With that, he turned and walked toward the door.
“Nate!” Ruthann began to walk after him.
“Ruthann Joliet,” he said, turning around, his teeth gritted. “Don’t follow me. I don’t want you to. I don’t . . . I don’t wantyou.”
He might as well have punched her in the stomach instead of that wall. Ruthann pressed her hands against her abdomen as he stalked out, the door slamming behind him.
She’d thought he was giving up, but this was more than that.
He didn’t wanther.
He didn’t care for her. After everything—their quiet conversations, the sweet gestures he’d shown her, the kisses—he’d decided he didn’t want her.
I shouldn’t believe it. But his words were too harsh, the look on his face too cold.
It didn’t matter whether she believed him or not. He’d decided he was done. And there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
And with that thought, she crumpled to the floor for the second time that day as tears welled up in her eyes and began to spill.
Chapter Twenty-six
NATE DIDN’T RETURNuntil after dark. To his relief, Ruthann wasn’t there. And neither were many of her things. The apartment above the studio was too empty and too quiet without her presence. Nate gave it one hour, until it seemed that both guilt and the ghosts in his mind would consume him whole if he stayed here by himself.
He spent the night at the boardinghouse and didn’t venture back to the studio until late in the morning. It seemed word had gotten around about how his studio had been ransacked, because he arrived to find no customers waiting.
It was easier to avoid thinking about Ruthann when he kept busy, so Nate set to work cleaning up the mess in the studio. His hand was black and blue from his outburst yesterday, but the pain seemed almost a penance for what he’d done. For how he’d hurt Ruthann.
As he reached the rear of the studio, he knew he’d have to order new glass for the window in the back door, but in the meantime, he covered it with a burlap sack, cut open to cover the hole. If Ruthann were here, he had no doubt she would have sewn up something prettier to cover the broken window.
That thought made his heart ache, and so he pushed it away and picked up the broom again.
A few minutes later, the front door opened. Nate tensed, sure it was one of the men who had turned his studio upside down. But it was only Stuart, who paused once inside and frowned at the partially swept-up room.
“Ruthann told me what had happened, but it was hard to believe until I saw it myself.” He closed the door behind him and went right to the little end table, which still lay on its side, and set it upright. He dusted his hands together. “I’d say someone has it out for you.”
Nate leaned the broom against the wall. Ruthann had occupied so much of his mind that he hadn’t had the wherewithal to think about that. But it was true. Someone certainly was out to ruin him, and their actions were growing more daring by the day. “It appears that way,” he finally said.
