He stopped at the door when he saw her. “I thought you’d be in bed.”
“Don’t stay away on my account.”
Devin glanced over his shoulder as a burst of laughter came from the main cabin, then shrugged and stepped in, holding a briefcase. “I have work to do that needs quiet.”
Rachel attempted a weak joke. “If you need help with your homework…” She’d meant schoolwork and realized too late that the comment could be read as sexual. It fell into an awful silence.
Grim-faced, Devin sat and opened his briefcase. “It’s copyright paperwork on some of my early songs.” Briefly, he filled her in on the reason for Zander’s visit-to rub salt into the wound, Rachel suspected.
“I knew Zander had invited you to rejoin the band. I thought you were avoiding telling me because you were embarrassed about…” She stopped, picked up her cold coffee and sipped it, for something to break the sudden tension in the cabin.
“Embarrassed because I’d said I was falling in love with you and didn’t mean it? No, my embarrassment came later.”
“I should have trusted you.” she said.
“Yeah,” he said, “you should have. But it wouldn’t have solved our basic problem. I was never more than a novelty toy to you, someone to play with while you waited for Mr. Right.”
He’d made that accusation before. This time it wounded the part of her she’d vowed never to expose again- her heart.
“You’re so wrong,” she said, but he’d already stood.
“I’m going back to the other cabin.”
“No!” Her anger came out of nowhere, explosively loud in the small space and catching them both by surprise. “I shouldn’t have let Mark walk away without an explanation and I’m damned if you will. Sit down.”
He folded his arms. “Make me.”
She launched herself out of the seat and kissed him, not lightly, not tentatively, but passionately, with everything she felt for him-all the love, all the aching regret. His lips tightened under hers. His hands closed around her upper arms like steel traps as he put her away from him.
Humiliated, she returned to her seat on the couch, but Devin made no move to leave.
“Steve-Mark’s father-talked me into smoking a joint the night I got pregnant.” Rachel couldn’t look at Devin, picking up a cushion and running her palm over the silky fabric. “I was crazy about him at this stage and he’d been teasing me about not drinking. He said it would make me happy. And oh, boy, it did. Happy and irresponsible.” She choked on a laugh, looked up. “When I smelled it on Mark…well, it was easier to blame you than admit I’d failed to protect him.”
Devin’s eyes were grave. “It was more than that, Rachel. You wanted to believe the worst of me.”
“No, that’s-”
“All the qualities that made me a danger to Mark-the wildness, the bad boy history-made me safe to you. Because I’d never ask you to marry me or have children with me, never make you confront the things you’d have to if I was the right kind of guy. Like why you’re so damn scared of anything approaching real intimacy. When I told you I loved you I broke the contract.”
“No guy is the right guy,” she cried. “I always chose men I couldn’t love. You were supposed to be another one. If anyone broke faith, it was you.”
“So you love me but you don’t want to. Thanks, that makes me feel a whole lot better.”
She had to make him understand.
“Just because I did the right thing in giving Mark up for adoption doesn’t mean there aren’t scars.” She hugged herself, but it didn’t help. “At seventeen, you think of self-sacrifice as something worthy, something good and ennobling that will carry you through the loss. You don’t know that the scab will still fall off on his birthdays, that you’ll still ache every time you hold a baby and smell that sweet, soft baby skin. At seventeen I made the sacrifice and at thirty-four I’m still paying. You’re just the latest price.”
“Rachel.” Devin sat down beside her and reached for her hands; she pulled them away.
“I know what you want. You want all of me and I can’t…love you like that. Giving up my baby changed me… I can’t love anybody that much again, can’t risk that kind of loss. It hurt too much. It still hurts.” She swallowed, forced herself to meet his gaze. “My only regret is that I hurt you.”
For the rest of her life she’d remember the compassion in his eyes. “I’m a big boy. I can survive a few rounds in the ring with the Heartbreak Kid.”
A laugh escaped her, then a sob. Ignoring her protests, he sat beside her and put his arms around her.
“I can’t do this,” she whispered against his shoulder, “not even for you.”
“It’s okay.” There was nothing but comfort in his hold. “You don’t need to explain. It’s going to be all right.”
She lifted her face. Devin had never seen such agony. “Is it? Now Mark’s making me doubt the only thing I thought I got right.”
Tears slid down her pale face, silent sobs shook her body. Rachel put her hands over her mouth, trying to stop.
Devin stroked her hair. “Let it go.”
Shaking her head, she stood and stumbled to the adjacent bedroom, shutting the door. He followed her. She lay face down on the bed, her shoulders heaving with the effort of self-control.
He locked the door, then lay down beside her and gathered her into his arms. Rachel pushed him away, trying to curl in on herself and disappear. He pulled her arms free and put them around his waist, pushed down her bent knees and entwined their legs. He wrapped himself around her, trying to cover as much of her as he could with his body. “Let go.”
Rachel stopped fighting and burrowed into him, her nails digging into his back as she cried, jagged heartrending sobs that seemed as if they’d been held in check for seventeen years.
At last the weeping abated, her grip on him loosened and her body slowly relaxed against his, until Devin felt as if he held something ethereal, she lay so lightly in his arms. Exhausted, Rachel slept.
Releasing her, he swung his feet off the bed and stood up. Moving stiffly, his muscles still tight from absorbing her tension, he took off her shoes and pulled the covers over her inert form. She slept like the dead. Then he sat on the bed, pushed damp tendrils of hair away from her face and stared at her, his emotions mixed and powerful.
He still had the ability to minimize the damage she’d done to him, to protect himself with emotional distance.
In her sleep, Rachel sighed deeply.
Devin laid his palm against her cheek. Had anyone really loved this woman? It didn’t seem so. And yet she’d still had the courage to defy her parents and do what she thought was right by her unborn baby, even at the cost of her relationship with them. She’d been alone in the world from the age of seventeen.
His life had been charmed by comparison, his losses self-indulgent. He’d been a kid in the world, too, and stumbled; but she hadn’t. Not his Rachel.
Because she was his, no matter what she said. All his trials had been preparation, strengthening him to become a man capable of loving a woman who so deserved to be loved-and who might always hold something back.
He loved her anyway.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MARK WAS IN THE sound booth of OneRing Recording Studios, cleaning up after the latest round of coffee takeouts, when Devin strolled in on Friday morning. He started, his grip tightening on a polystyrene cup, and coffee dregs splashed the recording console.
“Watch it, dipstick!” One of the junior techs-bumped up the ranks through Mark’s internship-shielded it protectively. “The VPR 60’s worth more than your life.”
But Mark wasn’t listening. He answered his former mentor’s casual greeting with a scowl. Untroubled, Devin
