"We've got nothing here and we both know it. It's just one of those times I saw it first."
She snatched up a bowl and sent it crashing through his kitchen window. Another time he might have been impressed with the force and velocity. And her aim. But at the moment he could only suffer.
"I ain't paying for the damages, sugar. And I never made you any promises, told you any lies. You knew yourself what you were getting when you came looking for me. You wanted me to take the choice out of your hands. You wanted me to take you so you wouldn't have to say it. That's fact."
"I didn't know how to say it," she shot at him.
"Well, I did, and that was fine with both of us. You haven't got a choice here either. It's just done."
Her breath was heaving, shuddering as she tried to calm it. Temper—her temper—she knew, was horrible when unlocked. And when the key was turned with pain, so much the worse. "That's cruel, and it's cold."
Where the temper had missed its mark, the quiet words arrowed straight into his heart. "That's life."
"Just done." She let the tears come, they hardly mattered. "So that's how this sort of thing is accomplished.
You say it's just done, and it is. So much less complicated than divorce, which is the only way I've ended a relationship."
"I didn't cheat on you." He couldn't bear having her think that of him, or herself. "I never thought of another woman when I was with you. This has nothing to do with you. I've just got places to go."
"Nothing to do with me." She closed her eyes. The temper was gone now, quickly as always. Drained to exhaustion. "I never would have said you were a stupid man, Michael, or a shallow one. But if you can say that, you're both."
She lifted her hands, rubbed away the tears. She wanted to see him clearly, since it would be the last time. He was rough, wild, moody. He was, she thought, everything.
"I wonder that you don't even know what you're throwing away, what I would have given you. What you could have had with me, and Ali and Kayla."
"They're your kids." This was another hurt, just as deep, just as bloody. "Templetons. You wouldn't have given them to me."
"You're wrong, pathetically wrong. I already had." She walked to the door, opened it. "You do what you have to do and go where you have to go. But don't ever think it was just sex for me. I loved you. And the only thing more pitiful than that is that even as you turn me away like this, so carelessly, I still do."
Chapter Twenty
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Michael took a step forward, then stopped himself. She didn't know what she was saying. Couldn't know.
He forced himself to step back from the door, then turned and watched her walk away across the lawn. Continued to watch when she changed directions, broke into a run.
She'd go to the cliffs, he realized. She was angry and hurt, so she would go to the cliffs to finish crying. When she was finished she would think. She would stay angry and hurt for a while, and hate him longer than that, but he knew that eventually she would see it was for the best.
She wasn't in love with him. He scrubbed his hands over his face. It already felt raw and battered. Maybe she thought she was, or had talked herself into it, he decided. It was a knee-jerk female reaction, that was all. It fit a woman like Laura—sex and love, need and emotion. She wasn't seeing the big picture.
But he could.
Men who had lived as he had lived didn't end up happy ever after with women of her class, her bree
ding. Sooner or later she'd have come to the same conclusion, found herself drawn back to the country club style. Maybe she would never forgive him for seeing it first, but that couldn't be helped.
It would kill him to be with her and wait. To know that when the passion had dimmed she would still stay with him. She'd be kind. She couldn't be otherwise. But he would know when he had become just another obligation.
He was doing them both a favor by getting out of her life.
Josh was right. And no one knew him better.
But he continued to stand, staring out at the cliffs and the lone figure who stood there twisting the knife in his own heart. Finally he turned away and left the room that was as disrupted as his life to go down to his horses.
She hadn't known how completely a heart could shatter. She'd thought she knew. When her marriage had ended, Laura had been certain she would never grieve in quite the same way again.
She'd been right, she thought now and pressed both hands to the ache in her heart. This was different. This was worse.