by Kim Law
“But you have to know something about her,” Arsula pressed. “You’re married to her oldest son.”
“I am.”
Maggie watched with interest now, her drink forgotten.
“Then, other than being a self-centered witch,” Arsula continued, “what do you know about her? What was she like? And just what kind of lasting impact did she leave on Gabe?”
“I always thought of her as being well put together and doting on her family,” Maggie offered when the pause between Arsula’s question and an answer from Erica went on too long.
Erica’s response was a sarcastic grunt.
“So she really wasn’t?” Maggie asked. Maggie had been there before and heard the same information as Arsula, but Arsula suspected she struggled with balancing the image formed years ago with what little info Erica had provided.
“She . . .” Erica looked pained. “The family doesn’t like to talk about her,” she explained. “And certainly not publicly. And honestly, I really don’t know all that much.” Worry creased the space between her eyes. “Why do you want to know, anyway? Did something happen that night that you aren’t telling us about? Are you interested in Jaden?”
“No,” Arsula immediately responded, but then she offered a slight grimace. “Okay, yes. Something happened that I haven’t shared. But no, I’m not interested in Jaden. Not like that.”
“Then how are you interested in him?”
“And what did happen?” Maggie added.
“One question at a time.” Arsula turned to Maggie first, and even before she began, a weight lifted from her chest. She’d been needing to talk about this with her girls. “I might have slightly exaggerated the simplicity of him being at my place Saturday night.”
Maggie slapped a hand on the table, and a wide smile appeared. “I knew it. You did sleep with him.”
“Shhhh.” Arsula leaned in and prayed no one had heard that. “No. I didn’t. I just . . . tried to.”
The other two leaned in as well. “You what?” they asked simultaneously.
Guilt continued to weigh on her. Sleeping with a client’s ex wasn’t exactly her norm, and the excuse of too much alcohol only went so far. She still couldn’t understand how she’d let herself end up there. “There was a lot of alcohol that night,” she attempted to explain. “Some laughing . . . some kissing . . .”
Neither of them said anything, clearly waiting for the rest of the story, so Arsula scrunched up her nose and finished. “And if he hadn’t had too much to drink, we would have had sex.”
“Would have?” Maggie questioned.
“He . . . ummm”—Arsula cast a quick glance around but found no one paying obvious attention—“couldn’t finish.”
Both women snorted and then fell into a fit of giggles.
“I know.” Arsula attempted to shush them again. “But really, it wasn’t funny. It still isn’t funny.”
“He couldn’t get it up,” Maggie choked out, this time pulling the attention of a couple of nearby diners, and she reached for her purse. “How is that possibly not funny?”
“Stop it,” Arsula pleaded. “You know how men can be. A little too much, and . . .”
“Gabe isn’t like that.”
Arsula rolled her eyes at her friend. “I doubt ‘Gabe-the-stud’ has ever come close to drinking the amount of liquor Jaden put away.”
“Possibly.” Erica took a large gulp of her drink. “And if that’s the result, I won’t ever encourage it.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Arsula replied wryly. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad the evening didn’t end the other way. But man, too much alcohol can certainly leave a girl wanting.” And honestly, she was glad they hadn’t had sex. She’d just gotten worked up, and then . . . hadn’t gotten to finish.
Maggie snorted again, then she put a twenty into Erica’s now-waiting hand, and Arsula sat back in her seat. She gaped at her friends. “Oh my God. Did you two bet on me?”
“Of course we did,” Maggie answered. “We knew you were holding back.”
“What was the bet?” She looked from friend to friend.
“I bet that you did sleep with him,” Maggie answered.
“And I bet that you started to, but that you changed your mind and stopped before it went all the way.”
“Well then, it seems you both lost.” She reached over and plucked the twenty away from Erica. “Because though I didn’t sleep with him, it also wasn’t that I changed my mind. Therefore, I claim the money.” She made a production of folding the bill and tucking it into her jeans, and as her fingers slipped free of her front pocket, she became aware that several people had turned to look in their direction.
A server arrived with their food, and while Maggie and Erica offered smiles of thanks, Arsula clued in to why they were now being looked at. Or rather, why she was.
“Ah, crap,” she murmured.
“What?” Maggie peered up from her steaming skillet of fajitas, then glanced around when she realized Arsula was watching someone. Erica followed suit.
They both quit scanning the crowd as their gazes landed on Megan.
“We’re both being talked about,” Arsula whispered. “And I hate that. I didn’t think about how helping out Jaden might affect her.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Erica soothed. She reached over and patted Arsula’s hand. “Some people always have to have something to talk about. There’s nothing you’ll ever be able to do to stop that.”
“Well, I wish they’d talk about the weather instead of me.”
“There’s snow on the ground,” Maggie droned in a monotone, still keeping her eyes on the crowd and on Megan. “It’s cold outside. The end.”
All three of them chuckled, and then Erica and Maggie both silently faced her.
“What?” she asked, suddenly feeling an itch running the length of her spine.
“You didn’t finish your story,” Erica explained.
“Yes, I did. We tried, he failed, the end.”
