Whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this. Shifting, he drank again. “For several of the usual reasons, I suppose.”

“You loved me?”

His eyes flashed to hers. “You know I loved you.”

“I know we loved each other. You were my friend.” She pressed her lips together. “My best friend.”

He got up to pour more wine. “We were children.”

“Not when we married. We were young, but we weren’t children. And we were still friends. I don’t know how it all went so wrong, Peter, or what I did to ruin it so completely, but—”

“You?” He stared, the bottle in one hand, the glass in the other. “What do you mean you ruined it?”

“I made you unhappy, miserably unhappy. I know I failed in bed, and it all spilled over into the rest until you couldn’t even bear to be around me.”

“You didn’t want me to touch you,” he shot back. “Damn it, it was like making love to—”

“An iceberg,” she finished flatly. “So you said.”

Fighting guilt, he set his glass down. “I said a lot of things, so did you. I thought I’d gotten past most of it until I heard your voice this afternoon.”

“I’m sorry.” She rose, her body and voice stiff to compensate for shattered pride. “I’ve just made it worse coming here. I am sorry, Peter, I’ll go.”

“It was like making love with my sister.” The words burst out and stopped her before she crossed the room. “My pal. Damn, Sydney, I couldn’t…” The humiliation of it clawed at him again. “I could never get beyond that, and make you, well, a wife. It unmanned me. And I took it out on you.”

“I thought you hated me.”

He slapped the bottle back on the table. “It was easier to try to hate you than admit I couldn’t arouse either one of us. That I was inadequate.”

“But I was.” Baffled, she took a step toward him. “I know I was useless to you in bed—before you told me, I knew it. And you had to go elsewhere for what I couldn’t give you.”

“I cheated on you,” he said flatly. “I lied and cheated my closest friend. I hated the way you’d started to look at me, the way I started to look at myself. So I went out to prove my manhood elsewhere, and hurt you. When you found out, I did the manly thing and turned the blame on you. Hell, Sydney, we were barely speaking to each other by that time. Except in public.”

“I know. And I remember how I reacted, the hateful things I said to you. I let pride cost me a friend.”