by Kylie Walker
The second time Heather saw Claire was at the Halloween party she and Phillip attended two days before the day she stood in the bistro and watched him kissing the other woman’s neck. Claire had been there alone, dressed in a short, red flapper costume that showed more skin than it covered. Once again Heather had tried to be friendly, but the other woman had practically shunned her. Now Heather understood why. She wasn’t interested in being friends with the woman who was engaged to the man she was sleeping with.
She realized as she took a step toward them that day, her legs were shaking. For the past three years all of her dreams and ambitions had included this man she thought she would be with forever. They talked about where they would live and how many children they would have together. They spent holidays with each other’s family’s and although she hadn’t cared much for either of his parents she had gone out of her way to be polite and get along with them. Her father tried to warn her once about Phillip, telling her that something about his cockiness gave him a bad feeling. Heather had defended him then, telling her dad that Phillip wasn’t cocky, he was confident. As she walked toward his table that day and watched him with Claire, she knew that she had been wrong. He was cocky and it was probably because he was getting away with screwing her over.
“Hello Phillip,” she had said that day as she reached the edge of his table. She often wished now that she had a picture of the shocked look on his face when he pulled his head up from Claire’s lips and looked into Heather’s blue eyes.
“Heather...” She never knew, nor did she care what he was going to say at that moment. Undoubtedly he was going to try and make some kind of excuse or rationalize what he was doing somehow. She stopped him by saying, “I’ll have anything you left at my apartment packed up and waiting in the lobby for you this evening.”
Then she had pulled off the two-carat diamond ring he had given her on their second anniversary and laid it down on the table in front of him. Claire had an amused expression on her face throughout the entire episode. As Heather turned to walk away Phillip actually had the nerve to reach out and grab her wrist. She had stopped dead in her tracks and without ever raising her voice or making any kind of scene she had turned back to face him and whispered, “I’m doing my best to keep this civil, but if you don’t let go of my arm, you’ll find that steak knife on the table protruding from you in about five seconds.” He let go and once again said her name. “No. You don’t get to talk. You don’t get to try and make excuses for why you’re mauling a half-naked woman in a restaurant in the middle of the day. There’s only one reason for it and we both know it. So now you’re free. You can sit at the front of the bistro from now on for all I care.”
She had walked out of there then with her head held high. She stopped long enough for a hug from Kimberly and a promise to make the birthday celebration up to her. She managed to make it home before shedding a single tear and although she had shed quite a few since, she realized that none of them were for the loss of that asshole, Phillip. What Heather cried for when she was alone was her loss of trust and faith in what she thought was the sanctity of the promises they had made to each other. For the next month she ignored calls from Phillip and pleading text messages and by Christmas time she had firmly encased her heart in a wall of stone, determined not to shed another tear for the loss of a man that had never been worth her time from the start. The only regret that stuck with her was that she had allowed him to destroy one of her most valued possessions...the trust that she always had in human nature.
As she pulled off the 99 and onto the narrow but paved road that led up to the resort she resolved not for the first time to concentrate on something she knew would never let her down, her own ambition. She had an innate desire to succeed in her chosen career and she wasn’t afraid of hard work. She was the one person that she could trust not to lie to her or break her heart.
**
Heather wasn’t a skier or a snowboarder or even a fan of cold weather. But, as she stepped out of her car in front of the huge resort she had to admit that she hadn’t ever seen a more beautiful, or romantic place. When Sadie Michael’s had first told Heather she wanted it as the venue for her wedding...in January of all months, Heather had been skeptical. She had never personally been to the resort at that point, but she had researched it then and found out January was not only the busiest month for the beautiful place, it was also the coldest. She had tried to gently urge Sadie and her fiancé Jim to reconsider but the two of them had met at the resort two years earlier and they were firm in their desire to marry there. So once the decision was made Heather had gone about doing everything she could to make it happen. This visit would be the third time that she had travelled up the mountain and she had to admit that so far she had been pleased with how accommodating the staff at the resort and in the small surrounding village had been.
She left her car with the valet and made her way into the huge lobby of the ski resort. There was a fire roaring in the stone fireplace that covered one wall and people sitting on the plush chairs and sofas enjoying a hot chocolate or a cup of the resort’s famous brew coffee. She took out her phone and called Kimberly.
“Hey Heather I was just about to call you,” Kim said as she answered.
“Oh yeah? I guess great minds think alike. Where are you?”
Kim’s voice sounded confused as she said, “Um, I’m up at the resort on Whistler Mountain with Sadie and Jim.”
Heather laughed. “I know that, silly. I’m here too. I’m in the lobby.”
“Uh oh.”
“Uh oh? Why uh oh? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing...unless you really wanted to get back home tonight.”
“What? Why wouldn’t I be able to go home tonight? Is there a problem with the wedding plans?”
“No, everything is going smoothly here. The wedding party has arrived and gotten checked into their rooms. I just talked to the kitchen and dinner will be ready and served on time tonight for the rehearsal. Cocktails will be served for two hours afterwards. The flowers and cake got here this morning and everything else is ready to go.”
