The Satin Sash

“Fucking look at you!” Heath roared as he gestured down at her, at this heap of clothes that she was, tear-stricken, trembling, someone she would pity. “Look at you without him! And did you get a fucking good look at him?”

“Well, I was a little busy at the moment!” she screamed.

“Then I can tell you what he looked like. I can—goddammit, it’s killing him!” Frustrated, his throat hoarse with agony, he smashed her body to his. Her thighs opened for closeness, their bodies fitting together, heat to heat. He ducked his head to hers, his mouth furiously nipping, biting between words. “Take me in, kitten. Take me in your body one last time.”

He kissed her rampantly, a good-bye kiss, as intense as the first but tasting of anguish and pain instead of eagerness and thirst and lust. It took all her effort to tear her lips free.

“What are you saying? Stop talking to me like this, Heath!”

“Baby.” Panting against her, he dragged his lips across her face. “Oh, baby, can’t you see? I love you too much to break you.” He dropped his head and buried his face in the softness of her breasts, releasing a low, tortured sound. “I can’t see you like this, I can’t . . . see Grey like this—fuck.”

She trembled, feeling very cold even as he groaned and wrapped her in arms of steel and warmth. She wanted to make love to him, to celebrate his arrival with joy. She wanted for her eyes to dry up so she wouldn’t have to cry anymore, and she wanted to marry Grey and Heath and have children together, and she wanted world peace and no one to ever die. . . . And yet all she could do was clutch Heath tight until she finished wanting and wishing and crying. Heath held her, told her he loved her, that he would understand. He was painstakingly gentle when he scooped her up in his arms and tucked her into her bed.

When seconds turned to minutes and minutes to hours, and she remained alone in it, in a bed that had been warm with someone else’s heat for more than two years, she realized Heath Solis had left her, too.

Chapter Sixteen

For three days, she poured her heart into her work. She sat at her workstation and crumpled paper after paper, sketch after sketch. Balls were littered around the wastepaper basket and her pencils were at their last inch.

Viscevis. It was all that held her together. Kept her sane. She thought about Grey and a knot formed in her throat. She remembered how she’d been stressing about this logo night after night, and he’d held her head in his hands, kissed her forehead, centering her over and over, telling her again and again, “Here’s your head. You have it in there somewhere.”

But it was not there; instead she found her answer in Mr. Preston’s words.

Your work has heart, Miss Kearny. I like that....

Staring at the two logos, she isolated each of the elements first, then began to play with them. That gray ball in motion. The vine shaped into an oval.The sleek brown cylinder.

She set the cylinder at the bottom. Unyielding, all alone. Empty. She set the ball an inch above it. It would roll and roll and roll and never stop without that cylinder to hold it. And the vine . . . she sliced it open. She made it fluid. Rather than an oval, it slithered into an S, and she wrapped it around both the cylinder and the top ball, so that the two other elements were embraced by it, joined by it.

Viscevis.

For six hours she concentrated on creating a clean copy to show the clients, and by the time her neighbor took her poodle out early in the morning,Toni lifted the logo up to her admiring gaze.Yes.

Yes.

Calmly, she crossed her apartment and went to her bed, pulling her sash from under her pillow. She had slept with it and cried over it, and cursed and thrown and stomped on it.

The sash had taken her places she and Grey hadn’t meant to go, and there was no undoing what had been done.

Her men were strong men, and in the most hopeful corners of her heart, she thought if they were the men she knew they were . . . if they were men who loved with the force and passion she did . . .

Without further thought, she recalled that vine, the solution to holding together two elements too strong to combine, and she grabbed a pair of scissors and sliced the soft, shimmering fabric in two.

Drunks.

He’d held a private distaste from them for some time. They lacked character, strength of will, an instinct to push forward no matter what blows life brought.

Drunks were fools. And Grey had never thought of himself as either until now; as he sipped more brandy, and sipped and sipped and sipped, and grasped for that numbness he’d sought for three days.Three long, never-ending days in which he warred with himself not to call her, go to her, drive past her place and spy on her. Take that freaking sash from her.

Instead he stood in the living room of his penthouse like a fixture, one of the many artifacts of this vast, lonely, cold place.There was no clutter here. No dying plants, since there weren’t any plants at all. No balled-up papers around the wastebaskets.

Things were just as he liked them.

The apartment covered the space of an entire floor—every square foot furnished by a renowned New York decorator who’d later begged to take pictures for Architectural Digest.The fabrics, the woods, the rugs; they were the finest money could buy.

It wasn’t home.

Not even Toni’s place was home. It was her—and he’d uprooted himself because he was proud and stubborn and more. So now he was alone. Waiting. Still not hopeless, but growing desperate.