There was a time when I found comfort in his savage overprotectiveness. But now I saw it for what it was.

Mad hypocrisy.

While Priest didn’t allow anyone near me, he didn’t apply that rule to himself and the random doxies who stirred his lust. He loved women. He loved to fuck, and I was under no illusion about what he’d been doing the past two years. Imagining it prickled heat behind my eyes and spread poison through my gut.

“I hate you.” My broken whisper exposed too much. Too much pain. I gave him too much power to hurt me.

“I’ll rectify that.” He sprawled on the seat across from me and stretched out his legs, flanking mine. “When I kiss you, undress you, and lick you…here…” He hooked his boot between my legs and pressed the toe against the juncture of my thighs. “I’ll remind you why you married me.”

“Your cock isn’t the reason I married you. It’s the reason I left you. Because you liked to put it inside other people.” I shoved his boot away, but my fingers clung to the worn leather.

Familiar leather. Black and soft and creased with heavy use, it wasn’t just any pair of jackboots. Seven years ago, they were left on a beach by a pirate who died wearing deerskin moccasins.

“It sickens me that I gave you these.” A clamp squeezed around my heart, and I closed my eyes against the anguish. “You’re not at all the man I thought you were.”

“Perhaps not. But no man will ever live up to the ideal you hold for Edric Sharp.” He slowly pulled his foot from my grip and softened his voice. “I treasure these boots. For two years, they were all I had of you. For that, I don’t regret keeping them.”

His words hit their mark, burrowing beneath my ribs. Would the pain ever stop? It wasn’t supposed to end this way. He had done this to us.

I breathed carefully through my nose, trying to silence the agony he so expertly ran through me.

But Reynolds had heard enough, given the threatening growl in his voice. “If you loved her, you’d leave her be.”

“That weak mentality is precisely why you’re still alone.” Priest wedged my compass into the waistband of his breeches and scrutinized his brother. “Still pining after my wife, I see. You’ve had two years to stake your claim. How many times did you attempt to warm her bed in my absence?”

The oar smacked the water behind me, and Reynolds surged to his feet, jostling the boat.

“Don’t answer that.” I gripped Reynold’s arm, holding him back until he sat and resumed rowing.