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“Oh, Rule …”
He took her shoulders and he set her gently away from him. “Can you forgive me?”
She shut her eyes, drew herself taller. And when she looked at him again, she wasn’t smiling. “I’m working on it.”
Strangely, he understood exactly what she was telling him. “But you aren’t succeeding. You can’t forgive me.”
She pressed her lips together, shook her head—and started to speak.
He touched his thumb to her mouth. “Never mind. You don’t have to answer. Let it be for now.”
“I miss you so. It hurts so much.”
Gruffly, he confessed, “For me, as well.”
She took his hand, placed it on her still-flat belly where their unborn baby slept. The feel of that, the promise of that, came very close to breaking his heart. “We have to … do something,” she said in a torn little whisper. “We have to … get past this. For the baby’s sake, for Trev. For the sake of our family. I have to get past this, put aside my hurt pride that you lied, that you didn’t treat me as an equal. We have to move on. But then, just when I’m sure I’m ready to let it go, I think of all the time
s you might have told me, might have trusted me….”
“Shh,” he said, and lifted his hand to touch her lips again with the pads of his fingers. “It’s not your fault. I am to blame and I know that I am. Somehow, I have to make you believe that I do trust you in all ways, that no matter how hard the truth is, I will never lie to you again.”
She let out a ragged breath. “I want to believe you. So much.”
He lifted her chin and brushed one last kiss against her tender lips. “Give it time,” he said again. “It will be all right.” Would it? Yes. Somehow, he would make it so.
She stepped back and turned. And then she walked away from him.
It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, to watch her go. To let her go. Not to call her back. Not to grab her close again and kiss her senseless. Not to promise them both that everything was all right now.
When it wasn’t all right.
When something precious was shattered between them and he knew that, as the one who had done the shattering, it was up to him to mend a thousand ragged pieces into one strong, shining whole.
The answer came to him in the middle of the night.
Or rather, in the middle of the night, he accepted fully how far he was actually willing to go to make things right.
He saw at last that he was going to have to do the one thing he’d said he would never do, the thing he’d rejected out of hand because it was going to be difficult for him. More than difficult. Almost impossible.
But whatever it took, if it gave him a chance of healing the breach between him and Sydney, he was ready to do it. To move forward with it.
And to do so willingly.
Pride, she had told him. “I’m … too proud, Rule.”
They were alike in that. Both of them prideful, unwilling to bend.
But he would bend, finally. He would do the hardest thing. And he would do it gladly.
If it meant he would have her trust once more. If it meant she would see and believe that he knew the extent of the damage he’d done and would never do such a thing again.
He turned over on his side and closed his eyes and was sound asleep in seconds.
When he woke, it was a little after seven. He rose, showered, shaved and dressed.
Then he went to his office where he got out the stack of messages he’d tossed in the second drawer of his desk—the stack he’d known somewhere in the back of his mind he shouldn’t throw away.
Not yet. Not until he was willing to make his choice from among them.
