Confessions in the Dark by Jeanette Grey Page A

looking at this man. At the scar on his lip and the frowning tilt of his mouth. The keenness to his eyes. The slope of his shoulders and the straight line of his spine, both radiating discomfort—both practically screaming that he didn’t want to be touched.
    But he’d let her in. He’d taken care of her nephew and he was giving her his time, telling her these basic things she should have figured out from her mother or from any of a hundred cooking shows, but which she hadn’t.
    He’d been rude, and he’d been gruff, and he’d listened to her babbling on about her sister without condescension or pity, with an even voice and with interest.
    He was the furthest thing from perfect she’d ever seen.
    And it was strange. She’d been attracted to him from the very first instant, but it wasn’t until that moment, when she was saying out loud that she would never date someone like him, that she really let herself consider it.
    What would it be like? To turn in to him, reach out her hand, and press a palm against the rough slope of his cheek? Brush lips on lips and taste his accent on her tongue. What would he do? Pull her in against his chest, wrap her up in warm arms, and keep her close?
    Or push her away.
    Face hot, ears burning, she dropped her gaze.
    “What about you?” she asked, hands unsteady as she took the basket of flour and poured it with care into a bowl.
    “Me?”
    “Did you ever think about a family?”
    She heard what she had asked at the same time he did. At her side, he stiffened, posture winding even tighter than it had been before, and she let loose a string of curses in her mind he might be proud of.
    He’d shut down on her the last time at the barest mention of his wife. She’d been bursting at the seams ever since, curiosity eating her, but she’d thought she’d tamped it down. That she could be cool.
    “I did,” he said, and the metal seat of his stool creaked with the force of his grip. “A long time ago.”
    “Oh.”
    She moved on to the next ingredient on the list, scanning the lines of containers just for something to do and someplace to look.
    “It wasn’t meant to be, though.”
    A hundred questions pressed at her ribs. She bit down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep them in.
    “My”—he hesitated, voice rough—“my wife wanted to. She was trying to convince me of it the night...” He sucked in a breath that could have been razors. Bleeding and sharp.
    Her own lungs wouldn’t work, the air in them going thin as she waited for him to let his out. To say...To tell her...
    “The night she died.”
    Oh God. She’d known. She’d figured, at least, but it was something else to have it spoken, hanging trembling between them. A crystalline web spun from confessions, glistening brightly in the light.
    Only to shatter.
    He rose from his seat in a lurching motion, knee near buckling as he got his crutches underneath him. “Eggs,” he said, and the word was watery. He swabbed at his eyes as he turned away from her. “We need—”
    “Cole.”
    “I’ll just get—”
    “Cole.”
    But he didn’t stop. He hobbled over to the fridge and tore open the door, rebalancing himself to reach into that space, to retrieve the cardboard carton. It shook in his grip, and her heart ached.
    “Here.” He thrust it toward her. “I can’t.” He gestured helplessly at the braces beneath his arms. “Infernal things, I just—”
    One last time, she spoke his name, only for him to hurl the carton at the wall. He whirled around, and the fridge door slammed shut with a clatter, the whole thing rocking, something inside it falling over. With a crash, the eggs hit the ground, but she couldn’t see them.
    All she could see was this man, and the bands of control with which he was trying so damn hard to keep himself together. And failing.
    His ragged inhalation was a hairline fracture to her ribs. His fist hit the front of the fridge, and then his foot, and there was another, wetter, angry