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Her bare feet tucked in the waning heat of the sand, her shoes paired up beside her, Sally stared out over the ocean seeing nothing. The salty breeze toying with her hair, playing across her face. Her eyes burned from the tears she’d cried, her throat hurt from screaming into the waves as they crashed into the shore, and her heart—torn asunder in her chest—beat only because it was too damn stubborn to stop.
The beach before her was emptying of people as the dinner hour came and went, and the sun kissed the horizon, painting the sky with dark purples bleeding into dramatic reds. It was beautiful. The dune on which she sat was several yards from the well-trod pathway leading through a palisade of high grasses hiding the rickety driftwood fences separating the private homes from the public beach.
Waves crashing, the last of the sea birds calling as they finished fishing and headed to their nests…. The solitude was breathtaking. The reason for the isolation was devastating.
Sly was no better than her father—worse than her father, actually. At least she’d known her father for what he was because he hadn’t bothered hiding it. Sly hid his poison behind lies of devotion and superb acting. God! She’d actually believed all this bullshit about taking her pain, keeping her from drowning…calling her “my love.” He didn’t love her—he didn’t love anyone but himself.
He might love Loni; they were married for five years and freaking best friends for decades before that. And see where that ended up?Loni trying to coerce him back into her bed and matrimony, and Sly chasing Latina tail and blindly giving his ex-wife what she was angling for.
Stabbing her fingers into the sand beside her, she groaned into the gathering night and shivered. The warmth of the day was cooling, and she hadn’t—in her flight from Sylvester’s house—thought to grab a sweater.
Cradling her tear-stained cheek on her shoulder, the sounds around her were muffled. So…she didn’t hear anyone approaching until the sand behind her shifted. She stiffened. The only people who knew to find her there didn’t know she needed finding.
Son of a bitch….
“How did you find me?” she asked, the sharpness of her voice just this side of a razor blade.
A throat cleared, then he answered, “I called AJ.”
Her eyes flew wide, but she didn’t turn around. “My brother told you where to find me?”
A bitter laugh sounded. “Er…no. Your brother refused to say anything, telling me that letting you cool off was better for my health, but I persisted. When he continued to refuse, I called Anna.”
That was a shocker. “So…Anna….” That little witch gave her up!
“I laid it all out for her; told her that I was an asshole and I fucked things up, and I needed to find you to explain—”
She turned around then, surprised that he would admit his wrongs and ask for help. Behind her, looking as delicious as he had when he’d busted into his own kitchen hours earlier, Sly stood, hands in his pants pockets, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing the tastiness of her veiny forearms. Forearms she’d traced with her fingertips the night before after a particularly acrobatic love-making session.
There was no love! Only lust! He doesn’t love you, dumbass!
Sally shot to her feet, ready to get the hell out of there. She refused to let him fill her head with more lies, more promises that would break her heart. She would not be like her mother, allowing the man she loved to beat her down until she was nothing.
When she went to race around him, he caught her around her waist, making her gasp.
“No, Sally! You have to let me explain. You have to let me get this shit off my chest so I can fucking finally breathe again. I am so tired—too freaking exhausted from carrying this around on my back, in my heart, on my soul. I just need to tell you, to come clean, to share this with you…all the while hoping you don’t hate me, that your gorgeous emerald eyes don’t turn black with hate.”
Sally sucked in a breath at his revelation, his vulnerability…his emerging truth. She remembered what it was like to unburden her own soul to Sly. To finally open up about the abuse, the infidelity, and her mom’s suicide. It had felt like a stone block had been lifted from her shoulders and smashed to gravel at her feet. It had been liberating, so much so that she had finally allowed herself to feel what she wanted to feel for Sylvester. She had finally admitted to herself that she was in love with him, that she wanted a future with her, that she wanted forever with him.
And then it all went to shit in a sack.
Throwing her shoulders back, she tried to shake Sly loose, but he only flexed his arms, holding her tighter.
“I killed Jake!” he roared over the pounding waves, his eyes wide and wild, filled with panic. “I killed him stone-cold dead, Sally. I stole his life! Me! I did that. I’m that one who got drunk, got behind the wheel, and was too fucked up to swerve away from oncoming traffic. I killed him and nearly killed Loni. I crippled an entire family with one mistake, and there is nothing I can do to make up for it—but, God, am I trying. So goddamn hard. But the only thing I could do to try and make up for it was promise to take care of his twin sister—and I even fucked that up because I don’t love her like she wants me to. I can’t love her like a man is supposed to love his wife. I can never be the man she wants me to be.”
Recoiling as if struck by lightning, Sally could only stand there, within his shuddering embrace, and stare up at him. His face a wretched mask of pain and anguish, his beautiful eyes shimmering with unshed tears, his lips trembling—holy shit! He couldn’t actually believe all the things he’d just said!
“You believe that? That you killed him?” she asked, her voice caught on the breeze and carried to his ear. He pinched his eyes closed, a single tear escaping as he nodded.
Unable to not touch him, she reached up and pressed her hands against the scruff-roughened hardness of his cheeks.
“Oh…Sly…” she breathed, her heart squeezing in her chest. This was a man in pain. This was a man so strangled and weighted by his guilt, he could no longer stand upright. Even now, his tall, muscular frame was slumped, as though his soul had been ripped from his body, and only invisible strands of self-hatred were holding him aloft. Like a puppet of misery.
Desperate to cut those strings, she wrapped her arms around his neck and cradled his face in her neck. She held him. Tight. Attempting to breathe through the enormity of what she’d just learned.
“I killed Jake…and I did what I thought I had to do to make amends, to find some way to live with the guilt….” The heat of his voice, thick with pain, brushed against the nerve endings in her neck, making her vibrate from head to bare toes. “My marriage was my fucked up way to find atonement. I never loved her, not like she wanted. And it made everything worse. So much worse.”
Hell. Fuck. Damn! All the little pieces of information he’d shared over the last few weeks, all the things she’d witnessed between Sly and Loni…it was all coming together to form a picture that was ugly and utterly wrong. After their interlude in the Bungalow Bar bathroom, Sally had done some basic googling, trying to find images of Sly and Loni together—which was a dumb attempt at trying to compare herself to the woman he’d married. She’d seen links to articles and a police report about an accident seven years before, and she’d clicked on it. There was basic information, but, overall, it hadn’t really registered in her head until Sly started talking about Jake and him as kids. About marrying Loni.
