"I don't know if I read all of them, but I understand now why you turned me down that first night in Sun Valley."
He moved to the workbench and dumped out the grocery sack. With his broad back to her, he picked up the pencil and tore open the package. "Getting shot tends to discourage a guy from having a one-night stand." He pulled out the pencil and tossed the package on the desk. "It also gets a guy divorced. Although I think that was probably doomed to fail before it even started."
Kate walked toward him. "Did you love her?"
"Stephanie Andrews?" He looked across his shoulder at her. "Hell no!"
Kate had never understood how a man could love his wife yet cheat on her. "I meant your wife."
He nodded as he took the pencil apart. "Yeah, I loved her. Trouble was, I didn't like her most of the time. She didn't like me either. We really only got along when we were in bed, and that wasn't all that often. Either I was on the road or we were fighting."
Kate had never loved someone but not liked them. No, her problem was that she loved men who didn't love her enough.
"Still, I would have preferred a different end to my marriage." He removed the spring and lead from the pencil, then set them aside. "My career, too."
"More dignified?"
"Dignified? Yeah, that's a good word. Getting shot takes away your dignity. You wake up in a hospital bed with tubes stuck in your stomach and… other places. You're weak and helpless and everything about it sucks."
Kate imagined that to any man, being weak and helpless would be hard. But to a guy like Rob, used to hammering opponents into submission, it must have been extremely difficult.
"Then when you finally do get on your feet again, your whole life is different. No job. No wife. No nothing, except the sordid details on the Internet for everyone to read." He pulled a sewing needle from a package and snipped off the eye. "No love life either."
She didn't think he was talking about the falling-in-love kind of love life. She knew firsthand, so to speak, that he was physically capable of having sex. He wasn't married, although that obviously hadn't hampered him in the past. "How long since you've had a love life?"
He looked at her. "Are you asking how long it's been since I've had sex?"
They both knew she was, so why deny it? "Yeah."
One corner of his mouth turned down in a frown. "Never mind."
"Six months?"
He turned away.
"One year?" She knew from interviewing a lot of people over the years that most often the answer was found in what wasn't said.
"Drop it, Kate."
"Two years?"
He set down the needle and turned to face her. "You seem awfully interested in my sex life."
"You brought it up." She shrugged. "And I don't know if I'm 'awfully interested.' I'd call it a mild curiosity."
"What exactly are you curious about?" He took a step toward her. "How long it's been? Or how good it would be between us?" His lids lowered a fraction over his eyes. "I gotta admit that I'm curious about that myself."
She took a step back. "You and I having sex together is a very bad idea."
"You've already said that." He took a step forward.
She stuck her hand out like a traffic cop. "Stop. We can't have sex."
"Sure we can. We're both over twenty-one and neither of us is crazy. I want you and I know you want me. You wanted me the first night we met, and I'm thinking I was an idiot not to drag you up to my room."
There were several very good reasons that had nothing to do with age. One of which she gave. "That's why I can't have sex with you."
He took a determined step toward her, and her palm flattened against the front of his shirt. "Are you still mad that I didn't drag you up to my room?"