Sanctuary

started back to her bedroom, shifting her bag from hand to hand.
    She was curled up on the bed, a tight ball of misery with her hair curtaining her face. He’d dealt with wild female tears before. A man couldn’t live with Lexy half his life and avoid that. But he’d never expected such unrestrained weeping from Kirby. Not the woman who had challenged him to resist her, not the woman who had faced the result of murder without a quiver. Not the woman who had just walked out of his kitchen with her head high and her eyes cold as the North Atlantic.
    With Lexy it was either get the hell out and bar the door or gather her up close and hold on until the storm passed. He decided to hold on and, sitting on the side of the bed, he reached out to bundle her to him.
    She shot up straight as an arrow, slapping out sharply at the hands that reached for her. Patiently, he persisted—and found himself holding on to a hundred pounds of furious woman.
    “Get out of here! Don’t you touch me.” The humiliation on top of the hurt was more than she could stand. She kicked, shoved, then scrambled off the far side of the bed. Standing there, she glared at him through puffy eyes even as fresh sobs choked her.
    “How dare you come in here? Get the hell out!”
    “You left your doctor’s bag.” Because he felt foolish half sprawled over her bed, he straightened up and faced her across it. “I heard you crying. I didn’t mean to make you cry. I didn’t know I could.”
    She pulled tissues out of the box on the bedside table and mopped at her face. “What makes you think I’m crying over you?”
    “Since I don’t expect you ran into anyone else in the last five minutes who would set you off like this, it’s a reasonable assumption.”
    “And you’re so reasonable, aren’t you, Brian?” She yanked out more tissues, littering the floor with them. “I was indulging myself. I’m entitled to that. Now I’d like you to leave me alone.”
    “If I hurt you—”
    “ If you hurt me?” Out of desperation she grabbed the box of tissues and threw it at him. “If you hurt me, you son of a bitch. What am I, rubber, that you can slap at me and it bounces off? You say you’re falling in love with me, then you turn around and calmly tell me that it’s over.”
    “I said I thought I was falling in love with you.” It was vital, he thought with a little squirm of panic, to make that distinction. “I stopped it.”
    “You—” Rage really did make you see red, she realized. Her vision was lurid with it as she grabbed the closest thing at hand and heaved it.
    “Jesus, woman!” Brian jerked as the small crystal vase whizzed by his head like a glittering bullet. “You break open my face, you’re just going to have to stitch it up again.”
    “The hell I will.” She grabbed a favorite perfume atomizer from her dresser and let it fly. “You can bleed to death and I won’t lift a finger. To fucking death, you bastard.”
    He ducked, dodged, and was just fast enough to tackle her before she cracked him over the head with a silver-backed mirror. “I can hold you down as long as it takes,” he panted out as he used his weight to press her into the mattress. “Damned if I’m going to let you take a chunk out of me because I bruised your pride.”
    “My pride?” She stopped struggling and her eyes went from hot to overflowing. “You broke my heart.” She turned her head, closed her eyes, and let the tears slide free. “Now I don’t have any pride to bruise.”
    Staggered, he leaned back. She simply turned on her side and curled up again. She didn’t sob now but lay silent with tears wet on her cheeks.
    “Leave me alone, Brian.”
    “I thought I could. I thought you’d want me to do just that sooner or later. So why not sooner? You won’t stay.” He spoke quietly, trailing a finger through her hair. “Not here, not with me. And if I don’t step back, it’ll kill me when you leave.”
    She was too tired even to cry now. She slipped a hand under her cheek for comfort and opened her eyes. “Why won’t I stay?”
    “Why would you? You can go anywhere you want. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. You’re young, you’re beautiful, you’re smart. A doctor in any of those places is going to make piles of money, go to the country club every week, have a fancy office in some big, shiny building.”
    “If I’d wanted those things, I would already have them. If I wanted to be in New York or Chicago or L.A., I’d be