Page 50 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

He’d wondered, fleetingly but he’d wondered it, if finally having her would cure him of his obsession with her.

But he’d reached for her again and again in the night.

Then he’d woken up ravenous, as if he’d never touched her at all. Once he’d untangled himself from her he’d stood there in his own bedroom and watched her sleep, feeling as if he’d been turned inside out and left bleeding.

So. Yeah. He wasn’t cured.

If anything, he was sicker than before.

“I don’t deserve the things you feel for me,” he told her, and he tried to say it calmly. Concisely. “I caused damage, Cat. I know you don’t want to believe that. But it’s true. It’s a fact.”

She studied him for a moment, then sighed. “I don’t doubt that you can cause damage, or even that you have. Because that’s what people do. Humans are marvelously imperfect and we hurt each other all the time.”

“This is what I’m telling you.”

But Cat sat forward, her blue gaze intense. “You deserve to be loved, Wilder. You did not make your mother suffer any more than she already was. And I bet that if you could ask her, she would tell you that she would have born that suffering happily if she could have had more time. Because that’s what love is.”

But that was too far. It was too much. He couldn’t take it and he backed away, shaking his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. But this is over, Cat. It has to be.”

She looked at him for a long while. And she didn’t laugh again, but he couldn’t tell if it was a good thing or a bad thing. If it proved that she was finally paying attention to him, or if it was something else.

After a while, she drained her mug and set it back down on the coffee table. She didn’t look at him. Instead, she reached for the deck of cards that sat in a shallow basket on one side of the table. She picked it up, undid the cardboard case, then tapped the cards out into her hand.

He watched, not sure why this was so mesmerizing, as she shuffled expertly.

“What are you doing?” he made himself ask.

When she looked up at him she looked half-feral. She shook her hair back, gazing at him with a glint in her blue eyes that he didn’t think he’d ever seen before.

He told himself it would make anyone hard. That it didn’t mean anything that he was.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” she asked him. “Let’s sort this out, Lisle to Carey, as we should have done from the start.”

“Lisle to Carey…?” But he was staring at those cards.

And sure enough, she nodded.

“Double or nothing,” Cat told him. “We play a simple game. You win and we’re done. But if I win? You’re going to be happily married to me for the rest of your life, Wilder.”

He felt something stir in him, then, and he couldn’t quite define it. Maybe he didn’t want to. Wilder told himself it wascertainty. In himself. In what he’d told her.

Then again, maybe it was just that he had never been one to back down from a challenge.

Because at the end of the day, he had Matthew Carey’s blood in his veins.

“I should warn you,” he drawled. “I’m great at poker.”

Cat only smiled that surprisingly wicked smile of hers. “This will be strip poker, Wilder. And there are two ways to win. One, if your opponent gets naked before you do. And two, if your opponent can’t keep their hands to themself. Still think you’ll be great at it?”

And he knew better than to do this.

But he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

Wilder walked over, sat down on the other side of the coffee table, and tapped the wood between them. “Deal me in.”

Chapter Twelve

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