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keep from touching her when she cried.
    She shouldn’t let him hold her like this, so closely, so intimately. He shouldn’t have done it in the first place. But she didn’t push him away, and God above, he lacked the will to relax his muscles and let his arms drop.
    “I’m sorry,” he murmured into her hair, aching to find the lost pieces of themselves they had no hope of reclaiming. Aching over how cleanly they fit together. Aching because once upon a time, he’d believed in the possibility that they fit so well because she was his missing piece.
    But while he’d left a chunk of his heart with her, he’d left a much bigger chunk of himself in Iraq—pieces that he could never get back, and Audra did not deserve half a man no matter what she’d done to hurt him since then.
    They’d both made choices that had more lasting consequences than he would have ever supposed. And trust was still a precious commodity that neither of them had funds to purchase.
    She shifted. Closer. Her hands spread across his back, and there was absolutely no mistaking the awareness in the soft little sigh that heaved through her chest. His blood heated instantly, and that was enough to get him to step back. Fast. The last thing they needed to be discussing was the blistering hard erection in his pants. Or how he was convinced that only her slick center could relieve it.
    Apparently his body only remembered the good stuff between them.
    “We can’t,” he told her simply. “I’m not like Anderson. I respect the fact that you’re together, even if he didn’t have the same respect for me.”
    Charlie turned to get the hell out of this shadowed little alcove before Audra drove him insane. Before he forgot that she was off-limits and reacquainted himself with her mouth right here in this alleyway.
    “Charlie.” Her sharp bark brought him up short. “I ended things with Jared a couple of months ago.”

A udra cursed whatever stupid compulsion had caused her to blurt out that gem. She didn’t owe him any explanations, nor had he earned any.
    But God, the feel of him surrounding her—she’d obviously lost her senses to have allowed such a thing, never mind blurting out a statement designed to keep him from storming off in a huff of righteous indignation because he’d thought she was two-timing Jared. Of all things to be up in arms about.
    It had worked though. Charlie stood at the edge of the alleyway, his body vibrating with tension, not turning around.
    Then he did, and she wished he hadn’t because something wholly seductive had taken over his demeanor, as if he’d been thinking of exactly the same thing she’d been imagining while in the circle of his arms.
    “The opportune time to mention that would have been earlier,” he said, his voice rough with unchecked need that she was very afraid was reflected on her face.
    That hug had woken up her insides in a way that she hadn’t been awake in a very long time—two years. Since the day Charlie had taken a plane out of her life. Jared had been there when her world fell off a cliff, and she’d always have a soft spot for him in her heart. But Charlie had claimed a much bigger piece of her—and then crushed it into smithereens.
    Which didn’t seem to be enough to kill the physical reaction he’d always elicited in her from the very first moment she’d met him. It pissed her off.
    She should have let him go. “Why? Does it matter so much to you that I’m single?”
    It mattered to her.
    Independence was her gig now. It was the whole reason she’d had to firmly tell Jared that she loved him for being there for her but she wasn’t in love with him. Hell, she barely liked him some days and definitely not enough to keep living in fear that she’d lose her job if she said or did the wrong thing. He was used to people kowtowing to him, and he liked to use people’s weaknesses against them.
    She’d had to end things if for no other reason than to prove she didn’t need a