Page 83 of Secret Surrender (Harlow)

The sheriff held Dean’s cell door open, the heavy metal gate soon clinking shut behind him. He sank down onto the plastic mattress against the wall and buried his face in his hands. He’d expected anger and disregard, not the sheriff’s compassion, much less his attempts to understand. And somehow, compassion and understanding hurt more—seemingly soft emotions—with enough aching precision to cut him to the core.

His thoughts slipped back to that little boy. Him. A black trash bag heavy in his hands, a bag containing a few sets of clothes and not much else. He’d needed compassion then, and decades on, compassion continued to duck away from him, leaving him on the losing side of any change he tried to enact.

The door outside his cell clicked open. He understood who likely stood across from him now. Watching. Waiting. His mind caught on the heat behind his eyes and his time “keeping peace” overseas.

Little girls, some babies, sold to older men. Some said to help with “domestic duties,” but everyone knew different. The women. The children. They always suffered the most. And that night with his staff sergeant? Dean had only tried to intercept one moment of misery, but he’d fought an unwinnable war on more than one front.

An intense pain gripped his chest, and he sucked in a sharp breath, the wall he’d built to lock away his nightmares had a giant fucking crack in it. Nothing could stop the darkness from filtering through.

He lifted his head out of his hands, his gaze slamming into Sarah. She stood some yards away, still watching, still waiting outside the metal bars.

“Why?” The question fell from her pale lips, the skin around her eyes red and splotchy. Blaine was beside her, his arm around her shoulder.

For one brief moment, he’d wanted life to be simple, and his brief moment had come at her expense. Of all the shitty things he’d done over the years, this was the worst, but all he could offer was a useless, “I don’t know.”

His husky voice scraped at his throat, dry and brittle. He wanted to give her a better answer, but it all sounded so selfish now.

He’d gotten what he wanted, what he’d always wanted—someone to give a damn about him. Somewhere he belonged…

She shook Blaine off and strode forward, the first signs of her innate inner strength bursting through. “Dean, just tell me why.”

But he couldn’t speak and his focus rose to her ruffled hair and down to the dried blood over her cheekbone. A wound she had sustained trying to defend him.

What an asshole. I’m such a selfish fucking asshole.

“Don’t torture yourself here.” Blaine padded to just behind Sarah, and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder again. “He’s got nothing good to say. Let’s go.”

Blaine shot Dean a tight look, one that was deserved and spoke volumes about how little he thought of him.

Still, Sarah pushed him away again.

“No. Despite what you all seem to think of me, I’m not crazy. I know this man.” She lashed her glare at Dean, one that once again commanded him to speak. “Go ahead. Tell me I’m not crazy.”

But her sanity wasn’t what she really wanted him to endorse.

What she really wanted to hear was that she hadn’t imagined the goodness in him.

But he saw nothing good here. Not in him. Not for her. Even if his time in Harlow had briefly convinced him otherwise, the ordeal at Maynard’s only verified he’d lost sight of who he was years ago. All he’d ever done was pretend. Until, of course, reality inevitably caught him.

“I’m sorry.” His apology fell from his lips, habitual, low, and weak. What more could he give her? So, he turned to Blaine. “I’m sorry to you too, and I’m glad you got your woman in the end. I guess, good or bad, the past finds us all, eventually.”

His attention stayed on Blaine long enough to see the man’s expression fall, his posture turning slack like he hadn’t expected any kind of remorse. At least that was one absolution to all this.

Meanwhile, Sarah shook her head, and her eyes glistened again, like she didn’t want to hear him confirm the truth of who he was and what he’d done. Or maybe that this really was the lackluster ending they would get.

She shuffled forward some more and clutched her fingers to the steel of his cell, her knees collapsing beneath her, as she slid to a defeated crouch on the floor. A once strong woman, broken.

Yet another thing to haunt him through the years.

For the longest time she said nothing. Her tears fell from her eyes, those eyes squeezed shut while she pressed her forehead to the bars, her sobs mostly muffled. She tapped her forehead against the metal, as though that might end the pain or the reality, ripping him to shreds in the passing minutes.

He’d wanted her. Wanted the life she’d offered. Blinkered himself to the consequences of what loving him entailed.

Love?

He scrubbed his hand over his face. The sheriff had called him empty in the skull, and now Dean knew why. As always, he sat ignorant to what went on within. Within him. Within Sarah.

She’d vouched for him, publicly, when she’d expended so much energy making it clear she wasn’t the type to fall easily. Though nothing about this relationship was easy, he’d fallen too, and almost certainly first.

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