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“By what right?”
He suddenly grabbed her hand and yanked it forward, pressing it against the fly of his jeans. “That gives me the right. As your next lover I have a right to know what’s going on inside your head.”
She pulled her hand away and rubbed the palm of it as though it had been burned. He turned her stunned silence to his advantage. “Why did you put on that stupid, Southern-belle act when Jenkins came in?”
“What Southern-belle act?”
“Sweetheart, you could have given Vivien Leigh a run for her money.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then I’ll be more specific. The fluttering eyelashes. The simpering smile. Your ridiculous vocabulary. ‘I adore it.’ ” He made an impatient gesture. “Where did all that crap come from? Is that kind of posturing what Jenkins expects from you? No wonder your relationship with him fell apart.”
His words stung. But rather than take issue with a point she was afraid she might lose, she attacked from a different angle. “Relationship! That’s a funny word coming from you. What do you know about relationships? From what I hear the relationships you have with the opposite sex rarely last for more than one night, if that long.”
“We’re talking about you, not me.”
“You are talking about me.”
“It was your wedding that went bust.”
“Well, at least I got that close,” she shouted.
“I got closer,” he shouted right back. “I got married.”
For an instant, he froze. Then he turned quickly, giving Sunny his back. She watched him drive impatient fingers through his hair as he swore beneath his breath.
Sunny’s chest seemed to cave in on her. “You’re married?”
“Divorced.”
“When?”
“A long time ago.”
“What happened?”
“I got shot.”
“Shot?” She sank down onto the arm of the sofa.
Slowly, he turned to face her again. He stared down at her for a long, quiet moment, then started talking in choppy phrases. “We got married. I got promoted to Vice. I loved it. She hated it. We quarreled every time I left the house. She didn’t understand why—”
He stopped abruptly, raked his hair again, then resumed. “One night they called her from the hospital. The gunshot wasn’t much. The bullet went straight through me.” Absently, he touched his side. “But it was enough to scare hell out of her. When I recovered, she told me she couldn’t take it anymore, that she couldn’t live with me knowing that every time I left it could be for the last time. We divorced.”
Sunny studied the striped pattern of the sofa. “Is that why you came here?”
“No. That was something else.” His lips hardened into that thin line of bitterness that was becoming familiar to Sunny. It was there each time his motivation for moving to Latham Green was mentioned.
He moved to the window, opened the shutter, and stared out into the blackness surrounding the cabin. He seemed lost in morose reflection. Sunny wondered, with an unacknowledged pang of jealousy, if he was still in love with the woman who had left him. She surprised herself even more than him when she asked the question out loud.
His head came around slowly and he looked at her hard. Then a faint smile relieved his lips of their tension. “No, Sunny. If I was, I would never have let her go.”
“But you look so sad when you talk about it.”
“I only regret being a postponement to her happiness. I wish I had realized sooner that we weren’t right for each other, that we wanted different things.” He returned to where she was sitting on the arm of the sofa and crouched down in front of her. Paternally, he covered her hands with his. “Is that what happened to you and Jenkins? Did you just decide at the last minute that you wanted different things?”
“That was basically it, yes.”