“Nice try,” Maggie acknowledged. She pointed her fork at Arsula, a bite of chicken speared on the tines. “But we need to know the rest. He couldn’t finish, we can assume he either passed out or fell asleep, but how did the man break his ankle?”
“And why did you take him in?”
Arsula snuck another peek at Megan, who’d settled in with a couple of other ladies on the other side of the room. Megan was a good person. She cared about the town, even though she hadn’t grown up there, and she’d uprooted her life for her boyfriend’s family when they’d needed the help. She didn’t deserve to be talked about just because she’d made a decision to move in a different direction with her life.
“Has Megan said anything?” she asked instead of answering their questions.
“About what?” Erica said. “The breakup?”
“That. And about Jaden staying at the office.”
“Nothing, as far as I know. She’s just acknowledged that the breakup did happen. She did call me about renting the apartment, though.” Erica owned an apartment across from her house with Gabe that had been a fire hall in a previous life. She’d rented it when she’d first moved to town, and had fallen so in love with the place, she’d decided to buy it.
Arsula pulled her eyes back to Erica. “Are you going to rent it to her?”
“She’s already moved in.”
Ah. She hadn’t been aware of that.
“Good for her,” she said, and this time, her approval of Megan’s decision to leave the Wilde house had nothing to do with what might be best for Jaden and everything to do with Megan.
“Do you have any idea why she broke up with him?” Maggie questioned before cramming a bite of fajita into her mouth.
“I do.”
“Why?” they asked at the same time.
“And when?” Erica added. “They came to the wedding together.”
“But they weren’t speaking to each other at the wedding,” Maggie pointed out. “I noticed
that. And it was her avoiding him. And she left early.”
“Exactly.” Arsula lowered her voice. “Because she ended things before the wedding. In the church parking lot.”
“Ouch.” Maggie grimaced.
“I know.”
“So that’s why they sat in his car for so long?” Understanding dawned on Erica’s face. “Gabe knew they’d broken up, but even he didn’t know exactly when.”
Arsula didn’t fill them in on the fact that a proposal had led to the breakup. Jaden could share that nugget if he chose to.
“But why did she break up with him?” Maggie asked. “They’ve been together for several years, and weren’t they planning on moving here after he finishes his degree? I expected them to eventually get married.”
“He did, too,” Arsula answered honestly, and she tried to figure out how best to explain Megan’s decision without revealing too much. She’d never taken any sort of oath of secrecy, but sharing one-on-one conversations felt like a mistrust of privacy.
It turned out she didn’t have to explain, though, because Maggie guessed it.
“She had a dream,” Maggie stated, and Arsula nodded.
“About Jaden?”
“About her comfort level within their relationship.”
Erica glanced at Megan. “And you think she’ll stick to it?”
“I do.” Arsula didn’t let herself look at the other woman again. She suspected Megan already felt uncomfortable enough. “I know she still cares for him, though. She was clear about that. They were friends first. And they didn’t have a big fight or a major disagreement that led to the breakup. He just isn’t the right person for her, and she realized that before it was too late.”
“Poor Megan,” Erica murmured.
Arsula and Maggie agreed. Any breakup was hard.
“She’ll rebound.” Arsula didn’t doubt that fact. Megan was a sharp, capable woman. And she would find the correct person for her. Whenever the timing was right.
The three of them fell silent for several minutes as they ate, before Maggie pushed her plate away and crossed her arms on the table. She leaned in, her gaze locking on Arsula. “Time’s up,” she announced. “No more avoiding. How did Jaden end up falling down your stairs?”
“And don’t feed us any the-steps-were-icy bullcrap.”
Arsula hid her grin as she took a sip of her margarita. “But the steps were icy.”
“Uh-huh.” Erica nodded. “And the man apparently showed up at the hospital not fully dressed.”
“That’s not true at all,” Arsula argued. “And anyway, who told you that? None of his family was even there when he first arrived.”
She supposed one of the emergency personnel could have said something. Embellished the story.
“Then why were you pulling his socks out of your coat pocket?” Erica asked, and Arsula froze at the words.
“Caught red-handed,” Maggie murmured. “Can we assume he was leaving in a hurry for some reason?”
“You mean, as if he’d woken up and been horrified to find himself in bed with me?”
Maggie gave a tilt of her head. “That’s one option.”
“And what was your thought?”
Maggie and Erica exchanged glances, but they didn’t say anything else, and Arsula understood that to mean they were through talking. She had to finish the story.
“Fine. Yes,” she groaned out. “He didn’t handle waking up with me well, okay? In fact, he might have handled the situation so poorly that I could have possibly . . . maybe . . . helped him to leave a little faster than he’d intended.”
They both grinned. They’d each witnessed her flare-ups before, though her anger had never been directed at them.
“What did you do?” Erica asked, and Arsula wouldn’t have been surprised to see her rub her hands together as any good cartoon villain might. She sounded downright greedy for the answer.
Arsula sighed. “I threw a vase at him. Then I threw a book.” She puckered her mouth in disgust. “And possibly I threw a lamp after that—just as his foot reached for the first step.”