With a chuckle Heather looked around the room, “Okay then...why uh-oh?”
“Shoot, I’m sorry. Have you heard the weather report?”
“Yes, well it was early this morning before I went to work. They said there was a winter storm watch in effect after midnight tonight. Why do you sound so worried?”
“They’ve upgraded it,” Kimberly said. “I’m at the coffee shop in the village. Meet me there and we’ll grab a coffee and talk.”
CHAPTER 3
“Why are you dressed like a great white hunter?” Jim asked. Gavin grinned and said, “Mason Briggs is one of my clients.”
Jim laughed. “Oh no, I wonder if that’s what I’m getting as a wedding present.”
“It’s not so bad. He had the hat and flannel shirt and even the jeans tailored especially for me. The shirt is lined with fleece so it’s warm as hell and I think my ass rounds the denim out nicely.”
Jim was laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes. It wasn’t that Gavin never wore jeans but while he was married, his wife would have never let him get by with wearing jeans that were actually faded and fraying...and a plaid flannel shirt and ball cap would have sent her into convulsions. Part of wearing the outfit his old client Mason had brought him was to thumb his nose at what his ex-wife would and would not have liked about the outfit. When Jim stopped laughing he took a drink of his beer and said, “Stand up and let me take a look at that ass.”
Gavin shot him a look, “I don’t think so.”
Jim Michael’s had been Gavin’s best friend since middle school. It was always easy for Gavin to forget his problems and relax when he was with Jim. It was like time stood still and they were back to being those fun-loving boys they used to be. Now Gavin was a billionaire businessman and Jim a high-powered attorney so there wasn’t much time left for any fun. There would be even less after Jim married Sadie, the love o
f his life. Gavin had actually considered begging Jim not to go through with the wedding, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. Jim was head over heels in love with his fiancé Sadie and Gavin really liked her too. It wasn’t Sadie that Gavin had a problem with anyways, it was just marriage in general. He never used to feel that way and he hated that he felt that way now, but life experience definitely changes things.
Gavin spent the first sixteen years of his adult life building his fortune. He graduated from NYU with a master’s in business and from that point on he began investing in his future. Gavin grew up poor. He was raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn New York. They didn’t have much by way of material possessions but the things he learned from his mother had turned out to be much more valuable than even a trust fund might have been. His mother worked two jobs and she never passed up on an opportunity to tell Gavin that the path to getting ahead in life was to work hard and always keep your dreams in sight. Gavin’s Mom had gotten pregnant right out of high school and while the man who had been partially responsible for her plight went on to an Ivy league college and never looked back. His mother had gotten a job in a restaurant, rented a studio apartment and began building the best life for her child that she could manage. She was never bitter about his father leaving and she had even offered to help Gavin find him. Gavin couldn’t imagine what use he would have for a man that would leave a young pregnant woman alone, let alone his own child.
Gavin adored and respected his mother however his main goal had always been to make her proud of him. He worked hard in school and with straight ‘A’s’ on his report card from kindergarten through high school, he was able to write his own ticket as far as scholarships went. He chose NYU because it was close to home and his mother.
As soon as Gavin graduated he got a job as a tech in an investment firm in Manhattan. Over the next five years, before he was even thirty, he worked his way up to the position of senior associate. Throughout those early days in his career he didn’t spend much money. He kept what he needed to live on, did whatever he could to make his mother’s life easier and invested the rest. Because of his innate sense for business and the tools he had learned from his job, he made some really good investments. By the time he did turn thirty he was a partner at his firm, but no longer needed that income to survive. His investments were paying off ten-fold and he decided to switch tracks. He took his money out of the ‘safe’ investments it was wrapped up in and he began to make riskier choices with the stock market. Those choices paid off in a big way. Gavin had made his first billion dollars by the time he was thirty-three. In the meantime he tried to buy his mother an upscale apartment on the Upper East Side, but she refused to let him. They were both stubborn and after a series of passionate conversations she had finally agreed to let him buy her a house, as long as it was in Brooklyn. He wanted her out of that neighborhood, but at least with the compromise he could get her a house and an alarm system, so he agreed.
Not long after his mother moved into her four bedroom brownstone home, Gavin had fallen in love with a Canadian girl named Annie. He met her at a club on one of his trips to visit Jim who lived and worked in Vancouver by that time.
The first year Gavin and Annie dated was amazing and he was truly happy. Annie hadn’t had much growing up and every new thing he introduced her to while they traveled or attended various functions in the city held an almost magical appeal for her. It gave him a great deal of pleasure to see her smile and know that he was the one that had put the pretty smile on her face. It wasn’t until he had proposed and they were planning their wedding and where they would live that Gavin began to get a sense that Annie wasn’t quite who he had thought she was. She became almost obsessed with everything Gavin’s money could buy and suddenly she was attending every charity benefit, joining every club and making herself “known” both in New York and Vancouver high society. Gavin wasn’t interested in impressing anyone and he wasn’t easily impressed so they had more than one disagreement where money and status were concerned. That worried Gavin but not enough for him to give up. He mastered the art of compromise and he probably compromised a lot more than she did, but he truly wanted her to be happy and he was willing to do almost anything it took to see her smile. The ‘almost’ anything revealed itself the day he found her birth control pills by accident.
