Tami Hoag - Heart of Gold

“Is that why you’re leaving?” Faith whispered, her heart immediately taking hope. “Shane, I don’t blame you for what happened.”

It was clear, though, that he blamed himself. The guilt that etched lines into his handsome face was almost unbearable to see.

“Shane, I love you.”

He shook his head, not to deny her statement, but to keep her from elaborating on it. “Faith, don’t. It can’t work between us. I knew that from the start, and dammit to hell, I should have had sense enough to stay away from you.”

“You said you loved me.”

“That was a mistake.”

Well, he wasn’t mincing words, was he? Faith had no idea how she kept from crying out at the pain. It was as sharp as a knife in her chest. Getting shot didn’t even compare. She didn’t try to keep the tears from rising in her eyes. They flooded her field of vision and brimmed over the barrier of her thick dark lashes. Her throat tightened on a knot of them. That she managed to comment at all was a minor miracle. “I see.”

Shane damned himself to yet another eternity in hell as he took in the stricken look on Faith’s delicate heart-shaped face. For a man with a degree in literature he had a way with words that no doubt had the great poets rolling in their graves right about now.

Pushing himself away from the foot post, he moved to the chair that had been pulled up beside the bed. Sitting down, he leaned his forearms on his thighs and heaved a sigh. “No, you don’t see. I shouldn’t have let myself fall in love with you, Faith. It’s just not allowed.”

She wasn’t about to pretend she was sophisticated enough to understand the rules that governed men like Shane Callan. She wasn’t. She didn’t want to be sophisticated enough to understand a world that left no room for love. “You’re not allowed to be human?”

Since he knew he was all too human, Shane chose not to answer her question. “The job I do is important, Faith. It’s also very demanding and dangerous. I chose this way of life knowing the limitations, knowing the rules. I broke those rules, and now you’re the one paying the penalty.”

“But I told you, I don’t blame you for what happened.”

No, it wasn’t in Faith to lay blame, but that was beside the point as far as he was concerned. “Don’t you see, honey? Our worlds don’t exist on the same plane. What happened with Strauss only proved that.”

Finally giving in to the need to touch her, he reached out and gently closed his hand over the fist she clenched so tightly in her lap. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry you were hurt because of me. I should never have let it happen.”

“You’re talking as if I never had any say in the matter,” Faith said with a harsh laugh. The man was a rampaging chauvinist, going on about how he should have made this decision or that decision about what she did, as if she wasn’t capable of making a rational choice herself. “I’m a grown woman, Shane Callan. I make my own decisions.”

Raking a hand back through his black hair, Shane looked away from her. “Let it go, Faith. It just won’t work. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

“But-”

“No, Faith.”

The look in his pewter gray eyes stilled the debate on her tongue. He wasn’t going to listen to her. The awful truth tolled inside her head like a death knell. Faith squeezed her own eyes shut against the pain, not opening them even when Shane’s fingers curved beneath her chin and his mouth brushed across hers. She didn’t watch him leave but listened to his footsteps as he rounded the foot of her bed and crossed the hardwood floor. When the door clicked shut behind him, she squeezed her hand tighter around the ring that burned like ice in her fist, and she cried.

She loved Shane Callan with her life, and he was leaving her.

HE WAS DOING the right thing, Shane told himself for the hundredth time as he wandered through the dark, silent house. He had touched Faith’s life only briefly, and look what had happened.

She had touched his life, and he would never be the same. Faith had given him a glimpse of joy, a sample of peace and contentment. Damn, but it hurt to have that slip through his hands! It had nearly killed him to walk out of her room that after noon, knowing she was hurting too. He would rather have taken her in his arms and kissed her tears away. But he was the reason she was in pain. Her life would be much better without him in it.

He leaned back against the door frame of the ballroom, a cigarette dangling from his lip, his whiskey flask in his hand. Hell, his life would be fine without the complication of a relationship; it had been for years. People didn’t try to get close to him. Even when he’d been young, he had always stood a little apart from the crowd. He was a loner. He had always accepted that.

Taking a pull on the flask, he thought about the future. A shudder ran through him that had nothing to do with the fine Irish liquor warming his belly. A few days ago he had sat on the beach with the sun on his face and the wind in his hair, his eye on the sweet serene woman beside him, his ears filled with the sounds of the sea and the laughter of a child. And he had let himself pretend that he could have that life. Now that image had faded, and all he saw once again was a bleak, gray plane. Shadows were his life, not sunshine, not rainbows.

He didn’t belong with Faith. Hers was a heart of gold; his was a heart of darkness.

Crossing the polished floor as silently as a cat, he went to the grand piano and flipped on the brass light. Shutting out all conscious thought about both the future and the past, he sat down and spread his long fingers across the cool ivory keys. Closing his eyes, he let his feelings flow directly from his soul to the keyboard.

Faith sat up in her bed, defying her doctor’s orders and nature as well. She was exhausted, but she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t cry either. She had long since run out of tears. Rubbing her keepsake between her thumb and forefinger, she sat back against the pillows and stared unseeing into the shadows of her bedroom.

Shane would be leaving in the morning. Not because he didn’t love her, but because he did love her. He loved her and he was leaving her. Did that make any sense at all? Not to a woman, it didn’t. It especially didn’t make sense to Faith, who had always let her heart rule her head. But it made sense to Shane, and that was what she had to worry about.

She thought of the guilt and pain she had seen in his eyes, and her heart ached for him. Regardless of what she had told him, he blamed himself for what had happened to her, and some deep-seated, antiquated male sense of chivalry dictated that he let her go because of it. Men. Faith shook her head. No wonder the world was such a goofed-up place-men were in charge of it.

The question was. What could she do about Shane’s decision to leave? He had made her no promises. She had asked for none. What right did she have to try to hold him there?

Love.

Love gave her the right. If ever she’d known a man who needed love, it was Shane. Wary, cynical, spending his life in the shadows, he needed someone to reach out to him. That wasn’t simply Faith’s overactive sense of romanticism talking, it was the truth. She knew it with a certainty that radiated a sense of warmth throughout her entire being.

She loved Shane Callan. She hadn’t been looking for love when he’d barged into her life with his brooding black scowl and suspicious nature, but she’d found it nevertheless. Perhaps the fact that she hadn’t been expecting it made it all the more special. Certainly it made her realize what a gift that love was.

A gift so exceptional deserved to be kept and cherished. She couldn’t let Shane walk back into the shadows of a lonely existence without at least trying to make him understand, without at least trying to give him the love he so desperately needed in his life. As hardheaded as he was, he wouldn’t be easily convinced to accept it, but she had to try at least.