Page 261 of Sweet Temptation

“She didn’t like him?”

“Who knows. I never could quite figure that part out.”

“Go on.”

“So… we were newly married. And as it turned out, she was pretty adventurous. In the bedroom. Or so I thought… It was her idea to bring another woman into our bed.”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“I know. I was young. I mean, I was still a teenager. I wasn’t gonna turn down that opportunity. So we messed around with a friend of hers a few times. Then I pulled the classic came-home-early-from-work one day, unawares—”

“Oh, Ronan.”

“Yeah. My life’s a cliche.”

“She was in bed with the other woman? Without you.”

“Oh, yeah. I walked right in on them.”

“And?”

“And she told me she was in love with this woman. She was really upset. We’d been friends a long time, but I never saw it coming. Like I said, I was young. She told me she was afraid to come out to her family, and she begged me not to tell anyone and not to divorce her. So, I didn’t.”

“Whoa.” I studied him. “Wait a sec. You’re not telling me you’re still married to this woman, are you?”

“Actually…”

“Ronan! Fuck, no.”

“No. We, uh, finally got a divorce… last year.”

“Are you serious?”

“Unfortunately.”

I took a moment, just letting this sink in. And trying to reconcile this information with all the things I knew about the man in front of me. The man who’d just asked me to marry him.

His protective nature.

The sacrifices he’d made, historically, for other people, often at a high cost to his own comfort.

The big, soft heart he’d tried to lock away under a layer of icy control…

But even then. Compassion and self-sacrifice had limits, didn’t they?

“You stayed married to someone for fifteen years,” I said slowly, “because she didn’t want to tell her family she was gay?”

“Uh, fourteen and a bit, technically. And she told them a few years ago. I mean, maybe they knew by then. We were legally separated the whole time. But when you say it like that… it does sound a bit extreme.”

“Kinda. You really care about her, I’m guessing?”

“I cared about her like I’d care about a friend who needed my help. Over the years, that was all our relationship was about. It was one-sided. She needed me, and I did what I could. She never offered anything in return. I barely saw her.”

“She used you,” I concluded.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “She did. And I let her. And just like the other times I let people use me… that’s probably the part that still bothers me the most.”

Yeah; I could feel the weight of that. It was heavy on him. His one greatest vulnerability…

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