Rock Wedding (Rock Kiss #4) - Nalini Singh Page 0,10

some fucked-up, drugged-up reason, he’d been angry at her for leaving him when he’d done his best to push her away. He’d woken up each day expecting to see Sarah back beside him in bed, and when she wasn’t there, he’d gotten angry all over again, hit the booze and the drugs.

David, Fox, Noah, they’d have slapped him to his senses if they’d known he’d fallen into the abyss, but all three had been out of town for reasons he couldn’t now remember. As a result, Abe had been free to attempt to drug and drink away his demons. In the fleeting moments of coherence, he’d been glad Sarah wasn’t there to see what he’d become. He never wanted her to see him like that.

Noah was the one who’d finally caught on to what was happening. He’d walked into their favorite bar a couple of days after all three men returned home, to find Abe partying with a dozen groupies, white powder scattered openly on a glass table in front of the sofa where Abe was seated. Noah had known he couldn’t make Abe move, not in the belligerent mood Abe had been in at the time.

So the guitarist had gritted his teeth and just kept an eye on him.

Later, Noah told him he’d kept shouting, “She sent me fucking divorce papers!” As if he was the injured party. Eventually, sometime during the night, the drugs and the alcohol had done their work. He’d passed out… to wake the next day and discover his three closest friends had hauled him physically into rehab.

Eight weeks later, he’d come out sober and angry. Always so angry. At fate. At God. At Sarah. She’d left him, wanted to divorce him. Even then, he hadn’t realized he should be begging and crawling on his knees to make up for what he’d done, how he’d abandoned her.

No, he’d fallen back on anger, the emotion that made it easier not to feel pain, not to feel panic, not to feel the staggering sense of loss that would’ve rocked him had he stopped for a second and thought about what those divorce papers actually meant. Anger was a great insulator. Furious, he’d gone to get his wife, to remind her she’d taken vows with him that he wasn’t about to allow her to forget, but he’d been months too late.

His demons had awakened with a vengeance when he pulled up and saw Jeremy Vance kissing her on the doorstep to her apartment.

He hadn’t been sober for most of their divorce battle.

He was stone-cold sober now. But while he’d gone through rehab and stuck to it this time, stuck hard, there was one thing he’d never done until Zenith: apologized to Sarah. Not because he didn’t think she deserved it. No, it was because he hadn’t been able to face her. Sarah’s opinion of him meant everything—and he’d screwed that up beyond redemption.

He’d known seeing disgust or hate in her eyes would kill him.

Even more, he’d thought she was happy with Vance, was painfully aware he didn’t have the right to push himself into that happiness. He’d given up all such rights. The fact he missed her each and every day didn’t change that.

But the moment at the music festival when he’d realized Sarah was bare feet away, he couldn’t have kept his distance if his life depended on it. He’d barely breathed until she met his gaze… and he saw no hate in her, only a guarded wariness that was a thousand times worse.

The apology he’d given her that night was nowhere near enough to make up even a tiny bit for the monumental bastard he’d been to her. Part of him said it was selfish to push himself back into her life, even if it was to say sorry a thousand times over.

Another part of him said she deserved a pound of his flesh.

Pushing back the piano stool, he stood, grabbed his keys. Sarah wouldn’t expect him to show his face again so quickly after she’d flipped him off—and he knew where he was most likely to find her if she wasn’t at home.

He swung by her neat little house first; the gate was locked, the windows all closed, and no one human responded to his long press of the gate buzzer—but he did hear a canine woof or two from the fenced-off backyard. He’d jumped the gate earlier today, but given that he was much bigger and stronger than the asshole who’d hit Sarah during