Her friends cackled with laughter when she finished, and this time every diner surrounding their table turned their way.
Then Erica pulled a twenty from her purse. “I lose,” she declared.
Arsula stared in shock. “Are you kidding me? You bet on whether I threw something at him or not?”
“No.” Maggie passed the money in front of her nose and smelled it. “We bet on whether you pushed him down the stairs or not. And then took him in out of guilt.”
Arsula reached across the table and snatched the second twenty. “I was fifteen feet away when he fell. I didn’t push. And guilt isn’t the reason, either.” She checked her voice again, realizing she’d gotten too loud, then she leaned in close. “He’s the reason I’m here,” she whispered. They both knew how she’d ended up in Birch Bay. “He’s the one,” she repeated, her excitement now palpable. “He’s the person I was meant to help.”
Chapter Ten
The tension in the office had remained throughout the weekend and into the middle of the week, and at this point, Arsula was almost ready to beg for forgiveness. She was tired of walking on eggshells.
Jaden had continued being his grumpy self. However, since she’d called him out for staring at her behind the week before, she’d now swear that whenever she stood from her seat, he did it even more. She hadn’t made a production of catching him in the act like she had the first time, but she had noticed that whenever she either pulled the shades she’d had Tim install on Jaden’s doors, or closed the doors altogether, the second she stepped out of the room and came back, Jaden’s view was always unobstructed.
She was pretty sure everything he did at this point was to push her buttons. She’d been around enough brothers and past boyfriends to know when a man was being a pain in the rear simply for the fun of it. But given that she’d still barely said more to him than “are you ready for food” and “do you need anything,” she didn’t know him well enough to say for sure.
And wasn’t that proving herself worthy? She’d declared she’d come here because he needed her, yet she’d done her level best not to speak to him since then. Aunt Sul would not be proud.
“That’s all I can manage today,” Dani announced as she exited her office. “I have a baby at home who needs her mama to come feed her. Not to mention I’m exhausted after taking almost four months off.”
Dani’s first day back had been today, and she’d made it until noon.
Arsula winked. “I’d say you did good. Four full hours.”
Dani shot her a teasing smile as she gathered her coat. “There are benefits to being the owner of the business.” She shrugged into her jacket and slung a tote over her shoulder. “I am available the rest of the day, though. I’m officially back on the job. So if anything pops up, let me know, and the moment Mia isn’t crying, I’ll get on the phone and play grown-up.”
“You got it, boss.”
Dani left, hunching her shoulders against the wind as she hurried to her car, and after she was out of sight, Arsula took a moment to stare at the reflection in the front window. She could see Jaden’s empty bed as clear as if she were turned to face it, and a pang of worry tapped against her breastbone. He’d talked Nate into taking him to Dr. Wangler’s for his first observation session an hour ago. Arsula hadn’t thought he was ready, but he’d insisted to everyone that he was fine. He’d just be watching from another room, and he could keep his foot propped up as he did so.
Still, she worried. He hadn’t even had his first checkup with his surgeon yet.
His absence gave her a rare sense of freedom, though, as for the first time in a week and a half, she could focus her energy on something other than ignoring him. And her first order of business was to reach out to Megan.
Since seeing her Friday night, she’d been feeling more like they needed to have another chat. Only, this time to make sure the two of them were okay. Possibly
to try to explain the night of the wedding—though she wasn’t sure doing so would be of any real benefit.
Things had happened between her and Jaden. True. And hate it as she might, she couldn’t take it back. Nor would she deny the facts if questioned. The reality was, though, that Megan and Jaden had been broken up. And if a conversation was needed, her instinct said it should happen between Megan and Jaden.
Still . . . she could check in with Megan. It would be the right thing to do.
She pulled her cell out from under a pile of papers and punched in a text.
Hey. So . . . the night of the wedding . . . I feel like we might need to meet up and talk.
No reply came within a couple of minutes, so she decided she would definitely seek her out.
Her second order of business was to call her mother.
Propping her tablet on her desk, she scrolled through the contacts until she found her mother and tapped the button to make a video call. When she’d looked at the calendar that morning, she’d realized she hadn’t spoken with her family since before Jaden’s accident. And she usually called home at least once a week.
While waiting for the call to connect, she loaded her email on her phone and pulled up her consultant account. Until Jaden had become her priority, she’d regularly used lunch hours to handle personal business. And now that she’d been in town for several months, along with requests for individual dream interpretation, she also got invites to be the entertainment at events. People would often seek her out, wanting her to attend a bridal shower or a girls’ night out, and if her schedule allowed, she always agreed. Social events were how she met a lot of the people she knew, and oftentimes, a true client would arise from the lighthearted fun.
“It’s about time you called.”
She glanced away from the list of emails that had come in over the last nine days and smiled at the sight of her mother’s rounded face. “Hi, Mom. Sorry for missing last week. I’ve been extra busy lately.”
“I suspected as much. I don’t suppose it’s been baby-making kind of busy, has it?”
Arsula scowled. Her mother was often as off-kilter as she was. “I swear, Mother. One of these days I’m going to answer that question with a yes. And then what are you going to do?”
