His Dakota Bride (Book 5 - Dakota Hearts) by Lisa Mondello Page A

wonderful together. You can’t deny that.”
    He’d leaned over and whispered the last words against her ear, tickling her senses, making her lightheaded as if she’d been drugged by him. He’d always had that way with her. Damn him!
    “Wade, please stop.”
    Instead of pouting, as Jay used to do when she’d refused him, Wade simply leaned against the porch rail and draped his arm on her shoulder.
    “In my mind, we’ve made love a thousand times,” she confessed. “But that’s where it has to stay. I can’t allow myself to go there again, Wade.”
    “Why not? I can see it every time you look at me. You still love me.”
    Moisture filled her eyes. “Yeah, I do. That’s the sad thing. I wish I had gotten over you.”
    “Then I don’t understand why you’re holding back.”
    “Wade, we can’t just pick up where we left off.”
    She cleared her throat and slipped her hands into the pockets of her denim jeans to keep from reaching out and touching him.
    “Why not?”
    “You don’t want to hear this.”
    “If it gets us to the place we need to be, then yeah, I do. It’s okay. You’re safe with me. You can tell me anything.”
    Skylar shook her head. Thinking these thoughts in her mind were horrible enough. Confessing them seemed so much worse.
    “Just say it.”
    Skylar swallowed to rid herself of the lump in her throat. “I wasn’t the wife I should have been. Not in the way it mattered anyway. Every time Jay wanted me, I...”
    She felt his body tense, but he didn’t turn away. She almost wished he would.
    “It wasn’t like with us. When I had sex with Jay, it was just that. Just sex.”
    Wade shifted uncomfortably, as she knew he would.
    “Forget it,” she said, waving a hand as if that would wipe a slate board clean of all the things she’d just said. “This is what I mean. Too much has gone on.”
    Before Skylar could go into the house, Wade caught her arm.
    “Don’t go yet. I want to know. I want to understand this.”
    The night had turned cooler and the breeze floating across her skin caused raised goose bumps on her arms.
    She took a deep breath and blurted out the very thing that had been haunting her for so long. “I thought of you. Not all the time. Alex kept me busy. My work at the diner, too. But you’d creep into my mind at the most odd times. Sometimes…during the most intimate of times.”
    She looked at his face and saw his jaw tighten, telling her he understood her meaning.
    “I thought that if I kept my fantasy to myself, it wouldn’t matter. But Jay must have known. How could he not have known? I gave him the shell of who I was.”
    Wade dragged his fingers through his short-cropped hair.
    With a heavy sigh, he said, “It doesn’t have to be a fantasy anymore. I’m right here.”
    “That’s the problem. I don’t know how to separate the two anymore. It wasn’t fair to Jay for me to be thinking of you when I was in his arms. I don’t want to be in your arms and remember what it was like with Jay.”
    “It won’t be that way with us.”
    She took a step back toward the kitchen door and just stared at him. Every feature of his face had haunted her for years.
    “Are you sure about that? Everything about my time in South Dakota is filled with all these memories that didn’t include you. I can’t piece what we had together overseas to fit my life here. How can I be with you and not have Jay intrude on what should have always been just us. Look at what it’s like with Alex. Jay never wanted to be his daddy but he’s still here in Alex’s life even if he’s not physically here.”
    “Don’t we owe it to ourselves to try?”
    “What we had was beautiful. It was special. So much so that it ruined my marriage to Jay. I don’t want the ghost of my life with Jay to turn what we had ugly like that. And I’m so afraid it will. There are too many things I can’t wipe from my mind. That’s why I have to leave. You belong here, Wade. Not me.”
    She turned and ran