“Kelly,” Jack interrupted, “I’m not sure I’m in a fit condition to be discussing all of this right now. You should probably head out before the bodyguard catches up to you. I’ll finish this job. Go on. I’ll be in touch.”

Kelly wondered if he really would. Or if this was just an easy way to get rid of her for good.

She wouldn’t blame Jack if he cut her out of his life after this. But on that thought she realized that it would be a real loss to her if he did.

A loss she more than deserved.

“Okay,” she mumbled, pushing her hair out of her face. “I’m sorry, Jack.” Shaking her head, she added, “I never should have involved you in the disaster of my life.”

She was leaving, she actually had her hand on the doorknob, when Jack stopped her.

He was looking at her over his shoulder with an expression she couldn’t begin to comprehend. “Like the sun,” he said in a low, rough voice.

She had no idea what he was talking about. “What?”

“Blazing,” he explained. “Like the sun.” His mouth turned up just a little at the corner. “It will burn you if you let it. But it can also just keep you warm.”

—

She left the library and headed back to her apartment. There she just huddled on her couch, too battered to do anything, to make any plans or decide exactly what she should do about this situation.

She lay like that for a long time.

Caleb had killed her father, and she had fallen in love with him anyway.

There was no getting over that truth.

Then, unexpectedly, she heard a loud knock on the door.

She ignored it. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

But the knocking continued, growing louder, until it was finally too much to ignore.

“Kelly!” The voice was slightly muffled by the door and accompanied by more pounding.

Caleb.

She was so numb and dazed that she didn’t even wonder what he was doing here when they hadn’t arranged to meet up again tonight. She still didn’t move.

She didn’t want to see him. Didn’t even care why he was banging on her door.

“Kelly!” he called out again. He sounded angry—she could hear it even through the door. “Damn it, Kelly! Let me in. I know you’re here. I’m not going to leave.”

He sounded very angry. But his obvious intensity bounced off of her—unable to penetrate through the frozen shield of her numbness.

She let him pound on the door for a while, until he was practically roaring for her to open it.

Finally she stumbled off the couch. Over to the front door. Unlocked it. Then trudged back to the couch and curled up defensively again.

After she’d done so, she wondered why she had. She had just wanted him to stop yelling at her, but now he was going to come in.

Which meant she was going to have to talk to him.

He was inside now. He’d pushed through the door immediately and was right on her heels. Looming over the couch.

He seemed to be simmering with something. Something hot and powerful. But he wasn’t screaming anymore. He seemed to have whatever was boiling inside him reined in—at least for the moment.

Despite the intensity, he looked as sophisticated and composed as ever in his dark gray business suit and shiny shoes. Except his face was more flushed than it normally was, and his eyes…

She closed her own eyes against them and tried to curl up even tighter, as if she could somehow close him out.

“So what have you been doing this evening?” he gritted out, his voice a mockery of the conversational words. “Anything interesting?”

She ignored him. She couldn’t even begin to understand what might be wrong with him.

Caleb paced over to the table where Kelly had tossed her purse as she’d come into the apartment. He picked up the stack of pages she’d printed off at the library—an article from a professional art journal—so her visit wouldn’t look suspicious.

“Been to the library?” The words were an attempt at a silky purr, but he wasn’t in control enough to make it effective.

Kelly blinked, starting to have an inkling about what he might be so angry about.

“See anyone interesting there?” Caleb asked, his murmur edged with something rough and grating. He moved back over to the couch until he was looming above her again. “Do anything interesting there?”

Kelly just blinked up at him again. Like everything else, his rage at this point seemed utterly ludicrous, and she was too frozen to even respond to it.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Caleb roared, her disinterest finally pushing him out of his attempt at bitter coldness.

She squeezed her legs more tightly against her chest and hid her face. Not because she was afraid of his anger but because his voice was just too loud.

Caleb must have dropped down beside her. She suddenly felt his hand on her shoulder. It was surprisingly gentle, given his mood the moment before. “Kelly?” His voice was different now—hoarse, almost tender. “Kelly? Are you all right? Did he…hurt you?”

She felt something strange in her chest. If she hadn’t been so numb, she would have probably recognized it as a pang in response to the sudden concern in Caleb’s voice, so incongruously juxtaposed with his enraged defiance earlier.

She should have just gone with the excuse he’d unintentionally given her. It would have given her a way out of this situation, at least.

But for some reason she wasn’t able to. She just mumbled, “No. He didn’t hurt me.”

Jack hadn’t hurt her. She had hurt him.

“So you were there by choice.” Caleb’s momentary flash of urgent concern erupted into bitter resentment again. “So you liked it. So you wanted a cheap fuck in the library.”

His anger still wasn’t affecting her. His words felt like innocuous pings against the impenetrable numbness of her heart.

Caleb seemed to realize this too because suddenly he was hauling her to her feet. His hands were forceful and bruising on her upper arms, and her knees buckled as he tried to position her upright in front of him.

She felt like a rag doll, like it wasn’t even worth the trouble of standing up.

“Damn it, Kelly,” Caleb muttered, his face flushed again and his eyes blazing with the kind of pure, visceral wrath she’d rarely seen in him before. “What’s wrong with you? Was the fucking so good you can’t even stand up?”

He was in complete control of her body—she was only resisting him through her involuntary limpness—and he ended up pushing her back against the wall in her living room.

Her head banged back against the wall with the force of his momentum, and she instinctively tried to blink away the sharp dizziness from the sudden shift in position.

Caleb was still gripping her ruthlessly by her upper arms, holding her up now with the support of the wall and with the press of his hard, hot body.

“Was it that good?” he snarled, the cold, calculating man he’d always been swallowed completely by his wild, primitive rage. “Can he give you so much more than I can?” He used one of his knees to part her legs so he could push his pelvis against her more forcefully. He wasn’t aroused, though. Was just trying to get her attention. And Kelly didn’t even react to the angry push of his body against hers. “Do I leave you so unsatisfied that you have to sneak off and screw some—”

Kelly couldn’t seem to feel anything. She was just so tired. And she wanted him to go away.

“I didn’t—” she began, wondering why she was even bothering to explain.

“Don’t lie to me. What kind of a fool do you take me for? You’ve done nothing but lie to me—the whole time we’ve been together—and you think you can get away with it. And now you can’t stop yourself from cheating on me.”

Kelly just blinked at him. She wondered if you could cheat on someone you were never really in a relationship with.

“They sent me pictures,” Caleb went on roughly, taking hold of her chin with ungentle fingers. His eyes crawled almost cruelly over her face. “You tried to slip away, but I had more than one man following you, since I knew you couldn’t be trusted. And now I can see for myself. I know how you look after you’ve been fucked.”