Page 30 of Seasons of Sin

She had carried the secret for days and she was so sick of its burden. “Please just let me speak.” Tears stained the words. “Don’t … don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

Her eyes shimmered. “Like you hate me.”

“Just … tell me,” he commanded flatly, trying to suppress the betrayal from his features.

Her hair lifted in the breeze. The words came out with deceptive neutrality. “Remember I told you last night about my friend Anita?”

He expelled a harsh breath. It was worse than he’d thought. “So? You wanted to compete with her? Do something just as sick to prove your friendship?”

Saphire blanched. “No. God, no.” Her blue eyes were filled with pain that he could, even briefly, believe her capable of such childish gamesmanship. “I was the other woman. The husband she’s sleeping with? That’s my husband.”

Comprehension slammed into him. Anger, love, sorrow, it all threaded through him. “Jesus. You are telling me your best friend slept with your husband?”

She nodded, and angled her body away, so that she could stare out at the ocean. Every thing seemed to still, as feeling enveloped them in its folds. “I found them in our bed together. The day I met you. I went straight from that particularly unpalatable scene to the airport. And I booked onto the first flight I could find with every intention of drinking myself into oblivion so that I didn’t have to remember what it was like to see my husband screwing a woman I’ve grown up with.”

“Saphire,” he groaned, positioning himself into her line of sight. He studied her with an increasing sense of worry. She was miserable. And he should have known. He should have read her vulnerability and pushed her to disclose its root. “I wish you had told me.”

Her lips twisted into a smile, though it was eerily humorless. “You were meant to be a stupid one night stand. Revenge sex.”

“Revenge sex?”

She nodded. “Stupid, idiot me decided that the only way I could ever go back to him and forgive him was if I did something just as horrible to him. Don’t you see that? It has a crazy kind oflogic to it. I wanted to hurt him, Thad. I wanted to rip his heart out and stomp all over it.”

Thaddeus’s own heart was being shredded by her words. “So you planned to fuck me until you felt like you’d leveled the score, and then you were going to go back to him.”

She flinched at his harsh curse. “I’m not proud of it. I’m so not proud.” She sobbed again. “By the time you and I had gone beyond just stupid sex it was too late. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

He dragged a hand through his thick hair and stared at a point in the distance. “You were going to leave now and go back to him?”

Her shoulders were tiny as they shrugged her confusion. “This was a fantasy. Nothing more. That’s my real life. And I have to go back. I have to go back and face the music at some point.”

Thaddeus stared at her long and hard. “Is it the life you want?”

A tear rolled down her cheek and splashed onto her breast. Another followed but Thad caught it with his fingertip.

“What I want is for my husband to have not cheated with my best friend. What I want is to have not met you two months after I married him. What I want is to have realized sooner what a douche he is, and not to have wasted more than ten years of my life devoted to him.”

“Ten years?” Thad stared at her in disbelief. “He’s your only other lover. This moronic idiot who has left you for your best friend?”

“He hasn’t left me for her,” Saphire corrected automatically. “He claims to love me. To want me back.”

No.I won’t allow it.He strangled the words with a shake of his head. “I cannot believe you’re even thinking about that.”

“I didn’t know how to tell you.” And now her breath was almost impossible to catch; tears had given way to full-blown hyperventilating. “You were meant to be the guy I used! This was supposed to be simple. And now I feel like I’ve cheated on you. I feel like I’m cheating on you with my husband, and not the other way around. I don’t know what to do, but I know I can’t leave him. I can’t give up on him because of one stupid mistake.”

“You don’t know it was only one mistake!” He retorted with undisguised fury.

“I know.” She was dizzy. She wanted to reach out to him for support but she’d lost that privilege. She was alone. This was her mess to tidy. “I can’t just quit my marriage.”

“For God’s sake, Saphire, you’ve spent ten years with this prick and I’ll bet you any sum of money that he was cheating on you most of that time. No one could accuse you of quitting. Being obtuse, perhaps,” he tacked on scathingly.

And before she could guess his intentions, he bent down and scooped her up, carrying her tight against his chest.

“What are you doing?” She whispered against his ear, her arms wrapped around his neck.

“You’re not leaving me,” he muttered. “Not now, and not for him.”