What he wanted was someone to talk to, someone who would understand why he needed what he did, someone to just hold for a little while. Someone who would make him laugh, while knowing they couldn’t have a relationship.

Someone he could be deeply attracted to.

That was why he’d slept with Mandy.

That was why he’d do it again.

And her baby was part of the package, part of what drew him to her, the love and worry in her brown eyes.

Damien sat up, drummed his finger on his knee. He couldn’t sleep. Nothing new there. He usually only slept four hours a night, then once a month or so collapsed in a twenty-four-hour coma where he slept straight through a Saturday. The first few times it had happened, he’d scared himself. But he’d learned it was a system that worked for him. He couldn’t sleep during the week, not when his mind was busy and he would lie there hour after hour thinking, seeing, feeling.

So he’d learned to drop into bed only when he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore; then once a month he caught up on his sleep. Big improvement from the days when he hadn’t been able to sleep at all because of the nightmares, because of the guilt, because of the feeling that he had failed miserably.

In the first weeks after Jessica had been found, raped and strangled in an alley, he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing the agony of her, once so vivacious and confident, lying in that morgue. Then the police had decided he was the prime suspect. They had thought he could have done that to Jessica, his wife. The pain had eaten him from the inside out, leaving him a jittery insomniac, hovering on the edge of insanity.

He was better now.

But never whole. Never again.

Damien got out of bed, glancing down at Mandy as she sighed in her sleep and turned her head in the other direction on the pillow.

He couldn’t have a relationship with Mandy, but he was so glad they had this, here, tonight. With her teasing smile, Damien thought she’d taken a part of him buried deep inside under a layer of avoidance and had started to help him heal.

Grabbing his boxer briefs off the floor, he pulled them on and grimaced as his feet stuck to the tile floor because of the humidity. He pulled a soft drink out of the minibar and popped the top off. He thought it was cool they had Coke in glass bottles, like he’d had as a kid.

Taking a swig, he plopped on the chair at the round table holding all his work papers, notes, and his computer.

He could work.