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“One,” he said darkly. He flicked a smile at Lexi. “Good night, little star.”

Shivers ran down her spine. Najin. Starlight. That’s what he’d called her. Back then, when she’d loved him and she’d believed he loved her. When she’d thought him a man, not a King.

The words swirled around them even as he left, closing the door behind him. The term of endearment that had made her feel stellar haunted her for all the minutes of his absence.

“I like him,” Lexi pronounced after at least three seconds consideration. “His voice is like magic.”

“Yes,” Sarah agreed, a wry smile twisting her lips, hiding her heart break. “And his words are just as deceptive,” she said to herself.

“Huh?”

Sarah cleared her throat. “Never mind. Let’s get you ready for bed.”

In the end, an hour was barely enough time. Sarah raced through the bedtime rituals, guiltily thinking of the evening she’d had planned. Lexi was fed a hasty dinner of leftovers, bathed in record time, read only three pages of her favourite book and tucked under the covers with a rushed kiss.

Sarah had just stepped out of the shower, thrown on an outfit, and peeked in to check on Lexi when there was a slightly-restrained knock at the door.

She stroked a hand over Lexi’s curls, tucked Mr Bear into the crook of her arm, and then walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs as though her body wasn’t quivering like a feather on the wind.

As she reached the door, she paused, her hand hovering just above the handle. Why was he here?

Five years ago, she had fallen in love with him. Or lust? Either way, he had buried himself inside of her soul. She’d understood his loss and grief, and she had felt powerful beyond belief to see how their chemistry could chase pain from his mind and heart.

He’d arrived in her life broken by death, and she’d patched him back together.

Then he’d left.

He’d used her. He’d prayed on her sympathies for sex. And when he had felt whole again, he’d crept out of her bed, out of her life, with only a single hand-written note cast on the kitchen table. ‘I have to leave.’

Sarah had heard of people feeling nauseous in anxious circumstances, but the way her stomach was flipping and flopping went beyond simple sickness. She half-thought she might pass out.

Flames of the past licked at the soles of her bare feet. She drew the door inwards on a curse of remembered pain.

Everything she had loved about him slammed into her. She stared at him, his face that she knew every single damned line of, his dark hair, his haunted eyes, and her heart leaped through her body.

He was just the same.

Which was all the more reason to stay away from him.

He was the same man who had broken her heart and chosen to leave her without a backwards glance.

She straightened her spine, pouring into it the kind of iron that could only be formed by nights of devastation and emptiness. “Yes?” She stood just inside the door, not moving to allow him inside.

“How are you?”

It was so far from what she’d expected that she let out a short, sharp laugh. Fog drifted from her; the temperature had dropped rapidly in the evening. Was he cold? He who was used to sand-swept desert nights and the sun on his back? She hoped so.

“After five years, that’s what you came here to say?”

“No.”

“So?” She gripped the door more tightly, her fingers seeking strength.

“Who is the child?”

Straight to it, huh? “My daughter.”

A muscle pounded at the base of his jaw. Out of nowhere, she remembered the way it had done that when he’d been tense and searching for the right words. The words to describe how it had felt to have watched his mother die. To have held her hand as life ebbed from her body. And Sarah had listened with no concept that only six months later his words would become a gruesome reality she understood all too well, for having lived the same loss. Not of a mother, but of a sister.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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