Caleb was shaking now too, with some sort of rising intensity—only he was shaking on the inside. His fingers were motionless and relaxed on the seat beside him. “If they were with me for other reasons, then they were trying to use me as much as I used them. I’m simply the one who succeeded. Besides, they all had a good time.”

“Did they?” Kelly asked blandly, the mildness in her voice almost merciless. “How do you know?”

He didn’t.

He didn’t know at all.

Most of the time he hadn’t even cared enough to wonder whether they’d really come or not.

“Anyway,” Kelly concluded, suddenly sounding sad and almost ancient, “I’m not saying you’re to blame for it. All of those women chose to do what they chose to do. Just like all the men I was with before. I used to think…”

There was a pause. And Caleb found himself holding his breath until she finished her sentence.

“What?” he asked at last, when she never completed the thought.

She shook her head. “Nothing. I used to think sex could be simple—just something to do. I never really thought what might be going on with the other person.”

Caleb had always been exactly the same, rarely thinking about the human being on the other end of the encounter. The revelation hit him with more power than it should have.

Kelly went on, as if she were speaking to herself now. “I went a really long time without ever knowing what it was like.”

“What?”

“Having sex with someone who saw me as a person and not a body. And who I saw in the same way.”

Caleb let out his breath and took another swig of Coke as his belly clenched sickeningly.

She’d been talking about herself, but the words so clearly applied to him too.

Surely there had been someone—in all his years of fucking—who’d wanted to be with him for no underlying reasons. Who’d just wanted him…for him.

It was tragically implausible, but if there had been someone like that in his past, Caleb couldn’t recall her.

Until Kelly. Maybe Kelly. But she might not even really want him either. Not completely. There was so much more going on inside her that she wasn’t revealing to him.

Why had she fucked him just now when she hadn’t really wanted to?

“Anyway,” Kelly concluded, “I’m sorry I messed up our hot sex. I’m still trying to work through a lot of issues, I guess, so it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.”

It hadn’t been good at all, except for the empty physical release.

As they rode back home in exhausted silence, Caleb realized something else that hit him just as jarringly.

Their fucking hadn’t been much different from most of what had passed for good sex in Caleb’s life, until Kelly had entered his world.

It just had never bothered him before.

—

They only said a few words during the remainder of the drive. And when they got to his house, Kelly went right to bed while Caleb went to his office to return a couple of calls.

When he got up to the bedroom a half hour later, he saw that Kelly was under the covers.

She hadn’t brushed her hair, and her dress was tossed on the floor beside her shoes.

He’d half expected her to take a shower before going to bed, and the fact that she hadn’t wanted to immediately wash off all evidence of Caleb’s body on hers relaxed something in his chest.

Maybe it had just been one of those things. Maybe it wasn’t something he needed to feel guilty about.

He did, though. And it was somehow all tied up in his mind with the guilt provoked by his conversation with Sean Moore.

He took off his clothes, dropping them on the floor next to her dress, and then crawled under the covers beside her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, scooting over toward her.

She turned to face him, and even in the dark room he could see that her eyes were slightly red.

She’d been crying.

“I’m fine,” she assured him, smiling faintly. “I’m glad you didn’t work all night.”

Caleb didn’t even register her comment. The small comfort he’d taken in the fact that she hadn’t showered had dissolved completely at the sight of her face.

He was overwhelmed with another sick, heavy feeling rising in his gut.

It wasn’t guilt so much now as knowledge.

There was so much going on inside Kelly that he didn’t know about. Her life was just as complex and conflicted as his was, and that meant everything she did might be more than what it initially appeared.

She could come on to him—fuck him like an animal—and not really want it. She could say yes with her mouth and body and say no with her heart. She was deep and haunted and torn and human. And human.

Like him.

He didn’t want her saying no to him—not any part of her. He wanted what was between them to be real.

“Kelly,” he murmured, unable to resist the instinct to pull her into his arms.

She didn’t pull away. Her shoulders shook a few times, and she burrowed against his side.

So Caleb held her, had to acknowledge that she was desperately wounded from more than one experience in her past, that he hadn’t really been thinking about what was best for her.

He could see himself—as if from a distance—as he’d been brutally pounding into her body from behind, even as he’d somehow known that she wasn’t in the mood, that there was more going on with her than he wanted to acknowledge.

He stroked the tangled, golden glory of her hair.

And he thought about what she might have been trying to hide this evening with sex.

—

Caleb held Kelly for an hour or so, trying to figure everything out.

He just didn’t seem to be capable of thinking clearly this evening. In any way.

He kept going back to the idea that Kelly had started coming on to him after the strange interaction with Wes, and the suspicious part of his nature wondered if she had been using it as a distraction, trying to hide something from him.

But he couldn’t figure out anything that had to do with Wes that she could possibly want to hide.

Finally, when he could feel she’d completely relaxed in his arms, he murmured, “So what happened earlier? Why did you get so upset?”

She tensed briefly but then relaxed again. “I don’t know.”

“You know something.”

After a long moment she finally said, “Do you ever think something is a good idea at first but then, once you start down that road, you realize it’s not what you want at all? But then it feels like it’s too late to take it back?”

Caleb knew she was talking about the sex they’d had earlier, but he suddenly saw himself all those years ago, thinking there was an easy way to deal with a business problem that threatened to ruin him and then realizing how utterly wrong it was but being in too deep to take it back. He said softly, “Yeah. I’ve been there.”

“That’s all it was. Once I realized it wasn’t really what I wanted, it was too late to take it back.”

“It wasn’t too late. I would have stopped—”

“I know. Of course I know that. But it just felt…I don’t know.” She pulled out of his arms and straightened up so she was kneeling beside him on the bed. She looked down on him, her hair tumbling down her back and the straps of her little gown slipping off her shoulders. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have had sex with you like that when I wasn’t in the mood. I’m sorry.”

A tension in his chest relaxed. In spite of everything, his body couldn’t help but respond to the sight of her kneeling above him, the lush outline of her breasts beneath the fabric of her gown, the full curve of her lips. “I’m sorry too.”

Kelly must have noticed the signs of his growing arousal, even though he had no intention of acting on it. The mood was deep and intense between them—almost uncertain in a way that wasn’t like either one of them.

Caleb wanted her as much as he always had, but he felt like she was somehow more than she’d ever been before.