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He hated himself.
“She didn’t.”
For a few seconds, Eve was perfectly still.
Then, her raspy intake of breath drove like a knife through his gut.
She stared at him, incredulity in her expression.“You mean…”
“Yeah.” He grimaced.
“You’re married.” It was a barely audible whisper.
He nodded, feeling his heart spasm.
Beside him, he felt her start to tremble.
Please don’t cry now; you’ll kill me.
But she didn’t. She sat there, rocking a little, her eyes wide, her small fist pressed to her open mouth.
He wished she would scream.
Hit him.
Something.
But this…this shocked, doe-eyed stare was worse than any physical violence she could have unleashed on him.
“Why did you list yourself as widowed on your Eleet client profile?”
“Privacy. She walked out seven years ago. She became dead to me that day.”
Eve didn’t ask why. She sat there like a statue.
“I didn’t feel anything for her, just went through the motions, and it got worse as time passed. I was so busy first with school, then with perfecting our app, then starting and growing a business…
“There were…problems.” He looked down at his hands and shook his head. He hated to go there.“I didn’t realize she was already quite experienced when we got married, in things that were…unknown to me.
“When she started making more and more demands, I found escape in work. And she… Well, she found other men to do what I would not. Sometimes more than one at a time. First, online. Then, she began meeting them for real. I looked the other way because I thought this was my fault, and maybe she’d married me too young and needed to get…whatever it was…out of her system.”
He paused, reached for a water bottle on the nightstand, and tooka few long swallows. Eve sat, knees up, gripping the blankets she’d pulled to her chin.
Adam put the water back on his nightstand.“But when she started to set it up so I would come home and find her in the middle of…things…and she repeatedly demanded I join in, I realized there was no way I could give her what she wanted.”
He left out how Ingrid’s disparaging remarks about what she called his sexual inhibitions made his younger self feel so inadequate. He also left out how, once, he’d given in and tried to participate in a threesome and how that night had messed up his mind.
How all of this had made him not even want to attempt a relationship ever again.
Until Eve.
The woman whose brown eyes now regarded him with such pain, he couldn’t even bring himself to make eye contact for more than a couple of seconds.
“You kept it from me for all this time.”
“I know.” He looked away.
She reached to grasp his cheek and turn his face to hers. Her fingertips felt hot.