Page 121 of Untouchable

He did though. And it was somehow all tied up in his mind with the guilt evoked by his conversation with Vinnie.

He took off his clothes, dropping them on the floor next to her dress, and then crawled under the covers beside her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, scooting over toward her.

She turned to face him, and even in the dark room he could see that her eyes were slightly red.

She’d been crying.

“I’m fine,” she assured him, smiling faintly. “I’m glad you didn’t work all night.”

Caleb didn’t even register her comment. The small comfort he’d taken in the fact that she hadn’t showered had dissolved completely at the sight of her face.

He was overwhelmed with another sick, heavy feeling rising in his gut.

It wasn’t guilt so much now as knowledge.

There was so much going on inside Kelly that he didn’t know about. Her life was every bit as complex and conflicted as his was, and that meant everything she did might be more than what it initially appeared.

She could come on to him—fuck him like an animal—and not really want it. She could say yes with her mouth and body and say no with her heart. She was deep and haunted and torn and human. Andhuman.

Like him.

He didn’t want her saying no to him—not any part of her. He wanted what was between them to be real.

“Kelly,” he murmured, unable to resist the instinct to pull her into his arms.

She didn’t pull away. Her shoulders shook a few times, and she burrowed against his side.

So Caleb held her, had to acknowledge that she was desperately wounded from more than one experience in her past, that he hadn’t really been thinking about what was best for her.

He could see himself as if from a distance as he’d been brutally pounding into her body from behind, even as he’d somehow known that she wasn’t in the mood, that there was more going on with her than he wanted to acknowledge.

He stroked the tangled, golden glory of her hair.

And he thought about what she might have been trying to hide this evening with sex.

Caleb held Kelly for an hour or so, trying to figure everything out.

He wasn’t capable of thinking clearly this evening. In any way.

He kept going back to the idea that Kelly had started coming on to him after the strange interaction with Wes, and the suspicious part of his nature wondered if she had been using it as a distraction, trying to hide something from him.

But he couldn’t figure out anything that had to do with Wes that she could possibly want to hide.

Finally, when he could feel she’d completely relaxed in his arms, he murmured, “So what happened earlier? Why did you get so upset?”

She tensed briefly but then relaxed again. “I don’t know.”

“You know something.”

After a long moment she finally said, “Do you ever think something is a good idea at first but then, once you start down that road, you realize it’s not what you want at all? But then it feels like it’s too late to take it back?”

Caleb knew she was talking about the sex they’d had earlier, but he suddenly saw himself all those years ago, thinking there was an easy way to deal with a problem that threatened to ruin him and then getting dragged into something utterly wrong but being in too deep to take it back. He said softly, “Yeah. I’ve been there.”

“That’s all it was. Once I realized it wasn’t really what I wanted, it was too late to take it back.”

“It wasn’t too late. I would have stopped?—”