Nodding slowly, he settled his hands on his hips. “Maybe now I understand the difference between us. To you, nothing mattered until our lips touched and our bodies met. To me, weeks of shared work—hours passed in silence and in conversation—that time meant something. But perhaps such moments are nothing to people like you.”

His words stoked her outrage until it blazed. “How could I have known what you were thinking? I can’t read your mind.”

His jaw tightened. “I hoped you could read my heart.”

She reeled, and the cooler tottered. Wedging her hands beneath her thighs, she gripped it. “That’s not fair.”

“Everything needs to be spoken aloud for you people,” he snarled. “You print your feelings on billboards and shout them over the radio. Can nothing be understood without words?”

She jerked to standing, toppling the cooler. “My world is an easy target, isn’t it? Well, maybe I am hopelessly corrupt, but I haven’t lied to myself for years. I don’t live a life I don’t believe in, just because I don’t have the courage to leave.” His studied composure cracked, exposing a hurricane of raw emotion. She braced for the backlash.

“This discussion isn’t about me, and you know it. It’s about the freedom you took to toy with two men—and your inability to make a choice, any choice, about how you want to live your life.”

“I had a choice to be with you?” Swiping curls from her eyes, she held his gaze. “How could I possibly have known? Did I think you cared about me? Yes. Did I believe our relationship could ever be anything more? How could I?”

He spun and leaned into the workbench, back heaving. His shirt strained at the seams.

She watched him struggle to contain the passion she knew his upbringing taught him to suppress. After weeks of restraint, she was not so fettered. “You live in this closed-off community I can never enter. When I’m around, your sister speaks in another language. She told me flat out to leave and never come back! How could I hope to be part of your life?”

His fist crashed onto the workbench, jarring the toolbox and all its contents.

With a cry, she stumbled backward, tripping over the cooler.

He pivoted slowly. “You speak of things about which you know nothing.”

His face was granite. Steeling her spine, she refused to back down. “Exactly.” With her gaze locked on his, she stood tight-lipped, daring him to speak. His silence double dared her in return.

Thunder rumbled in the west, echoing the sound of bone hitting wood and the hum of vibrating metal.

Grabbing the toolbox, he closed the distance between them in three paces and yanked a piece of paper from the tools, tearing one corner.