Rock Wedding (Rock Kiss #4) - Nalini Singh Page 0,69

once they realized she’d been separated from the herd, invitations in their eyes, but Sarah had never been into meaningless sexual encounters. She’d always been looking for her man. For home.

Then Abe had asked her if he could buy her a drink sometime, and boom. “Did we meet by chance?” she asked, her heart thundering.

Abe did two more push-ups before angling his head to shoot her a heartbreaker grin. “Of course not. I stalked you.”

That racing heart of hers, it turned all gooey inside her. Never, not once during their relationship, had Abe given any indication that he’d chosen her, wanted her. Part of her had always believed that it was pure luck she had the right to call this gorgeous rock star her husband, that she’d just had the right timing.

To know that he’d deliberately sought her out at a party filled with beautiful, sophisticated women… It changed the dynamic of their entire past.

Sarah tried to think past the rushing in her ears, the heat in her cheeks. “Why did you do that if you didn’t want to feel?” It made no sense.

“Because I couldn’t stay away from you, couldn’t stop watching you from the instant I first caught sight of you.” Abe finally stopped the push-ups and sat down on the carpet, his hands braced behind him and his body right there for her to ogle, the tiger tattoo prowling up the side of his rib cage making her want to trace the lines of it with a fingertip. “The idea of anyone else laying a finger on you infuriated me.”

She just stared at him, her entire understanding of their past in pieces. “You never said anything.”

“I married you.” His eyes held hers, refusing to let her look away. “And I held on to you even when I knew I was screwing you up, messing with your head.” He clenched his jaw, his abdominal muscles an iron-hard wall. “By the time I got clean, got over being angry with you, and came to haul you home, you were with that fucker Vance.”

She heard the whip of anger, felt her own fury bristle to life. “I was in a bad place, Abe. My husband had abandoned me after all but calling me a gold-digging slut.”

Abe flinched but Sarah carried on, so angry at him. That anger had been growing inside her since the day she first realized he wasn’t coming for her. “I never intended to get into a relationship with Jeremy.” Hadn’t wanted to be in a relationship with anyone but Abe. “He just happened to come by the night I saw pictures of you painting the town red with half-naked groupies. You had your goddamn hand on a woman’s ass, her tits almost falling into your face! What was I supposed to think?”

“Fuck.” Abe didn’t talk again until he’d completed ten more push-ups. “I don’t remember most of that night.” Another push-up. “I only saw the photos after rehab, after I had the poison out of my system.”

Sarah’s anger turned into the crushing pain of knowing she could’ve lost him forever during that binge. Then, because Abe had stripped away his own shields, she did the same with part of hers. “All my life, I figured my body was the only thing of value I had. I don’t mean that in a mercenary way.” She tried to find the right words. “I thought my body made people like me, so that’s how I tried to form relationships.”

Sometimes she wanted to go back to the naive, needy, romantic girl she’d been and just hug her, tell her she had far more to offer the world—and that the boys who took advantage of her desperate hunger to be loved weren’t worth her emotions or her heartbreak.

“Even you only seemed to really like me during sex.” She swallowed. “So when Jeremy came on to me while I was numb from seeing those tabloid shots, imagining you with those groupies in our bed, I thought, what did it matter? Even if you’d rejected the only thing I had to offer, at least he wanted it.” She hugged her knees, unable to add the rest: that she’d already been vulnerable because of her screaming aloneness. The tabloid images had been the last straw.

Loneliness was her greatest fear.

She’d never told Abe why, never told anyone. Today she found herself wondering if she should… but keeping secrets tended to harden them to stone inside a person. Her chest ached with breathlessness, the pain an