Refused to succumb to the despair that crashed and covered, the weight of it making it impossible to breathe.
The tires squealed again as Ian took the last turn into my neighborhood, and he slowed as he navigated the suburban streets to my home.
A sanctuary.
A place of peace and love.
And somehow it was Ian who’d come to feel like home.
He pulled to the curb, and my shattered heart heaved in a shock of pain when I looked over and saw the utter devastation on his face.
Different from mine.
A shroud of guilt covered him whole. The man vibrated with self-condemnation. A dark cloud crawling his flesh.
Shaking, I fumbled out of the car, still barely able to stand.
My bleeding heart was somewhere in my throat.
Thick and knotted.
Suffocating.
A crisp breeze twisted through the intense blue sky that murmured of the coming winter.
Like a cold, quiet whisper.
A premonition.
Chills flashed across my skin, and my stomach twisted in awareness and dread.
I couldn’t control the shaking in my hands as I opened the back door of his car.
Grief streaked through my insides, and I nearly fell to my knees when I looked at my children’s things.
Their little suitcases and their seats.
The unbearable reality slammed me.
He took them.
He took them.
Grief took over everything.
Every cell.
Every molecule.
He took them.
A sob ripped from my chest, and my eyes blurred with the tears that I couldn’t keep at bay.
They fell. Fell as violently as the anger that infiltrated to the marrow.
Ian came around to my side, the man a dark, gray storm, those crazy-colored eyes the strangest I’d ever seen.
Swirling with rage and anger and a terrifying sort of desperation.
He gathered up everything in one fell swoop, shifting on his heel and stalking up the walkway, rigid anger as he waited at the door.
I felt as if I were crawling as I followed. Moving against the current. Cutting against the grain.
Everything wrong.
So wrong.
Legs heavy, I moved around him and unlocked the door, and he set everything just inside.
He refused to look at me, jaw clenched and muscles bunched and twitching, the designs etched into his skin alive, exposed by the tee shirt he wore.
My soul wept.
Cried and howled.
Couldn’t he see that he was only making it worse? That he was only hurting us more by doing this to himself?
Blame would win us no points.
But it was there in the firm set of his chiseled jaw as he stepped back, there in the anger and the fury that roiled and tossed and turned my world into disorder.
A gust of wind screamed through. Burning my flesh. Freezing my bones.
He glared off into it, still refusing to look my way.
“Ian,” I finally begged, unable to take it any longer.
He stayed frozen.
The man carved of stone.
Stone that was roughened by the world. Gaping holes underneath. “I’m sorry,” he grated, the words just as hard as the rigid lines of his body.
“What are you sorry for?”
Bitter laughter punched the air.
Haunting.
Echoing through the space.
“What am I sorry for?” In a flash, he whipped toward me, and he was angling down, coming so close that I could taste his savage words. “I’m sorry for being me. For fucking this up. I knew I would. I fucking knew I would, and I went after you anyway.”
He straightened as soon as he said it, putting space between us.
Agony twisted my brow into a tight bow, and I hugged myself. “No. You are what I needed. What I was waiting for. We needed you.”
Bitter laughter rumbled low, and that gorgeous face twisted in disgust. “Your kids are gone because of me. You’re alone because of me. Everything I’ve worked for since I was seventeen, all the blood, sweat, and bullshit I’ve taken . . . gone. Because. Of. Me. Gone because I couldn’t keep my goddamned dick in my pants.”
He might as well have slapped me.
“You know it was more than that,” I wheezed through the desperate plea.
“It wasn’t anything but a mistake.” He gritted it so close to my mouth I could taste the venom coming from his tongue.
A sob climbed my throat, so big I was suffocating on it.
I couldn’t take any more.
“No . . . don’t say that. Please, don’t say that.”
“This ends. Now.”
I reached for him, and he stepped back.
“Please, Ian, don’t leave me. Not now. I need you.”
His expression turned cold, distant, and I swore the earth shook, the last pieces falling away.
Destroyed.
Desolated.
Pain splintered and spread. Veins of devastation that crawled and exterminated.
Uprooting all the hope I’d put on this man.
My fingers clawed at him. “No . . . no . . . you . . . you said you were going to fight for them. With me.”
I was begging.
Pleading.
Praying,
How could he do this to me?
He laughed more, this low, disgusted sound. He tipped his head to the side, bleeding antagonism. “You really think a judge is going to listen to what I have to say? I fucked my client. Guess what, Grace, that means I’ve lost all credibility. I can no longer touch this case. I’ve ruined my career. It’s over. All of it.”
Desperation sped through my blood.
“No, you can’t do this. You can’t just walk away from me. From us. You love me. You love us.” I was floundering, the despair too great as I tried to reach for him.
To get ahold of him.
To make him see.
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“No . . . please.”
He lifted a defiant chin, all the tender goodness I’d come to recognize in this man obliterated.
Standing in his place was the predator.
The man who would do absolutely anything to survive.
It didn’t matter who got in his way.
Including me.
“I don’t want this mess, Grace. I never did. Now, I’m walking away. Believe me, you’ll be better off.”
“So . . . that’s it? Things get rough, and you run like a coward?” I choked around the accusation.
He didn’t even flinch. “I warned you who I was.”
Selfish.
Greedy.
Incapable of love.
The devil.
Maybe I’d been the fool who hadn’t believed him. The one who’d seen more in him. Something better than the powerful, callous man who stood in front of me right then.
I hugged my arms across my chest as if it could shield me from the brutality of his words. As if they could protect me from the truth I should have seen all along.
Still, I was stumbling, pleading with him. “No, you’re wrong. You’re so much more than that. I know you are. I’ve seen it.”
“You only saw what you wanted to see.”
“You told me you loved me. I trusted you. I trusted you with everything.”
“And look what that got you.”
A gust of wind whipped through the narrow street. The spindly branches of the ancient oaks hissed and howled, sending a tumble of dead, dried leaves across the ground.
It stirred the chaos that raged inside me.
I don’t believe you.
I don’t believe you.
My spirit screamed it while my mind struggled to accept the reality. The truth that he could hurt me this way.
That he would just . . . turn his back and walk.
It ripped and tore at my insides.
Loss.
A grief unlike anything I’d ever felt.
Hope scattering like the leaves.
“How can you do this?” I forced myself to look at his beautiful face.
Too beautiful. Too mesmerizing. Too dangerous.
“How can you, when you know what is at stake? When you know how badly I need you? I trusted you.” The last raked from my throat that was raw and aching.
As raw and aching as my heart.
My eyes squeezed closed when he reached out and brushed his fingertips down the side of my face.
Tenderly.
A stark contrast to the wickedness that blazed from his soul.
Then his voice twisted with that dark, bitter hatred—hatred I was sure was completely directed at himself.