“Maggie,” I say softly.

“I know it sounds stupid coming from someone who had sex with a married man, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

She chews on the edge of her lip, and I find myself wanting to cup her face in my hands and kiss that abused spot, kiss across her cheeks and down her neck, kiss away the pain and the self-loathing.

She looks like she survived a natural disaster. Worry and concern distort her features.

I try to imagine what that was like for her. Finding herself pregnant with a married man’s baby after what happened to her in high school. And I can see it. I can see how a marriage to a willing and available man may have seemed like the answer.

“Would you mind waiting her for a few minutes while I run a quick errand?”

She blinks at me.

“I promise I’ll be back in less than twenty minutes.”

Chapter Eighteen

Maggie

I am quickly coming to believe that there is no place in this world I love as much as Asher’s arms, talking about nothing and everything in the darkness.

We didn’t say much on the drive home from Chicago. He played some music for me, pointing out influences for his new work and sharing his favorite songs. He didn’t ask me any more questions about Ethan or Will. He didn’t bring up the baby.

And I didn’t ask about the blanket-covered backseat holding something that hadn’t been there on the drive up.

When we got home and slipped out of our clothes, I caught myself waiting for Asher to touch me, to seduce me, to use me. Then I remembered this was Asher, and it wasn’t like that between us.

“Will you go to the gallery opening with me this weekend?” I ask him quietly now.

“Of course.”

I watch his expression in the darkness. “Ethan’s holding his cards close to his chest, and he won’t tell anyone what he’s showing in his part of the exhibit.”

“You think he might show the paintings of you?”

“I’m afraid he might,” I say softly. “I want to prepare myself for that possibility.”

“I’ll be by your side,” he promises.

Warmth blossoms in my chest. I know I can handle this if Asher is by my side.

“Where did you disappear to last year?” he asks.

My fingertips freeze where they’d been tracing the outline of his tattoo. “What?”

He pushes himself up on an elbow. “Last year, you left after you called off your wedding. Where did you go?”

Don’t ruin this. Please, don’t. “I wanted to get away for a while. I was…more than a little messed up at the time. I needed to get away.”

“From Ethan? From Will? From what happened in high school?”

I sit up. “From everyone. From this town.” I command my racing heart to slow. Asher is not the enemy. “Why do you care so much?”

“Why are you still hiding from me?”

“You already know. You know more than anyone.” I close my eyes, trying to center myself. “I’m going to go to sleep now. I’m sorry if you want to talk more, but this isn’t my idea of fun.”

I click off the light and move to the far side of the bed. I’m nude but it’s his questions that made me feel na**d.

Asher’s big arm wraps around me and pulls me against his warm, bare chest. “Is it just me,” he whispers, “or do you not trust anyone?”

I think about how much it meant to have him with me at the gallery this morning, how he was the only one I could ask to go with me to find the Discovery collection, how easy it was to answer his questions about Ethan. “I don’t trust anyone but you Asher, but trusting you scares me more than you can understand. I’m fighting it every day.”

“Don’t shut me out anymore.” He kisses my shoulder. “Let me in.”

“No one knows about Ethan,” I say softly. “It took my family years to recover from the scandal with Toby. This is a small town. People here are cruel and their memories are long. I couldn’t tell my mother I was pregnant with a married man’s baby. Not after what I put her through in high school.”

He presses his lips to my shoulder. “I understand that. And obviously Will did too if he was willing to play along.”

I stiffen in his arms, and my heart pounds painfully in my chest until I hear the whoosh of his exhale.

“Will knew the baby wasn’t his, right?”

I close my eyes.

Everything had happened so fast. I panicked. It seemed like one minute I’d been hovering in post-coital bliss, running my fingertips through the soft sprinkle of hair on Ethan’s chest, and the next I’d been falling hard for Will.

I remember that last morning with Ethan. His studio smelled of sex and stale wine and the sun poked its golden head in between the curtains.

He grabbed my hand, pressed his lips against my palm. “I wish I could stay here with you all weekend, Margaret, but Claudia is going to kill me as it is.”

“What will you tell her?” I asked as I explored his body with my fingertips.

“The truth.”

“Really?”

“I will tell her that I was working in my studio and fell asleep.” He turned, shifting his body so he was on his side, facing me. “I wish I could give you more, Maggie. You deserve more than a bum who’s sneaking around on his wife.”

“I’ve never asked for more,” I whispered, and it was true. “But I wonder sometimes…” I wasn’t sure I could say it.

“About what?” He was already moving, pulling himself off our makeshift bed of sheets and pillows on the studio floor and reaching for his paint-stained jeans.

“What would you do if something happened? If…I don’t know. If I got pregnant or something.”

His hands froze where they’d been working his fly. “We’ve always used protection.”

I rolled to sitting and crossed my feet under me. “Nothing’s one hundred percent,” I told the floor. If anyone knew that, it was me. I heard it over and over again from my mother. At my Catholic high school, there’d been no sex talk beyond a brief statement that sex was something sacred that should be preserved for marriage, that contraception was against God’s will, and that no contraceptive method was one hundred percent effective. If young women wanted to really protect themselves and please God, they needed to do so with chastity.

“Are you trying to tell me something?” His voice was so cautious, his face so guarded that I felt foolish. It was the first time he made me feel like a kid. But I had to know.

“Hypothetically.” This wasn’t me. Skirting the issue. Guarding the truth.

“Maggie, I know it takes two. I’d take care of you.”

The world contained so much hope at that moment. So much it had poured into me, like the early morning sunshine that warmed the studio.

I raised my eyes to meet his, that golden sunshine filling my most dark and desperate corners. I hadn’t taken a test yet, but my period was nine days late and I was like clockwork. My supply of denial was running dry.

