Page 13 of Spark of Attraction

Another small shake of her head.

“What do we need to talk about?” How could I make this better? What had I done wrong? Shit. She’d kissed me first the other day, but maybe she’d regretted it afterward? “Am I the first guy you’ve kissed since your husband…?”

Shit! Should I have mentioned him? Or not asked at all? Fuck! I was such an idiot. Now I wanted to bang my head against the wall.

She shook her head without raising it. “No, I’ve dated a couple times since Gareth...”

From the way she didn’t—couldn’t?—say died either, I figured she was still grieving and I’d breached her boundaries. I wanted to cuddle her but…boundaries. Last thing I wanted to do was make her feel crowded, make her want to distance herself even more.

“Ell? What can I do to make it better? What do you need?”

She launched herself against me, burying her face against my neck, her whole body taut against mine. What the hell do I do now? How do I fix whatever I’ve done? I had no idea. So I held her, rubbing her back as she pressed harder against me, her body now shaking. It took me a couple seconds before I realized she wasn’t crying but laughing.

“Ell?” I was floundering here, but I didn’t know what to do, what to say.

“It’s not you. It’s me. I told you.” She shook her head, then blew out a breath. “Well, in a way it is you, but not in the way you think.”

I stayed quiet because the way she worded it sounded like a two-edged sword that could swing back on me pretty damned quick. She finally lifted her head and stepped away to tug me over to the couch. She sat on the cushion beside me, turned sideways so she faced me and hitched one leg beneath her.

“So…that kiss means there’s something still between us, right? I mean, I’m not the only one feeling this…attraction, am I? Or…am I?” she asked.

“No. It’s still there.” I wanted to reach for her, to drag her onto my lap but she was fighting something that I didn’t understand, that I knew was important and she needed space.

“Okay, good. I need to tell you something before we take whatever we’ve got going on any further.”

Hope and fear leapt up in me. She wanted to take things further, but it came with a but that worried me. “All right.”

“I’ve only told my mom about this,” she scrunched up her nose and hugged herself, “and she may have told Josh, but I’d prefer if you don’t go talking about this with anyone else. Even your parents. You know how gossip travels in Port Paxton.”

Did I ever. “Okay.”

“Before he died, things between Gareth and I were…rough. They had been for a while. I realize now, it was always bad and that I should never have married him, but it was only the last few months I finally admitted to myself that I needed to get out. Mainly because of the way he’d been treating me. It took me too long to realize how he’d isolated me from my family, my friends. Then I discovered he’d been cheating on me. Like serial cheating, pretty much our whole marriage. So I hired a lawyer to get my ducks in a row before I told Gareth I was leaving.”

Fuck.

“I had everything arranged and planned to tell him I wanted a divorce.”

“You’d moved your stuff out?”

Another shake of her head. “No. My lawyer advised me not to move out, that I had the rights to half of the condo. They’d told me a lot more but they said unless I was afraid he’d get physical, to encourage him to move out or move into the second bedroom for one of us until we could work everything out.”

There was something about the way she’d mentioned physical abuse that set the hairs on the back of my neck crawling. “Was he? Abusing you?”

“He never hit me,” she said so quietly I had to strain to hear her. “But words can hurt as much as fists. And he knew how to use his words to hurt the most. He was really good at manipulating me, at making me doubt myself. I didn’t realize how much he’d been gaslighting me until I went into therapy after he died. That’s when I started remembering how he’d convinced me that the reason I was so unhappy was because I was always interpreting things incorrectly, that I was weak. That I expected too much, that I wasn’t good enough. That I was the reason for anything going wrong.” Another deep breath.

“He chose every piece of clothing I was to wear every day. He monitored what I ate, made sure I exercised to his specifications. He’d check my phone to make sure I wasn’t talking with people he didn’t approve of. He’d monitor my texts. He stopped me…from seeing…” The words seemed to catch in her throat.

“He stopped you from visiting your family,” I said softly. I grabbed the box of tissues from the side table and handed it to her.

She nodded as she dabbed the tissue against her eyes. “Sometimes Mom would ask me if everything was okay, but he never let me be alone with her or Josh. He was always right there and I couldn’t say anything. After he died, I discovered he’d put tracking software on it so he was getting copies of my texts and everything I sent. Which made me really glad that after I decided to leave him, I’d bought a different phone that he didn’t know about, and created new bank accounts and new email accounts.”

I wondered if her mother, Maureen, had confided any of this to my mother—they’d been best friends since grade school. If she had, she’d probably sworn my mother to secrecy too. If Mom had promised not to say anything, she wouldn’t even tell Dad. Mom was absolutely a deep well when it came to guarding secrets, mine or anyone’s.

“I wish I’d known. I would have come down there and gotten you out of there.” Protected you.

“I probably wouldn’t have left. Not for the first few years anyway. He had me so convinced I was the one at fault. That I needed him to keep my life in order.”

She dropped her gaze, picking at some fluff on the couch. “I was waiting for him to come home so I could tell him I wanted a divorce, right? Except he didn’t come home. Instead, the police knocked on the door and told me he had been in a car accident—that he’d been speeding. It was snowing and the roads were slick. He’d missed a corner, rolled the car and…he was dead.”

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