Free An Interrupted Marriage (Silhouette Special Edition) by Laurey Bright

social inhibitions on speech and behaviour lost. “I’ll try to be patient. Heaven knows, I ought to understand.”
    She came into the room and dropped the newspaper on a chair. Another desk held an electronic typewriter, a filing cabinet stood near the window, and two walls were lined with shelves holding files and thick books on accounting practice. “You haven’t been lucky with the women in your life,” she said, and then bit her tongue. Perhaps he did feel lucky, now. Maybe he’d found someone healthy and uncomplicated and undemanding. Like Ginette. “I mean,” she said, “between me, and your sister, and your mother—it hasn’t been easy for you, has it?”
    “Sympathy isn’t necessary. It wasn’t exactly a picnic for you, either. And I’m not sure that I’m the unlucky one. Having your own family around might have helped you a lot.”
    A faint stinging behind her eyes made her blink quickly and look away from him.
    “You still miss them, don’t you?”
    She kept her eyes wide and looked at him. “What’s the point? It won’t bring them back.” The doctors had taken her through all that, believing the trauma of losing her entire family in a matter of days might well have had something to do with her admission to a psychiatric ward seven years later.
    You feel guilty that you weren’t with them?
    Who had asked her that? The question surfaced briefly, a flash of memory. The voice...but then it was gone. One of the doctors, no doubt. There had been so many of them.
    Maybe, whoever he was, he’d been right. Maybe she had some unresolved guilt that when her father, with her mother sitting beside him and her younger sister in the rear seat, had in a moment of fatal inattention driven into the path of an oncoming train, she had been with her own friends at a party. Her parents had died instantly, and her sister had followed them in less than a week. But that wasn’t what had sent her over the edge.
    Magnus said, “You’re right, there’s no point in dwelling on the past. But somehow, the past has a way of catching up on the present.” He indicated the chair she’d flung the newspaper onto. “Why don’t you sit down?”
    “I don’t want to be a nuisance.”
    “You’re not a nuisance. A distraction, maybe....”
    The note in his voice was one she hadn’t heard since she’d come home, but as she looked up at him in quick, eager hope, the small, teasing smile on his mouth faded, and the once-familiar light in his eyes with it. He stepped back towards his desk, his face stiffening into a mask.
    She picked up the paper and sat down, her gaze puzzled and questioning. “Magnus—what’s the matter?”
    Magnus sank back into his own chair, half-turned from her. He said, “You’re not the only one who has things to get used to.”
    Carefully she lowered the folded newspaper to her lap. “You can get used to most things if you put your mind to it.”
    He steepled his hands, briefly looking down at them. “You should know.”
    Jade wondered if he was having second thoughts. She recalled the expression in his eyes when he’d come into the changing booth and looked over her shoulder at her reflected back, bared by the deceptively provocative dress.
    She guessed that he’d started the afternoon by just being kindhearted, considerate. Perhaps faintly aware of the ordeal it was for her to do some simple shopping, he’d tried to make the experience easier. But if at first he’d play-acted his interest in her purchases, he hadn’t been able to hide the darkening of his eyes at that moment, or the glint of male admiration when he’d stepped back to look at her.
    He still found her desirable, at least occasionally when he was caught unaware. The thought quickened her pulse. She smoothed the paper on her knee, and it made a small crackling sound. She looked down, studying a picture of a smiling child leading a disgruntled white-faced calf with a black patch over one eye. “You were kind, today,”