“I know you couldn’t afford to take care of it yourself,” he explained. “I’d take you to Indy or Chicago. We’d get it taken care of there. Discreetly. And I’d pay for it. You don’t need to worry about that.”

Get it taken care of?

Even now, my hand clutches my stomach instinctively, as if the threat still looms. The golden warmth fled and red-hot terror replaced it.

I remember ignoring his hand and pushing myself up off the floor. The gesture had felt meaningful, and I told myself that it had only been a matter of time before our relationship came to its inevitable end.

I grabbed my jeans and sweater, trying to keep my movements slow and natural—and fearing I was failing. “You better get home to Claudia.”

His fingertips grazed the small of my back as I bent to pull on my jeans. For the first time, they weren’t a lover’s fingertips. They were the enemy’s. For the first time, the touch of this married man, my mentor, my professor, made me feel unclean to the core.

I ended our affair that morning. I told him I wanted more from life than to be his mistress. It was so true. I wanted so much more from him. But he couldn’t give it. And at that moment, as I stood in the soft trickle of morning light and ached inside with a betrayal that cut to the very foundation of my beliefs, I knew I’d never ask him to give me anything else. Not ever again.

Asher brings me back to the present with his lips on my shoulder. “Tell me,” he says softly.

“The day I told Will I was pregnant, I was planning on telling him the truth. But he…” I trail off, sickened by my own lies. “He assumed it was his and I let him.”

“He deserves to know,” he says softly, and I hear something like pain in his voice. “Despite…everything.”

“I know.”

***

The garage is dark, save for the glow of the Jeep’s dome light. The concrete floor is cold under my feet.

I move the blanket from the backseat, and my throat grows thick at the sight of the framed canvas. I know he bought it for me.

I stand frozen, hypnotized by that goddamned painting.

There’s nothing scandalous about this one, but he bought it. For me.

I hope I deserve him.

I head back into the house and to the couch in the great room. My gaze drifts to the staircase. I should go back to bed. It would be so nice, curling up with a man who wants to protect me, letting him hold me, hiding inside his warmth. Maybe I could even wake him and tell him my story, explain how I let things get out of control. I made mistakes, and I tried to make amends for those mistakes.

Maybe Asher would listen. Maybe if I shattered, he would find me.

My hand curls at my stomach.

I didn’t give my baby away because I suddenly became a noble woman who couldn’t live with a lie. I gave her away because, in the gritty ultrasound image, I saw the blinking beat of my daughter’s heart, and I already loved her too much to make her live with it.

All week, I’ve felt something tugging inside me. Like a hidden ribbon unraveling and exposing what I’ve so carefully kept tucked away.

I want to tell Asher about Grace, but I’m terrified he won’t understand.

It would feel so nice to have someone on my side. To have a little help carrying the weight of my secrets. And I want to tell someone. I want to utter her name just once. Let just one other living soul in on the secret—screw-up Maggie Thompson created something beautiful.

***

Asher

She’s sleeping on my couch with her arms wrapped around herself. She looks so damn lonely it breaks my heart.

“Asher?” She blinks up at me as I lift her into my arms. “What are you doing?”

“I’m taking you back to bed. I can’t sleep for shit without you next to me.” My jaw tightens against the words. I don’t like to think about how much I need this woman. I don’t like that, while I need her more every day, she’s still pushing me away.

Even as I think it, she wraps her arms around my neck and leans her head against my chest. “Thank you,” she whispers. “I forget that I don’t have to be alone when you’re around.”

My heart squeezes, and I take the stairs two at a time. When I reach my bedroom, I don’t take her to the bed. Instead, I carry her into the bathroom and lower her onto the edge of the jetted tub while I run the water.

As it fills, I strip off my underwear and help her out of her clothes. She gives me a soft smile and lifts her arms over her head so I can remove the t-shirt. Then she stands and I take my time sliding my hands under the soft, thin cotton of her panties. Dropping to my knees on the heated tile, I take them over her h*ps slowly. When she’s completely bare, I kiss her foot, inside at the arch, the soft curve of her calf and the hot flesh of her inner thigh. Then I hover at the apex of her thighs, a breath away from tasting her.

“You’re so gorgeous.”

“I like the look of you like that,” she tells me with a grin. “On your knees like you’re worshipping me.”

I lift my gaze to meet hers. “You have no idea.”

Standing, I skim my fingers over her. Hips, waist, and br**sts that I will never tire of touching.

Then I take her hand and lead her into the tub, settling her between my legs so I can hold her in my arms where she belongs. The hot water pulses around us, and she relaxes into me as I trace an invisible path from her br**sts to her hipbone.

“You’re the first man I’ve ever been with that doesn’t want to have sex every time we’re na**d.”

I press my lips to her neck, scrape my teeth over the shell of her ear. “There’s more to intimacy than f**king,” I whisper, sliding my hand between her legs.

I love the sound of her gasp as my fingers slip over her clit, savor the tilt of her h*ps as my palm settles against her.

“You are so beautiful. I could spend hours touching you.”

She draws in a breath as I lift my hand from between her legs and return to tracing lazy paths across her abdomen.

“Are you going to tell me about this?” I rest my fingers over the silvery stretch marks at her navel.

She sighs, but she doesn’t tense. She relaxes into me further. “You already know.” The relief is in her voice.

“Zoe’s mother developed the same thing after her pregnancy. I didn’t put it together at first, but today…” I trail off. There’s no reason to say more.

“They’re my favorite part of my body,” she whispers, sliding her fingers between mine. “Because they’re proof she was mine once.”