Page 30 of From the Darkness

“Let me help you,” she murmured. “Tell me what happened.”

He was silent for several moments, then continued. “It was foggy, and the road was slick. She was yelling at me, and she took a curve too fast. The car hit the rocks, then bounced over the cliff. I was thrown out—I guess because I’d forgotten to buckle my seat belt. She went into the ocean with the car.”

“Oh my God,” Bree gasped out. Then, “Troy, you didn’t kill her! She was driving.”

“But we were fighting. She was focused on me, not on the road. If I’d kept my mouth shut and just let her concentrate on what she was supposed to be doing, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“You can’t blame yourself.”

“The hell I can’t!”

“Troy.” This time his name sighed out of her. She felt his chest rising and falling, felt him match the rhythm of his breathing to hers. An unconscious gesture?

“Thank you for telling me,” she murmured.

“You have the right to know.”

“Why?”

“Because in Montana, after you left, I met Grace. And I was lonely. We . . got close too quickly. She wasn’t like you. She wasn’t sweet and innocent. Then she told me she was going to have a baby. And I couldn’t leave her like that. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she breathed. Finally, after all these years, she did understand why he’d married someone else—when it looked like they were heading toward something incredibly good.

She heard the anguish in his voice as he continued. “God knows, I tried to make the marriage work. For a little while, things were okay. And she gave me an incredible gift—Dinah.”

“Oh yes.”

“Then . . Grace and I started getting on each other’s nerves. We should have gotten divorced, but she told me she’d take Dinah away, and I believed her. She would have done it to punish me.”

She heard his shallow breathing. He had just confessed his deepest sins, and she knew he was waiting for her reaction.

She clutched at his forearms, angled her head so she could soothe her cheek against his shoulder.

“Punish you for what?”

“Taking away the lifestyle she’d come to love.”

“Then don’t blame yourself,” she murmured.

His confession had released her from her own secret guilt. She’d wanted this man for so long, and she’d told herself over and over that it was wrong because he was happily married. She’d tried to substitute other relationships. But her memory of him had always gotten in the way. Now he had told her the truth, and she knew she hadn’t imagined the feelings between them all those years ago.

Yet, still, a tiny kernel of doubt niggled at her. The last time she’d talked to him, he’d claimed he couldn’t remember the recent past. Now he had come out with this fully formed story. How much of what he’d said was true?

She wanted to believe him. And there was one thing she absolutely had to believe. She had missed him all these years, and he was telling her that he had missed her, too.

More than that, he needed her. And she knew that if he let her, she could help him heal his soul. By allowing her to share his sadness and his guilt. And by building on the feelings that she’d struggled so hard to repress because she’d thought they were wrong.

She stood there, leaning back against him, just breathing, just tuning herself to something fundamental that seemed to grow from the contact between them.

She had been frightened in this house. Unsure. Now that she was with him, and they were communicating, everything seemed different.

He had the power to make it different.

He bent his head and brushed her hair aside, so his lips could find the tender place where her jawline met her neck. She had told herself they were simply giving each other comfort, but there was no denying the sensual undercurrent to his touch.

His lips inched upward, and she heard a small sigh ease out of her.

She knew he heard too, because the sound led his finger to her lips, where he touched her with a feather-light stroke.

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