“They’re your kids.” This was another hurt, just as deep, just as bloody. “Templetons. You wouldn’t have given them to me.”

“You’re wrong, pathetically wrong. I already had.” She walked to the door, opened it. “You do what you have to do and go where you have to go. But don’t ever think it was just sex for me. I loved you. And the only thing more pitiful than that is that even as you turn me away like this, so carelessly, I still do.”

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

Michael took a step forward, then stopped himself. She didn’t know what she was saying. Couldn’t know.

He forced himself to step back from the door, then turned and watched her walk away across the lawn. Continued to watch when she changed directions, broke into a run.

She’d go to the cliffs, he realized. She was angry and hurt, so she would go to the cliffs to finish crying. When she was finished she would think. She would stay angry and hurt for a while, and hate him longer than that, but he knew that eventually she would see it was for the best.

She wasn’t in love with him. He scrubbed his hands over his face. It already felt raw and battered. Maybe she thought she was, or had talked herself into it, he decided. It was a knee-jerk female reaction, that was all. It fit a woman like Laura—sex and love, need and emotion. She wasn’t seeing the big picture.

But he could.

Men who had lived as he had lived didn’t end up happy ever after with women of her class, her breeding. Sooner or later she’d have come to the same conclusion, found herself drawn back to the country club style. Maybe she would never forgive him for seeing it first, but that couldn’t be helped.

It would kill him to be with her and wait. To know that when the passion had dimmed she would still stay with him. She’d be kind. She couldn’t be otherwise. But he would know when he had become just another obligation.

He was doing them both a favor by getting out of her life.

Josh was right. And no one knew him better.

But he continued to stand, staring out at the cliffs and the lone figure who stood there twisting the knife in his own heart. Finally he turned away and left the room that was as disrupted as his life to go down to his horses.

She hadn’t known how completely a heart could shatter. She’d thought she knew. When her marriage had ended, Laura had been certain she would never grieve in quite the same way again.

She’d been right, she thought now and pressed both hands to the ache in her heart. This was different. This was worse.