Julianne scooted closer to him on the couch and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Heath, stop it. No one could have stopped Tommy. What’s important is everything you did for me once it was done. You didn’t have to do what you did. You’ve kept the truth from everyone all this time.”
“Don’t even say it out loud,” he said with a warning tone. “I did what I had to do and no matter what happens with Sheriff Duke, I don’t regret it. It was bad enough that you would always have memories of that day. I wasn’t about to let you get in front of the whole town and have to relive it. That would be like letting him attack you over and over every time you had to tell the story.”
It would have been awful, no question. No woman wants to stand up and describe being assaulted, much less a thirteen-year-old girl who barely understood what was happening to her. But she was strong. She liked to think that she could handle it. The boys had other ideas. They—Heath especially—thought the best thing to do was keep quiet. Unlike her, they had to live with the fear of being taken away. They made huge sacrifices for her, more than they even knew, and she was grateful. She just worried the price would end up being far higher than they intended to pay.
“But has it been worth the anxiety? The years of waiting for the other shoe to drop? We’ve been on pins and needles since Dad sold that property. If you had let me go to the police, it would be long over by now.”
“See...” Heath said. “My attempt to protect you from the consequences of my previous failures failed as well. It made things worse in the long run. And you knew it, too. That’s why you couldn’t love me. You were embarrassed to be in love with me.”
“What?” Julianne jerked her hand away in surprise. Where the hell had this come from?
Heath shifted in his seat to face her head-on. “Tell the truth, Jules. You might have been intimidated by having sex with me or what our future together might be, but the nail in the coffin was coming home and having to tell your parents that you’d married me. You were embarrassed.”
“I was embarrassed, but not because of you. It was never about you. I was ashamed of how I’d let myself get so wrapped up in it that I didn’t think things through. And then, what? How could we tell our parents that we eloped and broke up practically the same day?”
“You’re always so worried about what other people think. Then and now. You’d put a stranger ahead of your own desires every time. Here you’d rather throw away everything we had together than disappoint Molly.”
“We didn’t have much to throw away, Heath. A week together is hardly a blip in the relationship radar.” How many women had he dated for ten times as long and didn’t even bother to mention it to the family? Like the woman on the phone packing her bags for the Caribbean?
“It makes a bigger impact when you’re married, I assure you. What you threw away was the potential. The future and what we could have had. That’s what keeps me up at night, Jules.”
It had kept her up nights, too. “And what if it hadn’t worked out? If we’d divorced a couple years later? Maybe remarried and brought our new spouses home. How would those family holidays go after that? Unbelievably awkward.”
“More awkward than stealing glances of your secret, estranged wife across the dinner table?”
“Heath...”
“I don’t think you understand, Jules. You never did. Somehow in your mind, it was just a mistake that had to be covered up so no one would find out. It was an infatuation run awry for you, but it was more than that for me. I loved you. More than anything. I wish I hadn’t. I spent years trying to convince myself it was just a crush. It would have been a hell of a lot easier to deal with your rejection if it were.”
“Rejection? Hea
th, I didn’t reject you.”
“Oh, really? How does it read in your mind, Jules? In mine, the girl I loved agreed to marry me and then bolted the moment I touched her. Whether you were embarrassed of me or the situation or how it might look...in the end, my wife rejected me and left me in her dust. You went off to art school without saying goodbye and just pretended like our marriage and our feelings for each other didn’t matter anymore. That sounds like a textbook definition for rejection.”
Julianne sat back in her seat, trying to absorb everything he’d said. He was right. It would have been kinder if she’d just told him she didn’t have feelings for him. It would have been a lie, but it would have been gentler on him than what she did.
“Heath, I never meant for you to feel that way. I’m sorry if my actions made you feel unwanted or unloved. I was young and confused. I didn’t know what to do or how to handle everything. I do love you and I would never deliberately hurt you.”
He snickered and turned away. “You love me, but you’re not in love with me, right?”
She was about to respond but realized that confirming what he said would be just as hurtful as telling him she didn’t love him at all. In truth, neither was entirely accurate. Her feelings were all twisted where Heath was concerned. They always had been and she’d never successfully straightened them out.
“Go ahead and say it.”
Julianne sighed. “It’s more complicated than that, Heath. I do love you. But not in the same way I love Xander or Brody or Wade, so no, I can’t say that. There are other feelings. There always have been. Things that I don’t know how to...”
“You want me.”
It was a statement, not a question. She raised her gaze to meet his light hazel eyes. The golden starbursts in the center blended into a beautiful mix of greens and browns. Heath’s eyes were always so expressive. Even when he tried to hide his feelings with a joke or a smile, Julianne could look him in the eye and know the truth.
The expression now was a difficult one. There was an awkward pain there, but something else. An intensity that demanded an honest answer from her. He knew she wanted him. To tell him otherwise would be to lie to them both. She tore her eyes away, hiding beneath the fringe of her lashes as she stared down at her hands. “I shouldn’t.”
“Why not? I thought you weren’t embarrassed of me,” he challenged.
“I’m not. But we’re getting a divorce. What good would giving in to our attraction do?”
She looked up in time to see the pain and worry vanish from his expression, replaced by a wicked grin. “It would do a helluva lot of good for me.”