Page 163 of Untouchable

She didn’t want to see him. Didn’t even care why he was banging on her door.

“Kelly!” he called out again. He sounded angry—she could hear it even through the door. “Damn it, Kelly! Let me in. I know you’re here. I’m not going to leave.”

He was very angry, but the intensity of his voice bounced off her, unable to penetrate through the frozen shield of her numbness.

She let him pound on the door for a while until he was practically roaring for her to open it.

Finally she stumbled off the couch. Over to the front door. Unlocked it. Then trudged back to the couch and curled up defensively again.

After she’d done so, she wondered why she had. She had just wanted him to stop yelling at her, but now he was going to come in.

Which meant she was going to have to talk to him.

He was inside now. He’d pushed through the door immediately and was right on her heels. Looming over the couch.

He was simmering with something. Hot and powerful. But he wasn’t screaming anymore. He’d reined in whatever was boiling inside him, at least for the moment.

Despite the intensity, he looked as sophisticated and composed as ever in his dark gray business suit and shiny shoes. Except his face was more flushed than it normally was, and his eyes…

She closed her own eyes against them and tried to curl up even tighter, as if she could somehow close him out.

“So what have you been doing this evening?” he gritted out, his voice a mockery of the conversational words. “Anything interesting?”

She ignored him. She couldn’t even begin to understand what might be wrong with him.

Caleb paced over to the table where Kelly had tossed her purse as she’d come into the apartment. He picked up the stack of pages she’d printed off at the library—an article from a professional art journal—so her visit wouldn’t look suspicious.

“Been to the library?” The words were an attempt at a silky purr, but he wasn’t in control enough to make it effective.

Kelly blinked, starting to have an inkling about what he might be so angry about.

“See anyone interesting there?” Caleb asked, his murmur edged with something rough and grating. He moved back over to the couch until he was looming above her again. “Do anything interesting there?”

Kelly just blinked up at him again. Like everything else, his rage at this point seemed utterly ludicrous, and she was too frozen to even respond to it.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Caleb roared, her disinterest finally pushing him out of his attempt at bitter coldness.

She squeezed her legs more tightly against her chest and hid her face. Not because she was afraid of his anger but because his voice was just too loud.

Caleb must have dropped down beside her. She suddenly felt his hand on her shoulder. It was surprisingly gentle, given his mood the moment before. “Kelly?” His voice was different now—hoarse, almost tender. “Kelly? Are you all right? Did he… hurt you?”

There was a strange sensation in her chest. If she hadn’t been so numb, she would have probably recognized it as a pang in response to the sudden concern in Caleb’s voice, so incongruously juxtaposed with his enraged defiance earlier.

She should have just gone with the excuse he’d unintentionally given her. It would have given her a way out of this situation at least.

But for some reason she wasn’t able to. She just mumbled, “No. He didn’t hurt me.”

Jack hadn’t hurt her. She had hurt him.

“So you were there by choice.” Caleb’s momentary flash of urgent concern erupted into bitter resentment again. “So you liked it. So you wanted a cheap fuck in the library.”

His anger still wasn’t affecting her. His words felt like innocuous pings against the impenetrable numbness of her heart.

Caleb must have realized this too because suddenly he was hauling her to her feet. His hands were forceful and bruising on her upper arms, and her knees buckled as he tried to position her upright in front of him.

She was a rag doll. It wasn’t even worth the trouble of standing up.

“Damn it, Kelly,” Caleb muttered, his face flushed again and his eyes blazing with the kind of pure, visceral wrath she’d rarely seen in him before. “What’s wrong with you? Was the fucking so good you can’t even stand now?”