He wanted to pull her back into bed. There was never enough of her. He could never love her the way he wanted to. Full. A full love would scare her. Each time he returned to Mallard, he thought about bringing a ring. Her mother, at least, would finally respect him; she might even begin to think of him like a son. But Desiree never wanted to marry again. “I’ve been through all that already,” she said, with the same weariness of a soldier talking about war. It had been a war, in a sense, one that she could never win and only hope to survive. She’d told him about all the ways Sam had hurt her:
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