Shaken Read Online Free PDF Page A

life, Jules. You’re all that matters to me. How can you not know that?”
    Her forehead rubbed against his, a sob bubbling out of her. “I did once. But it wasn’t real. None of it.”
    “Yes, it was.” It took everything he had not to crush her against him with the need to convince her. To take that soft, wet mouth again. She only seemed to believe in him when they were wrapped up in each other. Joined. Their bodies straining against and into each other. The only time when absolute honesty ruled. Every other moment was clouded with half-truths and guilt, and nothing he could ever say would clear them away. “It still can be. You don’t want this divorce any more than I do.”
    She tilted her head back, staring up at him through slitted eyelids. “What about when you said you loved Autumn? How was that not a lie? How can I stay with a man who could pretend to love a child? How can I ever believe that you’re not pretending to love me ?”
    She slipped from his now boneless hold and pressed her back to the opposite wall of the car, arms tight around herself. He could only stare at her, head shaking on its own with his disbelief. Every inch of him had gone cold. Struck numb by her words.
    “You think I didn’t see your hesitation when we found out I was pregnant despite your vasectomy? That I didn’t feel your distance from us when I carried her? I did, but I told myself you’d get past it. Told myself you just had to get used to the idea of being a father. That you had when she was born and you acted like you cared. Like she meant something to you. Because believing anything else would mean there was something wrong with our perfect little marriage. But I was wrong. I lied myself into a stupor and that never became more clear than when she died and you didn’t care at all!”
    “Stop saying that!” He didn’t mean to yell at her, but the roar of his own voice stung his ears.
    Not that it seemed to bother her. “What?”
    “That I didn’t care! I cared , goddamn it!” It was the guilt that ate him alive until there was almost nothing left. Nothing but how much he loved her. If he could grab something and throw it, he would, but there was nothing. Just him and her in a fucking box with no doors.
    She shook her head, cheeks still wet but her tears gone. Straightening, she let go of the hold she had around herself. “I don’t believe you.” She wiped her cheeks, her voice as firm as the day she said she was leaving him, but her eyes shone, heartbreak just beneath her veneer of calm. “I don’t believe in anything anymore.”

Chapter Six
    Across from her like the combatant she’d turned him into, Grant bowed his head. She could see the tracks her hands had made in his hair, the heavy black lengths swirling with more strands of silver than she’d realized. “You were always the one with so much faith,” he said quietly.
    She couldn’t argue with that. She’d believed too strongly in their relationship—that it was practically fated, that it was so much stronger than those of her friends, whose significant others came and went with the breeze, that their love could overcome any obstacle. She’d never seen the breakdown coming. Had never guessed it could fall apart as quickly as it had come together. She swallowed the resentment along with the lump in her throat. “I learned better.”
    He looked up again, his stare boring into her.
    She didn’t know what she was supposed to understand in that look. It was dark, a sullen sensuousness heating his features. Those eyes trained on her as if there were nothing else in the world. He stepped away from the rail, changing the pace of her heartbeat with a single step. Then another. And another.
    The distance between them disappeared. She tried not to look up, her gaze locked on the small round button on his shirt. Not the firm, tanned flesh beneath, not the dark strands of the hair there, waiting to spring between her splayed fingertips.
    His hand rose, his