“I’m sorry."

He wanted to reach for her hand, but he knew how she’d react, that the last thing she wanted was for him to touch her. The irony wasn’t lost on him that the very thing she didn’t want was now what he needed most—to reconnect with her even in that one small way.

“I’m sorry, too."

Marcus was surprised to hear her say those words to him. He’d been planning to say so much more, needed to let her know how wrong he’d been to hurt her like that, that he hadn’t realized what a sensitive topic his father’s death was.

But when her eyes met his, flat and empty, he knew he was too late.

“I shouldn’t have pressured you for these extra days together."

He thought he saw the shimmer of tears in her eyes, but when he looked again they were clear. And still so flat his gut clenched at the memory of the passion, the joy that had been there just minutes before.

“You were right to want to end things after that first night.” Her mouth moved up at the corners, into something no one would ever call a smile. “Lesson learned. One-night stands should stick to the number in their name.”

Marcus had always been the steady Sullivan, the one who knew what do in any situation. However, from the first moment with Nicola, he’d been completely out of his depth. More so now than ever before. But even though he’d known all along that their relationship was going to end in the very near future, he hated the thought of it ending this way.

“You’ve never been a pop star to me, Nicola. You’ve always just been you. A woman I wanted and liked from the start. If I’ve ever treated you like you were nothing more than a sex kitten, I’m truly sorry.”

She was silent for a several very long seconds. Finally, she said, “It’s nice of you to say that."

He waited for more, waited for her to tell him she thought he was more than just some guy in a suit who knew how to make her scream with pleasure when she came, but she simply pulled her cell phone out of her bag and looked at the time.

“How long will it take to get to the Warfield?”

Suddenly, he felt like he was bending over backward to try to get her to listen to his apologies, but she wasn’t willing to bend at all.

Hadn’t he spent two straight years bending over for Jill, doing whatever he could to make her happy? Look how that had turned out. If he’d been too boring, too emotionless for Jill, then surely one day soon, even if he and Nicola found a way to patch things up today, she would surely end up bored with him, too...and eventually he’d have the extreme non-pleasure of walking in on her doing some exciting guy with piercings and a goatee, knowing he’d been a fool one more time.

“About an hour.”

“I hope there’s no traffic. If you know any short cuts, I’d appreciate you taking them.”

How had it come to this so quickly? From making love in the ocean to sitting in his car while Nicola spoke to him like he was a stranger?

But his pride wouldn’t let him beg her again for forgiveness. He’d tried. She’d pushed him away.

They were done.

“Don’t worry,” he told her in a voice that was just as distant as hers had been, “I’ll make sure you’re there on time.”

Chapter Eighteen

Thank God she’d done a thousand shows like this one, Nicola thought as she went through the motions of sound checking and joking around with her band. She might have been smiling, laughing, but she felt hollow. Empty.

And really, really sad.

The things Marcus had said to her kept repeating over and over in her head, so loudly that she actually forgot the lyrics to one of her songs and had to stop in the middle, apologize to her band with a joke, pretend she didn’t see the way they looked at her, at each other, with questions in their eyes.

One slip. She was only ever one slip away from people assuming late nights and drugs and wild parties.

Of course, she wasn’t exactly helping herself by playing into the wild image with her videos, the clothes she wore onstage, the fact that she let herself be photographed with people whose wild images were earned, not simply imagined.

It was as much as Marcus had said to her out on the beach, when they were angrily throwing words at each other.

She knew that was a large part of why she’d been so angry. Maybe if she could have taken one breath, and then another, she could have let herself admit to him—to both of them—that she was tired of the sexy-girl image. That she’d been wondering more and more why she was bothering with it. And that she wanted to let her songs stand for themselves.

Just the power of her music, sink or swim, without the silent promise of sex to sell them to the world.

But she hadn’t taken that breath, had she?

Instead, she’d barreled headlong into the stupidest, most idiotic confession of her life.

She’d told him she was falling in love with him.

No.

She’d yelled it at him.

Of course, he’d said nothing about love. Not there on the beach...and not later in his car.

She sat in her dressing room, which her tour manager had set up per her usual specifications, making the space comfortable and cozy for a few hours, and stared into the large mirror with the strip of lights shining down above it. They were way too bright, highlighting all the parts of her soul she didn’t want to have to see.

To his credit, Marcus had come back to the car and immediately apologized. But she’d been too afraid to hear what he was sorry for, terrified that he was going to say, “I’m sorry you’re in love with me. I never meant for that to happen.”

She turned away from the mirror, unable to look herself in the eye any longer.

Heartbreak was supposed to be perfect for writing songs. She should be picking up her guitar and writing a masterpiece, channeling the Joni Mitchell inside herself and singing about blue boys and bright red devils she couldn’t live without.

But she couldn’t do that. Not tonight, anyway. Not when it was all too raw. Not when she still felt so stupid, so painfully foolish to have lost her heart so quickly, so completely, to a man she had known from the start would never be a good match for her.

One night was all they ever should have shared.

But as she sat in her dressing room feeling sorry for herself, it was as if the guitar, the mirror, were both staring at her from opposite sides of the room and calling her coward.

They were right.

She was being a coward.

And she’d been one for too long.

Finally, Nicola took that breath she should have taken out on the beach. And then another and another until she felt strong enough to make the right decision.