She'd always thought, as had everyone else, he was just a dirt-poor farm boy from Savannah, whose ma set about bettering herself in a w***e house. Because that was as much as he let them think.
"You never said "
With difficulty he bared his teeth. It wasn't that he was ashamed. It wasn't that nothing he'd done had ever been enough to outrun the humbleness of his birth and his childhood. It wasn't even that he'd somehow parted with this miserable fact. It was that her eyes studied him as if she felt his pain with a sick certainty. Her brows knitted, her lips parted.
It was vital her lips didn't part his defences, that he re-erect the barrier, close the tiny rift that had somehow opened in his chest. The one that seemed to point the way to him not running out on her when, if he could feel
