Gillian stared deep into his icy gray eyes and saw Noble’s demons battling for control. There was anger and masculine dominance there, but there was also concern and something she didn’t recognize—something that made her feel warm and feminine and at peace with him despite the fact that she was, at that moment, the target of his wrath.

“What am I to you?” she whispered, unable to keep the words back.

His eyes narrowed. “You are my wife.”

The warm, peaceful feeling evaporated, leaving behind it the tears that had threatened earlier. “Is that all, Noble? It’s true, then—I’m just a possession? Something you purchased with a specific goal in mind? I’m nothing more to you than an object to be kept in its place and brought out when it pleases you?”

Noble didn’t know how to answer her, didn’t know how to erase the pain he saw in her lovely green eyes. The words were written deep in his heart, but they were too new, too fresh to be spoken out loud. The light that glowed inside him, her light, was still too weak to banish all the darkness. He gazed into her eyes and said nothing, damning himself for his inability to speak, for his desire to have that which he’d sworn he would never again seek, and for allowing her into the secret recesses of his soul, where no one had been allowed before.

He watched with tormented eyes as she first pushed ineffectually at his hands until he released her, then raced, sobbing, out the door. God’s eyebrows, what a mess he’d made of everything. Feeling his legs about to buckle under him, Noble sat in the chair Gillian had just abandoned and let his head slump into his hands. How the devil had things turned out this way? When had life slipped out of his control, turning it from a well-ordered and structured, pleasant existence into this chaotic farce? How could a man be expected to function when all he planned, all he hoped for was dashed away and replaced…the thoughts suddenly stopped cold.

What was the use, why was he pretending to himself? His life had been well-ordered and structured before Gillian came to it, that was true, but it had also been a bleak and hollow life, a life without joy or warmth or…love. Chaos might dodge her footsteps, but it was a small price to pay to be loved by her. And what had he done in the face of that love? He’d blown up at her, yelled at her until she sobbed at his cruelty, tears streaming down her face when she realized that he would not, could not, give her the words she needed to hear.

Another woman’s tears came to mind, another woman’s tears as a result of his cruelty. Noble clutched the arms of the chair until his nails gouged crescents in the wood, but he paid no heed to the pain in his fingers. He was too busy fighting the crippling pain that gripped his soul.