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his. Her turning a deaf ear each time he’d tried to apologize. To explain and beg for absolution.
    His cock stirred again when she cradled his balls in her palm. A sweet gesture, one she’d made a thousand times when they’d lain like this in the aftermath of sex. Had she done the same with the faceless men she’d fucked in the past five years?
    Damn it, he didn’t give a shit about the divorce. Marcy was his. She might have fucked half of Tampa, but she belonged to him. Would always belong to him.
    “Sam?” When she turned her head, damp strands of her hair tickled his chest.
    He lifted his head, looked down at her. Her eyes had turned the soft gray-green of a calm sea, the way they always did after they made love. It would be so easy to sweep the past away, start again as though this were a new relationship. No old hurts, no issues, no resentment.
    The hell it would. If he wanted his wife back—and he did—he’d have to bare his soul, make her listen now to what she’d refused to hear back then. Make her understand and forgive him. Right. Make her forgive the unforgivable. He stroked her cheek, then brushed an uncharacteristically tousled strand of her hair off her forehead. “What is it?”
    “I’m glad you came back. Glad we made love. Damn it, I’ve hated you for what seems like forever, but part of me still loves you too.”
    “Me too. You snatched my heart when you were fifteen years old and never let it go. Will you listen to me now, let me try…”
    “The baby was yours, Sam.”
    “I know.” He should have known it from the start. It shouldn’t have taken DNA testing to make him believe. “I should have trusted you. I’m sorry. You’ve never let me tell you how sorry I was—how sorry I still am. Will you now?” He stroked her cheek, soothed an angry welt caused, he guessed, by the same sort of flying debris that had pelted him while he’d clawed his way to her.
    The wind began to howl again, and rain sluiced through the shattered window, enlarging the puddle already on the rough wooden floor. Marcy shuddered. “I guess so. I don’t want to die not knowing what I did to make you believe I was unfaithful.”
    “We’re not going to die. We’re going to live.” Recalling the rising tide and the devastation that he’d seen from the leading edge of the hurricane, Sam hoped to hell he wasn’t lying. “You didn’t do anything. It was me.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “I’m sterile, or so damn near it that the chances of me fathering a child naturally are something like one in a million. I thought—”
    “How long did you know that?” She sat up, riddled him with the kind of gaze he imagined she usually reserved for hostile witnesses in the courtroom. “And why didn’t you tell me?”
    He had the decency to look abashed. “Since about six months after we quit using birth control. Don’t know why, but I decided to run tests on myself while I was sending in some samples from a patient’s husband. I didn’t tell you right away because I was fucking ashamed. Ashamed I couldn’t give you one thing every goddamn man should be able to give the woman he loves. Yeah, I know there are a lot of men who’ve got my problem—I see a good many of them in my office—but I’ve never run into a one who wasn’t devastated, hearing that kind of news.”
    So that was why Sam had turned surly. Why he’d closeted himself in his study every night with his goddamn medical journals and acted as though he didn’t give a damn when she told him she was pregnant. Finally she knew why he’d stammered around like a defendant caught on the stand in a lie whenever she’d tried to talk with him about the baby.
    Marcy might understand his behavior now, but that didn’t mean she’d forgive him. “The one thing you owed me—besides your trust—was the truth. And you didn’t come through with it.”
    “I know, but damn it, I tried to tell you. You weren’t willing to listen. Understandably,”