The ironies were coming thick and fast today, but Kelly didn’t have it in her to appreciate them.

“What does it matter?”

Caleb made a strange sort of choking sound, and his face almost twisted with the intensity of his emotions. “What does it matter?” he repeated, loud, violent, uncontrolled. He hauled her up so that she was higher against the wall, since her knees had been buckling again. “It matters because I have been faithful to you. I haven’t fucked anyone but you since we got together. Even after I found out who you are and what you were really doing with me, I still didn’t…I thought we were…” He cut off his words, giving his head a brief, jerky toss. “I haven’t even thought about cheating on you. Why the hell shouldn’t I be angry?”

The part of Kelly’s mind that was still working beneath her blank haze recognized that Caleb wasn’t just angry. He’d been wounded and was lashing out instinctively, like a bleeding animal.

She would have been pleased by this sort of victory, had she been capable of feeling anything at all.

It seemed like she should be experiencing a whole storm of emotions, like her feelings should be burying her alive.

But she wasn’t. They weren’t. They must be there inside her somewhere, but all of her feelings were somehow sealed off at the moment, with a blankness as hard and unyielding as stone. And not all of Caleb’s rage or jealousy or pain seemed capable of breaking through to her own.

Not even the faint realization that he somehow seemed to know who she was.

She weakly tried to shrug Caleb off, not in anger or fear but in empty annoyance.

He wouldn’t let her go. Gripped her harder. “Look at me, damn it!”

And that did it. Kelly snapped.

“Bastard!” she hissed, unable to find a word that came anywhere close to expressing the depth of her hatred. Her limp body suddenly tightened into fury, and she shoved Caleb with all of her strength away from her.

He stumbled back. Stared at her in astonishment.

She didn’t give him enough time to process the shift in dynamic. Advanced on him a white-hot rage barely held in check by the cold momentum of her will. Suddenly slammed with the entire weight of her grief, hatred, betrayal, and confusion from the last seventeen years of her life, Kelly lashed out—with both her hands and her voice.

“You’re mad at me for lying to you! You’ve lied about everything every moment of your life!” Her voice was shrill and raspy, and she was frantically pummeling Caleb with her fists until he grabbed her forearms to hold her off of him. “Nothing about you is real. You fuck me, act like you care for me. When you have no heart to begin with. Why the hell should I be faithful to a monster like you?”

She hadn’t been planning to confront him like this—as it would put her in a very dangerous position—but at this point it didn’t really matter. She didn’t care, and she was incapable of stopping herself.

Caleb’s expression was incomprehensible. It was twisting with effort and surprise and something far deeper as he tried to contain her flailing arms.

“I was starting to believe you…” She was almost strangling on the furious words. “Despite everything. Everything. I was starting to…I knew better. I knew better. But still…”

At the horrifying realization of what she’d almost started to believe—about this man who had murdered her father—her vision actually whited out.

She lashed out again, this time with her leg, since Caleb had imprisoned her arms in an iron grip. She tried to knee him in the groin, but he’d somehow predicted her attack, and he was able to deflect her raised knee with an awkward swing of his leg.

“You’re angry with me?” she choked out, giving up on striking out against him with anything but words. And it finally all came out. “You killed my dad. You don’t get to hate me for anything.”

Chapter 9

Caleb hadn’t expected it to hurt as much as it did.

He’d thought nothing could hurt as much as when he’d discovered Kelly’s real identity. He’d stupidly believed that was as bad as a betrayal could be.

He’d been wrong, though. This was even worse. Not only had Kelly lied to him and manipulated, deceived him in the most intimate way, but he’d actually started to believe that she’d grown to want him—to have feelings for him—in spite of herself. He’d started to believe that her feelings were real, even if nothing else about her was.

But he was wrong. All of it had been a lie, even the way she’d seemed so emotionally torn with him lately. She couldn’t really have feelings for him, not if she was screwing another man.

And that hurt even more than the first betrayal.

He’d never experienced anything like it. Not even when Mallory died. Then, the trauma and devastation had been spread out over more than a year, and so he was empty and numb at the end of it. But this loss was all at once—and with more anger and shock and pain than he’d believed himself capable of feeling.

And all of it slammed over him like a tidal wave as he stared at Kelly, who had just spit out those words as if they were the deepest expression of her heart.

“You killed him,” she repeated, now in a hoarse whisper. Her hair was hanging down all around her like a tangled veil. Her face was dead white, and her eyes were like bleeding wounds. “You killed my father, and he was innocent. And you’re mad at me because you think I fucked someone else? You think that would be anything close to what you’ve done to me?”

Caleb couldn’t move. His emotions were churning with too much strength. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. He just stood like a statue trying to process the feelings.

He was helpless in the face of them—no power in his mind or his body capable of facing the force of his emotions at the moment—and they were so conflicted he couldn’t even name them.

“You don’t get to be angry with me for anything. You don’t get to hold a grudge against anyone else. Not after what you’ve done.”

Caleb still couldn’t consciously decide what to say. He didn’t think he was capable of saying anything at all, but then he heard words come out of his mouth. “I didn’t kill your father.”

She narrowed her eyes and seemed to be visibly holding herself back from attacking him again. “You hired someone, but that’s a distinction that means absolutely nothing. You’re as guilty as if you pulled the trigger.”

And that hurt too. So much he had to close his eyes against her face.

She believed it.

He’d fallen for her like a boy. He’d believed she really loved him. And then, even after he’d found out the real truth about her, his feelings still kept pulling him toward foolish, impossible ideas.

She didn’t seem to be lying all the time. She seemed to mean most of what she said to him. No matter how hard he tried to be cold, he still couldn’t believe she was faking everything. The afternoon they’d gone hiking had felt so palpably real, even as he’d been trying to break her. In the end he hadn’t been able to bring himself to intentionally hurt her anyway.

So he’d talked himself into believing she had feelings for him after all. That no matter what game she was playing, it simply wasn’t working the way she wanted. Maybe she loved him, despite her best efforts.

But now he knew she couldn’t love him. Not really. Not if she believed he was capable of cold-bloodedly murdering an innocent man.

“I didn’t kill him,” he said again, his voice a little clearer, although he didn’t know how he’d managed it. “I didn’t arrange it. I didn’t know anything about it until afterward.”