“Did he keep his promise?”
“Mostly.” A waitress came to take our order, and I asked for the first thing I saw when my eyes landed on the menu in front of me.
Ember ordered the smoked salmon salad too, then motioned for me to continue when the waitress left.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We talked about it eventually, but we never went back to the job thing. There were so many other things to talk about and it didn’t seem important. Our last day, he mentioned something about how his work would be calling him back soon. It reminded me that I still didn’t know, and I was about to ask, but he beat me to it. Instead of asking about work though, he asked about my brother.”
“Wait.” She frowned, her pursed lips moving from side to side. “Your last day? That was when you phoned me and said you were in town alone.”
“Yep.” I tapped the side of my nose. “When I got back, he suggested we live in the moment for the night and not talk about leaving or anything else that was painful. And again, the job thing was linked to the conversation about my brother.”
“So you just never got around to talking about it,” she finished for me. “It makes sense, I guess. If you clicked with him the way you did, I suppose there were never any awkward silences to fill with small talk about the real life you were taking a break from.”
“Exactly.” I released a breath through my nose. “In hindsight, it was stupid. As soon as he told me he was pilot, I should have asked him.”
She gave me a look. “You said he told you that on your first day, which means you’d have been jetlagged, traumatized after having been stood up, and then claimed as the wife of a total stranger who’d just told you he’d be sharing your room. I think you can forgive yourself for not making the immediate assumption that just because he was pilot, he had to work for the same company you do.”
“Yeah, but I should have asked him what kind of pilot he was at least. I think knowing that he used to be Air Force just made me automatically assume that he was still in some way affiliated with a company contracted to the military.”
“It’s not an unreasonable assumption to have made.” She tried to defend my stupidity, but when I lowered my chin and lifted my eyebrows at her, she conceded. “Okay, so it does feel like the kind of thing you’d have eventually thought to ask about, especially considering that you work in aviation yourself, but it wasn’t exactly the easiest week of your life.”
“What, being left on my wedding day and then falling in lust with a hot, alpha asshole on my supposed honeymoon is an excuse for being completely dim?”
She laughed but it wasn’t mocking or judgmental. “Well, if anything’s going to be an excuse for an oversight or a lapse in logical thought, I think that’s a pretty decent one.”
I snorted softly. “Thanks. Strangely, that doesn’t make me feel much better.”
“What brought him to human resources?” she asked, moving her glass out the way when our salads were delivered.
“Oh, that’s the best part of all.” I grinned, and I knew I looked more than a little unhinged in that moment. “He never got approval for the time he took off to go to Fiji. They sent his file up to us for termination.”
“What?” She dropped her silverware with a clatter, a wicked gleam in her eyes as she shot me a wide grin of her own. “What are you going to do? Are you going to get him fired?”
“I don’t know. I thought about it all the way over here. I fucking hate the guy with a passion, but he did try to get ahold of us before he left.”
Her grin grew even bigger and she lifted her hands to rub her palms together as if she was a real-life villain. “Who cares? You have the power now. The only question that remains is what you’re going to do with it.”
Chapter 32
JAXON
Kavan’s blond hair was disheveled instead of in its usual faux-hawk when he opened the door for me. There was paint splattered on his shirt and over his forearms, and several band-aids stuck to his fingers.
I took a step back. “Whoa. What the hell happened to you?”
“Putting together a nursery happened,” he grunted before letting me in. “Thanks for coming to help me assemble the crib. I only have so many hands and I don’t want Shira lifting anything that heavy right now.”
“No problem.” I followed him into their kitchen. “Where is she?”
“Having a mommy massage at the spa. Your mom got it for her actually. She said every woman should have one last spa day to relax before the baby is born.” His blue eyes cut to mine before he opened the fridge to extract two beers, a baffled sheen in them as he gave his head a quick shake. “I don’t get it. What’s so great about a spa?”
I chuckled, accepting the ice-cold bottle he handed over. “Dude, you should go try it. You wouldn’t have to ask once you have. It’s pretty fucking great. I’d never have thought about getting someone a gift like that, but I’m glad Mom did. I’m sure Shira’s loving it.”
“Like you’ve ever been to a spa.” He scoffed and twisted the cap off his beer.
“Look who’s the enlightened one now.” I smirked at the way his features contorted in disbelief. “I went while I was in Fiji.”
“Ahh. That makes more sense.” He drank deeply, draining half of his bottle in one go. After he swallowed, he hopped onto the counter and stared at me with questions in his eyes. “How are you doing with that whole Lindsay and Fiji situation anyway? Feeling any better yet?”
A shout of laughter left me, but I wasn’t in any way amused. “Do you remember when I got that call about how they wanted to fire me because I went?”
He nodded. “Of course. It was only a few days ago.”
“It turns out that Lindsay is the person in charge of making that decision. She’s the HR director or consultant or whatever I could never get ahold of because she was out of the office.”
