to her face, where they reflected a provocatively unsettling interest in her mouth.
Karen grimaced uncomfortably. ‘Now, about that stew … I hope you’re hungry—’
‘How did he die?’ Though he stood-stock still, Gray’s relentless gaze ate up the distance between them as though channelling electricity—probing her reluctance to give him the information he sought with all the steely-eyed determination of a professional interrogator.
‘I don’t—I don’t really want to talk about it.’ She dipped her head, twisting her fingers into a long burnished strand of hair, then impatiently pushing it away again. Her troubled gaze studied the once colourful swirls woven into the homespun rug at her feet with exaggerated concentration.
‘I seem to remember you advising me that it sometimes helps to talk?’
Glancing up at him, Karen was inexplicably annoyed that he should throw what had, after all, been genuine compassion and concern back in her face.
‘You didn’t buy that idea when I offered it to you—why should you expect me to be any different in return?’
‘In my own case I knew it wouldn’t be of any use. You, however, are an entirely different case, Miss Ford. By the way, what is your first name?’
‘You obviously know that it’s Karen. You’re my landlord. The letting agents must have informed you.’
‘Perhaps I wanted to hear it from your own lips.’ Curling his fingers round the thick black leather belt he wore round his jeans, Gray seriously considered her. ‘You barely look old enough to have been married—let alone widowed.’
‘You know how old I am. I’ve already told you. And Ryan and I were married for five years. His death came as a terrible shock. There was no warning, so I wasn’t prepared. He hadn’t even been ill. He worked hard … too hard. Long hours, with not enough rest—but that’s the culture nowadays, isn’t it?’
Her eyes glazed over with distress. ‘The culture we’re all taught to so admire. As if there’s such virtue in working hard and dying young! My husband suffered a massive heart attack at the age of thirty-five. Can you imagine that? When he went, I wanted to die, too. So don’t stand there and tell me I don’t look old enough to be married, because in the space of those five short years with my husband I lived more life than most people do in ten times as long!’
She was shaking, emotion slamming into her like a train, appalled at giving in to such a passionate display in front of a man who probably regarded such outbursts as a certain sign of weakness … or at least a serious character flaw. If only she could take the words back, keep them private and unsaid, but it was clearly too late for that.
His handsome visage a cool, impenetrable mask of enforced self-control, Gray retrieved his jacket from the couch and wordlessly shrugged it on. As Karen struggled to regain even a shred of her former equilibrium, he came towards her, his expression grim. With her heart in her mouth she automatically stepped back. She saw the glimmer of disquiet in his gaze when she did, as if it took him aback that she might be afraid of him.
‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Miss Ford, and sorry that I clearly intruded where I had no right. I didn’t come here to make you revisit painful memories and upset you. I’ll see you in the morning as arranged—if that’s still all right? If not, we can leave it for another time that’s more convenient.’
Nodding miserably, Karen plucked the material of her soft wool sweater between trembling fingers, twisting it into a knot. ‘Tomorrow morning will be fine.’
‘Good. I’ll wish you goodnight, then.’ Gray’s glance greedily swept her pale solemn face, the distressed China-blue eyes with their long dark blonde lashes that reminded him of a fawn, and the full, almost pouting, trembling lips devoid of so much as a trace of lipstick. A man would have to go a long way to find such innocent unaffected beauty in a woman, he thought.
Karen heard him go to the door, lift the latch and step outside. As he went, her body seemed suddenly to move of its own volition, and she found herself hurrying after him. Out into the rainy night she ran, her eyes squinting up at the water that splashed onto her face, ignoring the cold, ignoring the wind that tore into her hair, sweeping the long sun-kissed strands into a dishevelled cloud.
‘Gray!’
The voice that called out his name was full of anguish and something else—something that Gray registered in his mind with tight-lipped control. Heat seared him like a brand at the realisation, making him rock-hard with need. He turned to survey her. Even in the dark he knew his light-coloured eyes burned as brazenly as a cat’s.
‘What is it?’
‘I just—I just want you to—’
‘Don’t ask me to stay, Karen. I’ll only end up hurting you. Trust me.’
Her lip wobbled as she struggled for the words to tell him what she felt. ‘I want—I need—Dear God! Do I have to spell it out for you?’
She was crying even as she spoke, her tears mingling with the rain. Why was it so hard to just say what she wanted? She missed the physical side of married life. She missed having someone to hold her and touch her and make her feel like a woman again. She didn’t want a relationship with Gray O’Connell. He was the last man on earth she could ever want that with. He was too angry—too wounded to be kind. But they’d both been hurt by life. Why shouldn’t they find comfort in each other’s arms for a little while? It didn’t have to mean any more than that, did it?
‘It would only be sex, sweetheart,’ Gray asserted coldly, as if intuiting her thoughts. ‘Nothing else. Not “making love”, not hearts and flowers and violins. Just sex. Screwing, plain and simple. Would you really settle for that?’
Shock slammed into Karen at his words. The strength seemed to drain out of her legs completely. Yet she stood her ground, blinking back tears, blinking back the rain that had already left a fine damp sheen on her sweater, soaking its way onto her skin.
‘Were you always this cruel?’ she asked boldly into the night. ‘I’ll bet you pulled the wings off dragonflies when you were a boy. I’ll bet you laid traps for poor defenceless animals … I bet you broke your poor mother’s heart!’
In two strides Gray was in front of her, his dark face just inches away from hers, his warm breath fanning her face, making little clouds of steam in the rain. ‘My mother took her own life when I was three. Maybe having me was to blame? Who knows? But whether it was me or my father I’ll never know, and I have to live with that every day. So my advice to you, Karen, would be to think twice before you make such a throwaway comment again, damn you!’
The impact of the bitter words made Karen go rigid. Then, hardly realising what she was doing, she slowly raised her hand tentatively to touch his lips with her fingertips. They were infinitely soft to the touch—soft, but inherently stubborn. Velvet clad in iron. But right then she saw past the anger of the man, past the torment of the grown-up who didn’t know where to go with his pain, and instead saw the small three-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his mother and ultimately abandoned by his father, too. Grief twisted her heart.
Gray grabbed her wrist to wrench her hand roughly away. Before she could react he wove his hands through the damp tresses of her hair to crush her lips beneath his mouth in a bruising, destroying kiss that made her body go limp with dazed reaction and turned her blood into a
