waiting tables at the local greasy spoon—a job he’d set up for her. A job he’d secretly hoped she would find appalling and so far beneath her she would have stomped her regal foot and thrown a royal tantrum.
In retrospect, he wasn’t too proud of himself for stooping so low as to want to humiliate her. Not that his plan had worked, anyway. She hadn’t done one damn thing he’d expected.
What she’d done was adjust. Without comment. Without complaint—and he’d been the one left feeling devalued.
She’d taken to the waitress role as if she’d been born with an order pad in her hand instead of a gilded rattle. She’d waited tables, laughed with the locals and looked and acted like she’d enjoyed every minute of it.
Act is the key word here, he told himself, working hard to reinforce his cynicism where she was concerned. He didn’t dare forget that she was a consummate actress—had played the role of her life when she’d made him fall in love with her.
He rolled a shoulder, shook it off. That was then. This was now. And love—whatever the hell that was—didn’t have anything to do with what he was feeling for her now. What he was feeling for her now, he told himself, was a grudging tolerance that had gotten tangled up in a misplaced sense of responsibility. And a leftover sexual obsession that he had no intention of indulging.
Stone-faced, he turned toward the whistle of the kettle, set it off the heat and snagged a pair of mugs from her cupboard. As he held the chunky stoneware in his hand, he worked hard to convince himself that the princess was no doubt missing the delicacy and the elegance of her seventeenth century fine bone china and the servants who all but drank her tea for her. Yet when he set the mug in front of her, she cupped it gratefully between her small hands, absorbed the welcome warmth, first through her fingertips then with her mouth, as she touched the mug to her lips.
A knot of tension that was becoming all too familiar when he was around her coiled tight in his gut.
“I’m fine now.” She made a forced attempt to sound more steady, more centered. “You don’t have to babysit me. People have bad dreams. It’s not a big deal.”
A muscle in his jaw worked involuntarily and he stated the facts as he saw them. “And you don’t have to put on some brave front. This has been hard on you. There’s no shame in admitting it.”
The stunned look in her eyes as she reacted to his unexpected empathy momentarily silenced them both.
“Right,” she said finally. “No shame.”
Her voice so full of the shame she was trying to deny, it made his chest hurt.
She sat so still. Her slender fingers were wrapped around that mug like it was her only anchor. Her gaze was focused on something much further away than the clock on the far kitchen wall. And her voice, when she finally spoke, sounded as weary as time.
“I wanted Ivan out of my life,” she all but whispered into a silence that had grown heavy and thick. “I’d prayed he would be made to pay for whatever part he played in Sara’s death, for holding Sara’s babies hostage.” She lifted eyes glittering with unshed tears, stared at a time and place far away from Royal, Texas. “God help me, I wanted him dead.”
The guilt etched on her face clogged his throat with emotion. He swallowed it back. Waited.
Haunted eyes flicked to his then quickly away. “I’m glad he’s dead. For everything he’d done, everything he tried to do. I’m glad he’s dead,” she repeated and once again, met his eyes. Once again, she looked away as if she was ashamed. “What does that make me? What kind of monster does that make me?”
Everything she wouldn’t let him see in her eyes was manifested in those self-indicting words, in the thready hopelessness of her voice. He wanted to drag her into his arms and hold her so she wouldn’t splinter in a million pieces. Yet he sensed that if he touched her now, she would shatter. Like a beautiful spun glass swan. Like a priceless crystal vase.
Since he didn’t think that both of them together could gather all the pieces if she fell apart, he made his voice as gentle as he knew how.
“What it makes you is human, Anna. It makes you human—nothing more. Nothing less. The prince was an opportunist. He was a murderer. And he was a coward—he proved it when he jumped off the bridge south of town. You had no part in that. You had no part in anything he did.”
Despite the sense of his argument, her silence told him she felt she had played a very huge part in it. The next words out of her mouth confirmed it.
“If I had married him he’d be alive, though, wouldn’t he? Sara might even be alive—”
It galled him to hell and back that she would take even an ounce of blame on her slim shoulders. He drew a deep breath, laid a hand on her arm. “Look—”
She jumped as if she’d been burned. “It’s all right,” she insisted abruptly. So abruptly he could only stare as she shook off his touch and rose. “I’m sorry...I’m sorry the alarm bothered you. I’m sorry I laid all this on you. But it’s all right now. I’m all right now.”
She was out of the kitchen and racing for her front door so quickly he was left standing flat-footed in his anaconda boots and a scowl. He glanced at his raised hand, curled his fingers slowly into a loose fist.
Fine, he decided, accepting that his touch had set her off. Obviously, she didn’t want him here any more than he wanted to be here. And as sure as hell was fire, he didn’t want to get all tangled up in caring about her again.
“Call Harriet if you need anything,” he said gruffly and headed for the door. Shouldering past her, he swung it wide.
He wouldn’t have thought anything could have kept him from barreling out of her apartment. Not her tears. Not her guilt.
He hadn’t counted on her touch.
It stopped him cold. It stopped his heart.
Very slowly, he turned his head, looked down at the small hand that lay so tentatively on his arm, then into the eyes of the one woman who could turn hard muscle to yearning flesh, turn simple heat to complex need.
Through all of this, if there had been contact—as minimal and necessary as it had been—he’d been the one to initiate it. He hadn’t initiated this. Just like he hadn’t initiated the explosion of memories her singular act had stirred. Slender hands trailing down the arch of his bare spine, delicate fingers tracing the point of his hip, tangling in his hair, caressing him, urging him closer, demanding him deeper.
He closed his eyes, clenched his jaw so tight he heard a dull pop. Then her whispered, “I’m sorry, Gregory. I’m so sorry for everything,” as her fingers drifted slowly away.
For a long moment he stood there. Struggling for something to say. Reaching for something to do. The better part of wisdom, however, overrode either instinct.
“Lock the door behind me,” he ordered in a rusty voice and strode into the hall without a backward glance. He hit the apartment stairs at a jog and bounded down them and into the night. The urgency of his need to get away from her was suddenly more powerful than the one that had had him shooting across town to get to her.
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