The only regret Gavin ever had about his childhood was that he hadn’t had siblings. He wanted a big family and Annie had told him she wanted the same. After over two years of marriage and almost four years of being together he was beginning to worry that there was something wrong with one of them. He went to his doctor and found out that it wasn’t him. Annie told him she had done the same and he would just have to be patient. About a month after all of that he was in the kitchen one day when Annie’s phone began to ring. She called out from the other room, “Gavin can you grab that for me please.” He reached into her purse just about the time she rushed into the kitchen saying, “Never mind, I’ve got it.” He saw by the look on her face as soon as he pulled the pills out that she had remembered too late that they were there.
“What’s this?”
“You’re not stupid,” she smirked. “You know what they are.”
“If you don’t think I’m stupid then why have you been lying to me? Have you been taking these all along?”
“Yes.”
Gavin had dropped down into a chair and with the pills still clutched in his hand he looked up at his wife’s guilty face. “Why? I don’t understand.”
“I’m just not ready Gavin. I don’t want my body all stretched out of shape and a baby drooling all over me...”
“Now...or ever?”
“I can only speak for now,” she replied.
“Why didn’t you just tell me the truth? You pretended like you wanted the same things out of life as me.”
“I wasn’t pretending,” she said. “I grew up not knowing anything else. You get married and you have kids and you spend the rest of your life in sweatpants and your hair in a ponytail. I just realized that wasn’t me.”
“After you started wearing designer clothes and having your breasts enhanced?”
“Don’t make this about money.”
“What else could it possibly be about?”
“Me Gavin! You never think of me and what I want.”
He had actually laughed out loud at that. He had given up a lot of his wants and needs to make sure that she was happy and she actually had the nerve to tell him that he didn’t think of her. “Please tell me you’re kidding.” She wasn’t. Gavin decided quickly that a woman who would lie about something like that would lie about anything. He wasn’t going to be able to trust her again. It almost killed him to admit that he couldn’t fix it, but he had to at that point. He couldn’t live with someone that he didn’t trust. He filed for divorce days later and even though he had his attorney draw up a substantial financial settlement for her she took him to court to fight for more. The prenuptial agreement she signed before they got married was iron-clad however. Gavin’s attorneys were some of the best in the world and his friend Jim was one of them. Annie ended up getting a lot less than what she would have gotten had she simply settled.
“Sadie’s not going to screw me over the way Annie did to you,” Jim told him.
Gavin smiled. “What makes you think that’s what was on my mind?”
Jim laughed. “I’ve known you more of my life than I haven’t. Trust me man, Sadie is nothing like Annie.”
“I believe you,” Gavin replied. “But...we all thought Annie was pretty great to begin with.”
“Mmmmm....no, not really.”
Gavin was surprised. Annie never liked Jim but from the start Gavin made it clear to her that he wouldn’t tolerate her being rude to his best friend. She thought Jim was “beneath” him and she actually tried to get him to get rid of him as the best man at his wedding. Gavin wondered later if he should have walked away back then, but if he had he would have always
wondered if it was a mistake. At least by the time he did end it he knew there was no other choice.
“What do you mean, not really? You never said anything.”
“I never liked her and I definitely never trusted her. But I wasn’t going to tell you that. You were in love and it wasn’t my place. I kicked ass on that pre-nup for you. It was all I could do.”
Gavin smiled. At least he made better choices in best friends than he did wives. “I’m just not sure I even know what love is,” he said, “I felt things for her, yes. The sex was phenomenal right off the bat and she said that she wanted the same things as me. But once the sex had gone stale and I realized she was only pretending to have things in common with me I didn’t feel anything at all. I was sad because I’d screwed up and married her more than I was splitting up with her. So I have to say I’m just not sure it was ever love.”
“Well then you got off easy.”
Chuckling Gavin asked, “How do you figure?”
“If it was love then having to give up on it would have torn you apart. I can’t imagine losing Sadie. If she ever left me she may as well take my heart out of my chest with her.”
Gavin felt happy for his friend and envious at the same time. That was what he wanted to feel and what he wanted someone to feel for him. He held up his glass and Jim held his up too. “To my best friend and his beautiful bride to be. May you both find the happiness that eluded me and keep it in your hearts forever.”
Jim tapped his glass to Gavin’s and said, “Here, here.”
After the men finished their second drink Jim looked at his watch. “Damn, I’m late.”
“What, for today?” The wedding party had been staying at the lodge for three days and nights already and there had been something going on every day. Gavin had planned on doing some hiking around the mountain. It was actually the reason he was in the outfit Mason designed for him. But the weather was beginning to look slightly ominous outside and the last thing he wanted was to freeze to death on the side of a mountain. A long nap was beginning to sound more appealing. This was his first vacation in over a year and he wouldn’t have even taken that much time off if not for the fact that he was honored and committed to being Jim’s best man in the wedding taking place tomorrow.
