Sam felt her face burn, and she was furious that she was still so vulnerable to everything Nick said or did. It had to be the shock. When she’d come to Los Angeles, she’d known she wouldn’t be going anywhere near Malibu and she certainly hadn’t expected to see him walk through the door. Not any more than she’d expected that the sight of him would rock the world under her feet.
She turned from him and the way he seemed to fill all the space in the room, the way he’d always filled the space around her. She concentrated on the attorney behind the desk. But nothing she did could stop her from feeling Nick’s presence beside her. She didn’t have to inhale to know that he was so close she almost felt the air stir as he shifted in the leather chair.
She didn’t have to turn to be assailed by his image, an image burned into her mind. The navy suit, the pin-striped shirt with a deep red tie. His hair, a bit longer than it once had been, swept back from a hard face. Angles and planes. Those eyes. The one constant with Nick was that he was as sexy as hell. Even when he looked as if he wasn’t feeling well.
She couldn’t block out the image even when she wasn’t looking at him. He still had the same effect on her as he had the first moment they’d met, the first time he spoke to her in that low, rough voice, the first moment he touched her. She took a deep breath and knew she needed to go home, but she couldn’t till tomorrow morning. Until then, she just needed to be out of this office and to put Nick behind her.
“Mr. Danforth, I tell you what. I’ll get these back to you before I fly out tomorrow,” she told the attorney.
“That’s fine.” The man frowned at the two of them, probably glad that she was leaving and any explosion wouldn’t happen. “Just fine.”
She picked up her small white purse, then turned and walked away. The door was close enough for her to reach out and touch when she heard Nick’s voice call out, “Sam?”
She stopped but didn’t turn around. She didn’t need to look at Nick, the man she married, the man whose touch could make all reason flee, the man who could make her ache with just the sound of his voice. She held the doorknob so tightly her hand ached. All she wanted to do was cross the room and make some contact with him. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
Sam stood very still, his words hanging between them, and she didn’t know what to do. He was sorry. For some reason, that centered her. It killed whatever had been happening, whatever craziness was growing inside her, and in its place came a startling anger. She remembered. That moment she knew she’d have to leave. That moment she realized that Nick was a stranger.
Nick and Greg O’Neill on the deck of the Malibu house. She’d been gone, losing herself in her painting. The morning had started badly with a sense of something wrong, but she hadn’t been able to figure it out. There had been so many rough spots in the short marriage, but that morning, something had changed.
When they’d come back to the house from the beach, their lovemaking had been incredible and almost desperate. Now she realized she had sensed their relationship was over. That was the last time they’d made love. She’d immersed herself in her painting all day, then when night came, she’d heard voices in some other part of the house.
Wiping her hands on a rag, she’d gone toward the voices but stopped when she realized that Nick and Greg O’Neill were talking on the deck overlooking the beach. There were no lights on, just a partial moon, and the sound of Nick’s voice seemed to be everywhere in the air.
“My God, Greg, I’ve gotten myself in a real mess. This marriage…I don’t even know how it happened, and now Sam’s talking about kids. Next thing you know, she’ll be wanting a picket fence and daisies.”
Greg had laughed, saying something about bribing a judge and favors owed.
She’d waited for Nick to laugh and make it all into a joke. But he never had. Instead he spoke about marriage as if it were a disease. His voice was low, slightly slurred from drinking and filled with remorse. “It’s my fault, and if I could undo it, I would in an instant.”
“You wouldn’t even have wanted to meet Sam?” Greg had asked.
“Oh, hell, meet her? Yes. I wanted her from the first minute I saw her in that courtroom, green all over her hands, telling the judge that she was just trying to get to where she was going and didn’t understand why everyone was so upset with her driving.” There was a pause, then he laughed, but the sound was almost ugly. “Too bad it couldn’t have just been different.”
She had tried so hard to block his words, but they never went away. “Like what, an affair?” Greg had asked.
“Absolutely. That would have been perfect. But marriage? Marriage isn’t a normal state. Who ever thought up this concept of ‘forever’ with one person?”
“You don’t love her?”
She’d held her breath until Nick spoke again. “Love? I want her. I can’t stop that. But love? There’s no such thing.”
During their short marriage, he had never once said he loved her. They were strangers in so many ways. But she hadn’t known about the regret on Nick’s part. She’d believed that he loved her even if he couldn’t say it. She’d deluded herself. That tore at her more than anything, and in that moment in the dark, she’d seen clearly what she had to do.
The dreams that had kept her going through a lifetime alone were shattered. Her dreams of meeting a man, falling madly in love, being loved in return and having his children, died that night.
Her last act was to ask Nick one simple question, and even before he spoke, she knew it was over. So she gave him what he wanted—an out. And he’d taken it.
She bit her lips hard, the past hammering against her, and she would have left Danforth’s offices right then if Nick hadn’t spoken again.
“Sam? I said I was sorry.”
She took a breath, trying to steady the way her heart was bouncing in her chest, then made herself look back at him over her shoulder. He was still sitting in the chair, his eyes narrowed, his hands pressed to his thighs. She was sorry, too. So very sorry at that moment. And it made her ache even more. She was sorry for ever cuddling against him in the night, for ever touching him or letting him touch her. She was so damned sorry it was pathetic.
That thought was clear and sharp, as painful as anything she’d ever felt. “What are you sorry for?” she asked, her voice tight.
“For not being what you needed.”
She exhaled, a slightly shaky action, and spoke the truth. “It’s not your fault. The man I thought you were just never showed up,” she said quietly. “It was my fault for thinking he would.” Then she did leave. She went through the door, closed it and hurried through the reception area, looking neither right nor left.
She went out into the hallway to the elevators and didn’t feel as if she could breathe until she’d pushed the down button. Fifty feet and three closed doors were between herself and Nick, and yet she could still almost feel him behind her.
She held the purse and envelope against her chest so tightly that the clasp on her purse was biting into her ribs, but she didn’t ease her grip. For six months she’d had a life without Nick, a life that wasn’t what she’d dreamed she’d have, but it had been good at the cottage. It had been calm and peaceful. But just one meeting with him had toppled whatever balance she’d found.
“Mrs. Viera?”
Startled by the sound of a name she hadn’t heard in months, she realized that the elevator doors were wide open. She didn’t have a clue how long she’d been standing there or why a slightly built, elderly gentleman dressed all in black was in the car watching her with a smile.
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