He backed up. “Something like that.” So it wasn’t going to be quick and clean, he decided, but messy. Nonetheless, it had to be done. “Break the place up if it makes you feel better. It’s your stuff. I expect even royalty has to have its tantrums.”

“Don’t you speak to me that way, as if I were some interesting toy that’s suddenly run amok. You came into my life, you exploded into my life and changed everything. Now you’re just finished?”

“We’ve got nothing here and we both know it. It’s just one of those times I saw it first.”

She snatched up a bowl and sent it crashing through his kitchen window. Another time he might have been impressed with the force and velocity. And her aim. But at the moment he could only suffer.

“I ain’t paying for the damages, sugar. And I never made you any promises, told you any lies. You knew yourself what you were getting when you came looking for me. You wanted me to take the choice out of your hands. You wanted me to take you so you wouldn’t have to say it. That’s fact.”

“I didn’t know how to say it,” she shot at him.

“Well, I did, and that was fine with both of us. You haven’t got a choice here either. It’s just done.”

Her breath was heaving, shuddering as she tried to calm it. Temper—her temper—she knew, was horrible when unlocked. And when the key was turned with pain, so much the worse. “That’s cruel, and it’s cold.”

Where the temper had missed its mark, the quiet words arrowed straight into his heart. “That’s life.”

“Just done.” She let the tears come, they hardly mattered. “So that’s how this sort of thing is accomplished. You say it’s just done, and it is. So much less complicated than divorce, which is the only way I’ve ended a relationship.”

“I didn’t cheat on you.” He couldn’t bear having her think that of him, or herself. “I never thought of another woman when I was with you. This has nothing to do with you. I’ve just got places to go.”

“Nothing to do with me.” She closed her eyes. The temper was gone now, quickly as always. Drained to exhaustion. “I never would have said you were a stupid man, Michael, or a shallow one. But if you can say that, you’re both.”

She lifted her hands, rubbed away the tears. She wanted to see him clearly, since it would be the last time. He was rough, wild, moody. He was, she thought, everything.

“I wonder that you don’t even know what you’re throwing away, what I would have given you. What you could have had with me, and Ali and Kayla.”