Ten
Kenna’ssudden loss of consciousness unsettled Smith.
Last night he had been relieved to retreat to the bedroom and leave her here in the living room. Eager to escape her disturbing presence. Tonight her energy was…off. She seemed utterly defeated.
It concerned him.
Yes, he had wanted her emotions to be more accessible, had wanted her to feel comfortable andsafeenough with him to allow herself to be vulnerable in his presence.
But this wasn’t that. This wasn’t a willing capitulation.
It was a brutal defeat.
The strong outer shell which had protected her vulnerabilities had been eroded through brute force and attrition. And without it, she was diminished, fragile, too gut-wrenchingly exposed.
This wasn’t what he’d wanted. He’d been willing to walk away. To leave her to her jealously guarded secrets.
He still was.
Having her here, like this—so small andbruised and broken—wasn’t what Smith wanted. She was too damaged, and he feared that all he’d do was fuck her up even more if she stayed here any longer.
His concerned eyes traced her features, so still in sleep. She was stunning. He’d always thought so. Not what one would call conventionally beautiful. But she had strong, arresting features that drew his eyes and kept them lingering on her face a beat longer than was acceptable.
He’d always been unable to resist the mysterious depths of those beautiful, serious gray eyes with their unique blue striations. And her wide, mobile mouth, made for kissing even though she rarely smiled.
He’d enjoyed the mystery of her at first. Had eagerly anticipated peeling back all her layers to find the woman lurking beneath those grave features. Before their marriage he’d found it challenging to coax even the smallest of personal details from her.
But after their marriage and the miscarriage, it had become emotionally taxing, then frustrating, then exhausting to have to wrestle even the tiniest scrap from her.
Getting the woman to talk about herself, about her feelings, had been like drawing blood from a stone and he’d begun to wonder if there was anything there to uncover.
He winced as he recalled saying something similar to her just before he’d left.
He had been harsh. Perhaps even cruel.
But he had panicked when she’d stood there in that bathroom and so guilelessly talked about making another baby.
The most intimate exchanges they’d had in weeks had been to pass each other the salt across the breakfast table. He’d pictured them trapped in an endless, stagnant loop, only this time with an innocent child thrown into the mix, and he’d known that he couldn’t do it.
So he’d lashed out, said terrible things. The words hadstemmed from his roiling frustration and come from a place of absolute truth.
But he could have been kinder. She’d stood there, taking his vitriol with visible shock on her face, but he’d seen more than that. He’d seen pain. And the memory of her expression of betrayal and hurt had haunted him for weeks.
She’d always seemed so impervious to basic human emotion.
So resilient.
But that night when he’d been so unforgivingly cruel had revealed the vulnerable woman beneath the cool, polished veneer she presented to the world.
Despite what he’d learned and seen, he’d walked away from her. Convinced himself that she would be fine, that she would shrug their marriage off as a stupid mistake. Something she hadn’t wanted to start with. And she’d move on. They both would. A simple, painless divorce.
Only she’d shown up here, a messy kaleidoscope of conflicting emotions flitting across her face from one moment to the next. He had seen her stubborn, scared, hurt, relieved, angry, turned on, and devastated, over the last twenty-four hours.
Her comments had been self-deprecating, sarcastic, funny, and flirtatious.
It was a bittersweet sample of how it should have been between them. But it was too little, too late. There was no going back. He refused to go back.
He stared down at her sleeping profile, her hair a silken mess as it half obscured her face. She was bound to get a crick in her neck with her head resting on the hard arm of the couch like that.
