by Robin Kaye
“No. No one would mistake you for a child, but you’ve been crying with all the abandon of one.”
She always enjoyed arguing, but even she couldn’t argue with this. After all, he was right. She shrugged, snapped the bandanna open, and blew her nose. Before she finished wiping tears from her face, he had a grip on her arm. “Come on, it’s getting cold and we’re losing the light. I can deal with a lot of things, but not a frozen ass. I have a cabin just up the hill, I’ll stoke the fire and you can thaw out your ass.”
She dug in her heels. “You have a cabin?”
“Yeah, but just to warn you, it’s not much.”
“You’re staying in the Sullivan’s hunting cabin?”
“The very one.”
“My father rented it to you?”
When he didn’t answer, she forged ahead. “My father works for the Grand Poobah of Harmony, Jackson Finneus Sullivan III.”
“Teddy Watkins—”
“is my father. Guilty as charged.”
From the look of consternation on his face, she figured he must have recently been on the receiving end of her father’s third degree—the same one her dad gave to anyone interested in renting one of the houses or cabins on Sullivan’s Tarn.
“Well, that’s a relief. At least now I can be sure you’re not an axe murderer. The Secret Service has nothing on my father when it comes to looking into the backgrounds of tenants.”
“Teddy’s that careful, is he?”
“Oh, yeah.” She looked from the guy who still had a hand on her elbow to the land around them. “I’m a little surprised Jax Sullivan hasn’t developed this side of the lake by now, but then maybe he’s forgotten he owns it. I guess when you own half the town not to mention half the banks in Chicago, you’d have better things to do than remember a falling-down cabin on a heavily forested piece of land.”
The man rocked back on his heels and blew out a breath. “It sounds as if you don’t like your dad’s boss very much.”
She shrugged and brushed the snow off her skinny jeans. “Believe me, the last thing I want to do is think about men like Jax Sullivan. Just because my parents think he walks on water doesn’t mean I do.” She shrugged. “But then I can’t say I have feelings about him either way—”
“You could have fooled me.”
“I haven’t seen him since I was in grade school. By the time he started coming back to the lake, I was in college or living and working in Boston.”
He didn’t say anything. He just stared at her with startling blue eyes.
“So no, I don’t dislike him. I just don’t automatically like him. It’s nothing personal. He pays my parents’ salary and he must treat them well. If he didn’t I doubt they’d still think he walks on water.” She shrugged. She couldn’t help but lump Jax in with every other stuffed shirt with whom her fiancé forced her to socialize. She’d always wondered why David tried so hard to impress the corporate elite. Now it all made sense. “Well, enough about me. What brings you out here in the off season?”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Me? I wanted some peace and solitude. I thought this would be the perfect place to find it. I’m staying at the cabin for a few months at a cut rate and doing some handyman work.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Why is that so hard to believe? I’m just repairing the roof and cleaning the place up a little.”
“Do you mean to tell me that the great Jax Sullivan—Harmony’s own Scrooge McDuck—is so cheap, he’s not even paying for your labor?”
“I think it’s a fair deal.”
“Right.”
“You make it sound like having money is a criminal offense.”
“No, but taking advantage of people should be. It’s not the having money that’s bad, what’s bad is what people usually do to keep it.”
“Are you speaking from personal experience?”
She looked at her car wondering how much money David saw fit to leave her in their—make that her—savings account. “Probably.” She blew out a breath and tossed her hair over her shoulder before she shook her head. “Look, don’t mind me. I just discovered that sometime in our twelve-year relationship my ex-finance turned into a Jackson Sullivan III wannabe. If I’d known world financial domination was what he was after, I never would have gotten involved with him in the first place.”
The guy seemed to relax a little then. “We all make mistakes—”
“Obviously, but in my own defense, when David and I started dating, he wanted to be a fireman—of course we were in eighth grade at the time.”
“So I take it the career switch didn’t come as a complete shock?”
She shrugged. “Yes and no. In college and grad school, he majored in finance, but our plan had always been to move back to Harmony—not exactly a world financial center. I was going to open my own psychotherapy practice and I thought he’d get a job at the bank, maybe do some financial planning, sell insurance, that kind of thing.”
“He had other plans?”
“Yes. Plans he didn’t see fit to share with me. He took a promotion in San Francisco. Yesterday, I got a pink slip and then to top off my day, I came home to find him packing. He said he didn’t need a modern-day Betty Crocker with a Carl Jung fetish. His words, not mine.”
“Wow, that’s harsh.” He leaned back against the car and tilted his head, as if looking at her from a different angle would change the picture. No such luck for either of them. “Would you have gone to San Francisco with him if he’d asked?”
She wanted to say yes, but the look in his eyes stopped her and made her really think about it. Would she have followed David to San Francisco? She’d followed him to Boston, but that was with the understanding that they’d return to Harmony. Boston was two hours away from home, not on the other side of the country. “I honestly don’t know. I’ve never wanted to live anywhere but right here.”
“I would think that if you really loved this guy, you’d follow him anywhere.”
“We spent the last twelve years planning our life together and David never even floated the idea of a move to San Francisco or anyplace else for that matter.”
He didn’t argue, he just continued staring.
“If I used your logic, I could say that if he really loved me, he would never leave me for a job on the west coast.”
“You’re right. Which begs the question: why are you wasting your time crying over a man who obviously doesn’t love you? At least not anymore.”
Ouch, that hurt. Tears welled in her eyes but she blinked them away. “He might not have loved me, but I loved him.” It came out on a sob, and his frown deepened.
“Not enough to follow him to San Francisco,” he said softly. His eyes stared into hers as if he was willing her to agree.
She wasn’t feeling very agreeable at the moment. “I might have if he’d asked. Instead, he waited until I left for work to pack his belongings and move out of our apartment without a word about it to me. If I hadn’t lost my job and come home early, I would have received nothing more than the email he’d planned to send from the airport. He said he wanted to avoid the drama.”
He stepped closer and crossed his arms, his gaze pinning her in place. “Look, you don’t know me from Adam, but if you ask me, I think the jerk did you a favor.”
“You think he did me favor?”
“Yeah. He’s obviously a coward. No real man would spend over a decade with a beautiful woman like you—even with your penchant for tears—and leave you with no warning, no apology, and without so much as a goodbye. You should thank him for keeping you from wasting any more of your life on him. He probably saved you years of misery, not to mention the cost of a good divorce attorney. In his own cowardly way, he did the right thing. He set you free to be happy.”
She took a deep breath and gathered her thoughts, his words pinballed their
way around her mind, hitting more buttons than she would have thought possible. “You know, I doubt I would have ever come to that conclusion on my own but you might be right.” She stared at the tall, blond, obnoxiously gorgeous man wondering who the hell he was. “If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll feel that way in a few years. Right now, I’m having a difficult time working up any real gratitude.”
“It won’t take years, believe me.”
“Who are you?” That seemed to surprise him. She couldn’t fathom why.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s suddenly occurred to me that I’ve just spilled my guts to a total stranger and I don’t even know your name.”
“I’m Jack.” He held out his hand in a manner so businesslike, it was odd considering where they were and the fact that he was dressed like a construction worker.
“Jack.” His warm, work-roughened hand engulfed her smaller, smooth, frozen one. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Kendall.”
Robin Kaye is a Golden Heart Award–winning author of the contemporary romance series the Bad Boys of Red Hook, including Back to You, You’re the One, and Had to Be You. Her books have been translated in ten languages.
