His Until Midnight by Nikki Logan

clusters coated in Brazil nut.’
    The parcels might have been small but he and Audrey each took their time first testing and then consuming the tart morsels. Buying time. Really necessary time. Because the last thing he felt like doing was eating.
    He’d come this close.
    He almost touched her, back then when she’d turned her blanched face away from him with such dismay. He almost pulled her back into his chest and breathed down onto her hair that none of it mattered. Nothing that had gone before had any relevance.
    Their slate started today, blank and full of potential.
    But that wasn’t just embarrassment on her face. That was dread. She didn’t want to be feeling any kind of attraction to him.
    She didn’t deserve his anger. He’d reacted automatically to the suggestion that he was as pitiful as he’d secretly feared when it came to her, but it wasn’t Audrey’s fault she’d pegged him so accurately. His anger was more appropriate directed at himself. He was the one who couldn’t get another man’s wife out of his head. He was the one who found himself incapable of being with a beautiful woman, now, and not wanting to peel back the layers to see the person inside. And he was the one who was invariably disappointed with what he found there, because they all paled by comparison.
    Audrey was the best woman—the best human being—he knew. And he knew some pretty amazing people. But she was the shining star atop his Christmas tree of admired friends, just as glittering and just as out of reach.
    And right up until a few minutes ago he’d believed she was safe territory. Because right up until a few minutes ago he had no idea that she was in any way into him. He’d grown so used to not acting on all the inappropriate feelings he harboured.
    What the hell did he do in a world where Audrey Devaney was both single and into him?
    ‘What happened with you and Blake?’ she suddenly asked, cutting straight through his pity party. Her eyes were enormous, shimmering with compassion and curiosity. And something else... An edge of trepidation.
    No. Not a conversation he could have with her. What would it achieve now that Blake was dead? ‘We just...grew apart.’
    Two pretty lines appeared between her brows. ‘I don’t understand why he didn’t say something. Or suggest that I stop coming. For so long. That seems unlike him.’
    ‘You’d expect him to force you to declare your allegiance?’
    She picked her way, visibly, through a range of choices. ‘He knew why I came here. He would have told me if it was no longer necessary.’
    Necessary. The bubble of latent hope lost half of its air. The idea that she’d only been coming each year to please her husband bit deep. Attraction or no attraction.
    ‘There must have been something,’ she urged. ‘An incident? Angry words?’
    ‘Audrey, leave it alone. What does it matter now that he’s gone?’
    She leaned forward, over the nutty crumbs of the decimated parcels. ‘I never did understand why you were friends in the first place. You’re so different from Blake.’
    ‘Opposites attract?’ That would certainly explain his still-simmering need to absorb Audrey into his very skin. Too bad that was going to go insatiate. ‘We weren’t so different.’ At least not at the beginning.
    But, those all-seeing eyes latched onto the mystery and weren’t about to let go. ‘He did a lot of things that you generally disagreed with,’ she puzzled. ‘I’m trying to imagine what it would have taken to drive you away from him.’
    Her unconscious solidarity warmed him right down to the place that had just been so cold. ‘What makes you think it wasn’t something I did?’
    Her lips twisted, wryly. ‘I knew my husband, Oliver. Warts and all.’
    And that was about the widest opening he was ever going to get. ‘Why did you marry him?’
    The curiosity changed focus. ‘Why do people usually marry?’
    ‘For love,’ he shot back. Not that he’d know what that looked