long time, but I really do think that this is just life,” she told him softly. “Sometimes we lose people. It’s actually highly likely that you might lose someone in a combat situation.”

“I’m sorry that I can’t be glib about it,” he all but growled at her, his dark eyes like a storm.

And Raemy understood, so she didn’t react to that the way she could have. She sighed instead. She put her hand on his thigh, feeling the way that big muscle bunched up beneath her palm, because he was stiffening.

Maybe waiting for the blow. Maybe waiting for her to return his growl.

“My parents and I grieved him,” she said, very simply. Very directly. “We grieved him like it was our job. You don’t know this, because you weren’t there. But the person you saw at my brother’s funeral is the person I was. For years, Noah. I sleepwalked through my life. I don’t remember whole seasons. It’s like driving home and only realizing when you get there that you have absolutely no idea who was operating that vehicle. That’s what it was like.”