he had introduced her to Kade, she had given herself away. She brought her pure disdain for him to the surface in order to shove the real impact of seeing what Kade had started brewing inside her. But she had hid nothing from her husband; he had seen beneath her exterior.
Every time Kade had been near, her heart had beat differently yet the same way it did when Liam was around. She had tensed up because she knew it was wrong that she could feel that way for any other man. She had poured extra vehemence to her tone to conceal the catches in her breath. She had rigidified her body when Kade had touched her, but an instant later she had drowned under his touch: weak, pathetic, feeble.
Oh God. Liam, with an astuteness she had misjudged, no... forgotten, had seen those reactions in her before she could even analyze them herself.
Her tummy knotted painfully, and black, stringlike wisps floated before her eyes.
Liam believed she couldn't love him, so he had given her a man he thought she could.
He had given her Kade because he believed, no he concluded that she must love him.
“You don't what?” Kade asked, forcing her to finish what she was going to say. The part where she was going to say she didn't love him. How could she? She was a married woman.
She had to make this right. She had to make Liam see that she felt those very things he thought he saw her demonstrating toward Kade, for him. She loved him. Liam. Her husband.
Raising her chin and squaring her shoulders, she kept her fists balled at her sides. “I love my husband. I love Liam. He is the only man I want. I need. I love. And just because he's forbidden me from saying those words to him, doesn't make me love him any less.” Without taking a pause, she continued before she lost her nerve. “I want you to leave. Right now. Go away, and don't ever come back here again, or I'll—”
“Were you going to threaten me, Mrs. Stone?” She hated that they were so similar in the one thing where they demanded her obedience yet so different in every other way. The lilt to his voice made her want to bow her head and apologize at once. But this was wrong, and she had to make it right again.
“I want you out of my house, off this property. I don't want to see you again.” Hysteria took ahold of her now. She was losing her ground. Her heart shattered and lay aching inside her chest. The right thing to do was going to kill her.
“Go,” she shouted, pushing into his chest with all her might, but she moved him not even an inch. “I will not have my husband think he needs to keep you around because I… because I—” She continued pushing at him, growing more and more frantic, tears flying out of her eyes.
He let her have her way for a few minutes before he captured her wrists and slammed her against the same wall he had pinned her down on not moments before when she thought Liam was going to pass her around to other men. But this, this was infinitely worse than him discarding her and leaving her to his men. This was the ultimate to anything else she could think of. That her husband thought he had to find her someone she loved because she couldn't love him and when she said she did, she must have been lying. He had accused her of confusing love for gratitude.
How could he not see her love for him? How could he ignore it when she wore it around her like a cape? How could he not believe her when she said it, that she meant it from the whole of her heart and soul, body and mind?
“Because you don't what?” Kade growled softly. His staggeringly strong and large body crushed the breath from her lungs. His eyes a fierce and dark green that chilled her and made her want to fall to her knees.
“I don't love you,” she said, struggling. “I hate you,” she added, gaining momentum now. “I never want you to touch me ever again. I feel nothing except… except—”
“Finish what you were going to say.”
She couldn't because she felt nothing except the same sublimeness she felt when Liam touched her. She was doomed, destroyed, defeated.
“Please, go, Kade,” she pleaded. “Please.”
“You feel nothing?” he murmured