Jamie wasn’t an easy lay. And she wasn’t someone he could go on autopilot with. He’d been different with her. Different than he could ever remember being. She ignited something in him. She called him on his crap. She’d asked for the real him.

Now she was crying, so he had to wonder if it was because he’d done something wrong. But Jamie wasn’t talking. She was just crying.

So he just held on to her, because he figured, if a woman burst into tears in your arms, the only thing to do was to keep on holding her.

He’d never had a woman cry after sex with him before. And if he was going to take a guess on which woman might be the most likely to do it, his guess wouldn’t have been Jamie. No. It would not have been.

He said nothing. Instead, he held her while she shook and cried, completely silently, tears tracking down her cheeks in large, wet streaks. The intensity of her silence, the way she bit her lip, made him seriously question which one of them was more horrified.

He had a feeling it was her.

So he held her, stroking her hair back from her face, moving the strands that had fallen from her ponytail during the act.

“Are you okay?” he murmured finally.

She nodded. Still not making a sound.

“Do you always...cry?”

Sex was a release, after all. It was entirely reasonable to think that some women just cried afterward. Maybe even some men did.

Not him. But he could understand it.

The sex had been so good between the two of them, he could understand weeping with gratitude over it. But he’d barely had a minute to enjoy it, given that she had burst into tears, and now he was terrified.

Throw him on the back of an angry, bucking horse and he was right at home. Give him a soft, naked woman, weeping after an orgasm, and he had no clue what to do.

Yeah, he was pretty damn terrified.

She shook her head. Great. So it was just him that made her cry. That made him feel like a real winner.

And somewhere in that tangle of feelings, his stomach hollowed out. Because now he wondered if she had really wanted to do this. If somehow, he had been too hasty. If he’d been selfish.

His dad had said that about himself more than once. That he turned off his conscience sometimes when a beautiful woman threw a look in his direction. That he was so focused on getting what was good, he didn’t think about what was right.

After Trisha, Gabe had intentionally made sure that there was no one in his life he was beholden to. He’d never been in a relationship since. And that meant he was free to take up what was on offer without thinking about it too deeply. He never went to bed with women who weren’t excited to go to bed with him. And he’d never betrayed a woman back home.