Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

everywhere that he had been warm from her. “What about me?”
    Angry, frightened, feeling cornered by life and wanting to lash out in all directions, she combed trembling fingers through her hair. She didn’t want to talk about this, any of it. She just wanted to go on as they had, suffused in passion, not asking about tomorrow because they both knew there wasn’t any tomorrow.
    Not for them.
    “Damn it, Archer. What are you complaining about? Sex with no strings attached? Most men would be dancing a jig.”
    Sex with no strings attached.
    He closed his eyes and tried to accept the fact that the woman he could have loved all the way to his soul felt nothing more than lust for him. “I’m not most men.”
    “I know. That’s why I can’t marry you.”
    Rage chased in the wake of pain, caught it, raced neck and neck in a headlong run toward destruction. Archer let the pain sear through him, but he fought the anger savagely. At a level too deep for words, he knew if he slipped the leash on rage, he would regret it even more than he regretted leaving Hannah to Len’s mercy ten years ago.
    “Why can’t you marry me?” he asked evenly. “Explain it to me, Hannah.”
    She looked at him. Her breath caught at the drawn lines of his face, as though he had his hand in fire and was fighting not to show pain. Yet it was there. Agony. Stark and real.
    Something terrifyingly like his agony sliced through her to her soul.
    Then he opened his eyes. They were the color of steel. They belonged to a man who knew no mercy.
    “Look in the mirror,” she whispered. “You’ll see why.”
    “Tell me.”
    “You’re like Len!” Her breath broke on a sob. “Damn you, you’re like Len! Great smile, great body, and underneath it all, as cold a bastard as ever walked the earth. That kind of ruthlessness makes love impossible. It makes everything impossible, even the most simple affection.” She took a tearing breath. Tears blocked her view of Archer, but it didn’t matter because all she could see was the past. “I was pregnant once. When I miscarried, I wanted to die. I almost got my wish. Later, much later, I went down on my knees and thanked God that I didn’t have a child to raise in Len’s cold shadow. I’ll never expose my child to that kind of ruthlessness. Never.”
    Once, years ago, Archer had been beaten to the point that it was agony to breathe, to move, even to blink his eyes. He felt that way now. “I would never hurt any child, much less my own.”
    She just shook her head. “You don’t understand. You can’t. Like Len. He didn’t get up each morning and decide to be the way he was. He just . . . was.”
    Silence stretched, stretched, thinned. Snapped.
    “Let’s see if I understand,” Archer said, his voice low and flat. “Marriage is out because you don’t trust me and you don’t like me, but you don’t mind having sex with me.”
    She gave a broken laugh and wiped her eyes. “I trust you. That’s why I called you. I know you won’t kill me.”
    “You trust me with your body, but not your emotions, your future, and your children, is that it?”
    The blunt words made her flinch, yet she didn’t argue. “I like you. I didn’t want to, but I do. And the—the sex is good.” She shivered. “Very, very good. Can’t that be enough?”
    It had been enough for Archer in the past, with other women. It wasn’t nearly enough now.
    “Sex and protection, that’s all you want from me?” he asked, driven to be certain.
    Again his blunt words scraped over her emotions, touching raw spots she didn’t even know she had. “Yes.” Her voice was bleak. “That’s all.”
    Archer looked at Hannah’s bruised eyes and trembling lips, at her chin tilted up and her shoulders squared. He remembered the girl who had stood on a street corner in Rio de Janeiro with empty pockets and a raw determination to survive. With a distant sense of surprise he realized that he had fallen in love with Hannah then: her courage and her fear, her despair and her hope, the life that burned so incandescently within her, giving her a beauty no other woman had ever equaled in his eyes.
    Nothing had changed in ten years.
    Nothing would change.
    He would never have the woman he loved.
    The mattress hitched suddenly as Archer got up and began dressing. “If you’re pregnant, I will support you and my child.”
    “No, I—”
    “The child will know his or her cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents,” he continued