His jaw loosened. “Are you serious? How did you not know who she was?”
“Beats me.” I shrugged one shoulder, wishing I had a better answer for him. “It never came up, I guess. We were too busy—”
“I don’t want to know what you were too busy with.” He flashed me a knowing grin. “My wife’s pregnant. Trust me. I know all about how that works.”
“That wasn’t all we did.” I glowered at him.
My friend, however, kept right on grinning. “Sure. You went to a spa as well. Point taken. Carry on.”
“Anyway, the woman who took me to said spa and knows very well that I wasn’t at work is now the one who gets to decide my future.”
He whistled between his teeth and pointed the open top of his bottle at me. “You, my friend, are up shit’s creek with not a paddle in sight.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I sighed. “It’s not even so much about the job as it is about the idea that she’s been this close to me the entire time. Now that I’ve seen her again…”
“Wait. You saw her?” He chuckled before taking another swig of his beer. “How was it?”
I scraped my palm over my chin while I tried to find the right words to describe the disaster that meeting had been. “Let’s just say it could’ve gone better. I’m going to have to make some calls about the offers I’ve received in the past. Find out if any of those people are still interested.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad. You pulled a dick move by leaving without saying goodbye, but surely, she won’t fire you because of that.”
“Oh, no. I think she will.” The memory of the way she looked at me before I left her office would haunt me for the rest of my days. “She fucking hates me, man. Like, can’t stand to be in the same room as I am, hates me.”
“Told you she hadn’t meant it literally when she said she didn’t want to say goodbye.” He held up his hand to show me to give him a minute when I moved to flip him off. “The upside is that if she hates you, it means she does care about you.”
“Not enough to piss on me if I was on fire.” I rolled my head on my shoulders, tr
ying to block out the pain and the universe of hurt behind her gaze when she’d stared at me. She hadn’t wanted me to see it, but I had. “I think I really fucked up.”
“You don’t say?” He drained what was left in his bottle, grabbing two more before we made our way up the stairs to the nursery. “You two had this idyllic week together in paradise. Then you spent the night together. Then you took off.”
“Because I thought I was doing what she wanted,” I burst out much louder than I had intended to.
Kavan turned on the step two above the one I was on, shooting me a look before he carried on walking. “Don’t yell at me, man. I didn’t tell you to do what you did. In fact, if you’d just have fucking phoned me when you came up with this idiotic plan, I’d have told you to can it and figure something else out.”
“So what? I deserve to lose my job because I made a mistake?” I knew that was what I had done now. Between Kavan, my mother, and seeing Lindsay again, there was no doubt that I hadn’t done the right thing. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. I was specifically trying not to.”
“You know what they say about the road to hell, right?”
“That it’s paved with good intentions?” I squeezed the back of my neck with one hand and finished my beer with the other. “Yeah, I know. I’m starting to see why they say it too. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I didn’t even know I was capable of hurting her that much.”
I’d thought I was the only one who’d have to live with the weight and the searing pain caused by my decision to leave. It was why I’d made the decision in the first place—to try saving her from having to carry any extra weight.
What a fucking fiasco.
Kavan frowned at me when we walked into the nursery. “Capable of hurting her how much?”
“So much that she literally winced when she realized I was standing in front of her.” A stab of pain hit me in my chest. “So much that she told me she wasn’t going to save my job and then tossed me out of her office.”
“To be fair, it would have come as a shock to her as well.” He pointed at an open box lying on the floor. “Let’s get started on that while we dissect the terrible state of your love life.”
“I don’t have a love life,” I retorted and dropped to my haunches in front of the box.
“Well, yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “Because you turned your back on it and walked out without saying goodbye. Doing shit like that will always throw the world’s biggest wrench into the works.”
My jaw clenched, but I couldn’t argue with his logic. “You’re not planning on trying to make me feel any better about this, are you?”
“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve been waiting to give it back as good as I got it for years. Welcome to payback.”
“At least my ideas helped you get Shira and then keep her. All you’re doing is pointing out how stupid I was.”
“What better place to start?” Amusement lit his eyes as he shrugged. “The first time we talked about this, you still thought you’d done the right thing. Even now that you seem to be coming around to how colossally stupid you were, I’m not hearing how much you regret what you did or even that you’re planning on trying to fix it. If you’re not there yet, you don’t understand.”
“You were way less annoying before you knocked your wife up.”
He laughed. “You’ve always been as annoying as you are now, so I have some catching up to do.”
I pulled the side panels of the crib out of the box, and we worked in silence while checking the printed sheet of instructions every so often. It took longer than I would’ve thought, considering that I’d always thought of a crib as a pretty basic thing, but eventually, we had it standing.
Kavan dusted off his hands as he leaned in the doorway, a strange, almost serene look on his face as we he surveyed his handiwork of the last few days. “It’s kind of difficult to believe my baby is going to be sleeping in here soon.”
