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situation grown too complex, too fast—but the naked pain in her voice caught up with him just before he moved out of earshot and much though he’d have liked to, he couldn’t walk away from it.
    Burying a sigh, he waited as she stumbled over the coarse gravel toward him. A gentleman would probably have rushed forward to steady her before she broke her neck in her flimsy little shoes, but he’d never aspired to be anything other than what he was: a working guy who’d made a pile of money by learning from experience never to make the same mistake twice.
    A fat lot of good that rule of thumb was doing him now, though. Knowing he’d always been a sucker for a bird with a broken wing should have been reason enough for him to steer clear of her in the first place. That he’d persisted in ignoring the warning bells clanging loud and clear in his mind and had chosen instead to protract the association, was nothing short of foolhardy.
    “What?” Frustration, as much with himself as her, had him barking the question at her.
    If only she’d taken umbrage or flight at his brusque tone! But she was too wounded, too crushed in spirit. “I can’t…face going up to that empty room,” she said wretchedly, flinging herself at him.
    Good idea or nor, his arms closed around her. She was so slight, so fragile, that to shove her away was unthinkable. But to let her remain pressed close against him like that…! Jeez, it was all the encouragement needed for certain parts due south of his brain to rise to action.
    “Listen, Jenna,” he said, sounding as if he’d just choked on ground glass, “this isn’t such a good idea. I know you’re going through a bad time right now, but it’d be better if you were to turn to the people who care about you.”
    “No,” she said, clinging to him and lifting her face to his so that, even though he’d thought it was black as Hades under the trees, enough light filtered through from the gardens for him to see the tears glimmering in her huge dark eyes, and feel himself drowning in them. “I don’t need them. I need you! ”
    “How can you need someone you don’t even know?”
    “For precisely that reason! When you look at me, you don’t see a pathetic bride without a groom, or a daughter who’s made a laughing stock of her family. You see me— an ordinary woman, just like any other.”
    Ordinary, my hind foot! She was a lovely, sensitive, tenderhearted creature who felt other people’s pain as deeply as her own. A woman in desperate need of the kind of loving which would restore her faith in herself—the kind of loving his brain told him she’d do better to seek elsewhere, but which his less cerebral components clamored to accommodate. Another good reason to put an end to things before they grew even more seriously out of hand!
    “I can’t give you what you’re looking for, sweet pea,” he said hoarsely. “I come with too much excess baggage of my own.”
    Briefly, she sagged against him as if all the fight and courage had been blasted out of her. Then, with a flash of the courage which had drawn him to her from the first, she pushed herself away from him. “Of course you can’t,” she whispered, her voice tinted with shame and her body—every slender, desirable inch of it—poised for escape. “Whatever possessed me to suggest that you could?”
    For the second time in as many minutes, he had the chance to cut and run out of her life as easily as he’d blundered into it. So what the devil prompted him to haul her back into his arms, and stroke the soft, dark hair away from her face? What sort of masochist was he to search out her mouth and kiss her as if she was the last woman on earth and there was no tomorrow?
    The insatiable kind, that’s what, and she’d have done them both a favor if she’d smacked him across the head for his nerve. Maybe that would have spared them both a lot of grief. Instead, her mouth softened beneath his and she sank against him in total