I nodded, flashing back to the first time we’d had a conversation about marriage and families. I remembered his arrogant smirk and the confident way in which he’d told a newlywed newbie that he’d willingly walked into a life of captivity.
A lot had changed over the years, but nothing more so than his stance on those particular issues. Although I’d never told anyone, I’d always thought I’d end up meeting my soulmate and having a bunch of babies with her.
I hadn’t thought about it much because I always thought it would happen to future-me, but I was starting to realize that none of that stuff could happen to future-me if present-me didn’t get his shit together. Running out on the first girl I’d ever really been able to imagine myself with probably wasn’t the best way to go about paving the way to having the same look on my face that Kavan did now.
“What’re you going to do?” he asked, all the joking and banter gone from his voice. “There has to be a way to fix it if that’s what you want to do.”
“I don’t know if there is.” I’d never been looked at by anyone with so much vehemence in their eyes. “I don’t know if there’s a way back.”
“Did you try explaining why you did it?”
“Maybe I could’ve tried harder.”
He slapped a hand on my shoulder, squeezing it as he gave me his version of an encouraging smile. “We flew fighter planes, Jax. We’ve been in tougher situations and you’ve always figured it out.”
The dark hole inside pulsed and clenched painfully. I shut my eyes against it, shaking my head before letting out a shuddering breath. “I’m not so sure about that. I sure as fuck don’t feel like I’ve been in any tougher situations, and I don’t know how to figure it out. This is one clusterfuck I have no idea how to get out of.”
Chapter 33
LINDSAY
Lunch with Ember had done wonders for my mood, but the feeling of empowerment that had flowed through my veins pretty much shriveled up and died as soon as I’d left her. I might as well not have gone back to the office for the good it did me to be there.
I’d never had a more unproductive day at work, and I only had Jaxon to blame for it. I knew he’d worked there for longer than I had since I’d taken the time to take a very detailed look at his file, but I couldn’t help feeling like he’d invaded the sanctity of my workplace. A place that had always been somewhere I’d felt like I was at the top of the world.
In that office, I reigned supreme. There were very few people above me in the department itself, and outside of it, even the highest-ups often deferred to me for decisions relating to our workforce. I was the expert, and they knew it.
I used to take pride in that fact. I used to feel like I was invincible while I was there. Not in the silly, thought-I-could-get-away-with-anything kind of way. It was just that I was comfortable in my knowledge and in my job, and I didn’t feel the need to justify or explain that to anyone.
Seeing Jaxon had ripped my confidence to shreds. Maybe not seeing him but not knowing what to do with his case. I’d never been as uncertain, and yet this was my domain. My forte.
My brain said one thing, my injured heart another, and sometimes, the two would even switch. I hated the way I was feeling about it. I hated that I felt so much about it even more.
Lying on my couch with my knees hooked over the armrest, French music blasting over my speakers, and running my fingers through my hair, I wished I could teleport back to a time when I wasn’t the sad sack feeling sorry for herself over something as temporary as a vacation hookup.
Between my thoughts and the music, I almost missed the banging at my front door. Frowning as I sat up and hit pause on my remote, I nearly jerked when I realized there really was someone desperately trying to get my attention outside.
My heart jumped in my throat. Jaxon?
While I was telling myself that I really hoped it wasn’t him, I also knew how much I wanted it to be him. I wanted him on his knees groveling for my forgiveness, even if it was only to shut the door in his pretty face.
Yeah. That would amaz
ing. Smiling until I realized I’d never be able to look into those eyes and slam the door on them, I scowled as I flung it open.
Shock radiated through me at who was waiting on the other side, his fist poised to keep banging and his blue eyes flashing with relief when he noticed I’d opened up. “I was starting to think I was going to have to break your door down. Why are you listening to French classics? You only listen to French classics when something’s wrong.”
My brother grinned and opened his arms, enveloping me in the biggest, most comforting hug I could’ve gotten after the last few weeks. He rubbed my back when I started shaking in his arms, overcome with joy that he was okay and happy and here.
“What are you doing here?” I asked when I could finally form words again. “How did you even know where I lived?”
“I got your letters,” he said when he released me, the corners of his mouth turning down. “I kept all of them. I’ve reread them about a thousand times. I’ve had your address memorized since you sent it to me after you moved.”
Tears pricked at my eyes and I didn’t bother trying to hold them back, letting them flow over my cheeks as I put my hands on Ethan’s shoulders. “I just can’t believe you’re here.”
I looked him over head to toe three times, checking to make sure that he was real, uninjured, and in one piece before tugging him back into my arms. While I hadn’t heard it for years, his chuckle was still as familiar to me as my own when it rumbled in his chest.
“I’m sorry I made you wait so long,” he whispered into my hair. “I just wasn’t ready to see you before, but I’m on leave, and I really wanted to come see you.”
Questions slammed into my mind one after the other, each as burning and urgent as the one before. Asking him about it while he was still standing out in the hall probably wasn’t the best move, though.
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