Mend Your Heart (Bounty Bay Book 4)

by Tracey Alvarez

  Just after nine they reached the motor lodge where they’d booked rooms for the team and supervising adults. They’d spend two nights there, with the girls sharing rooms together and the adults in separate rooms spaced between them. Aside from Isaac and Nat as coach and parent help, Owen would drive down tomorrow before the big game after he’d finished a late-night shift at the hospital. Justine and Mike had also accompanied them on the bus, with Justine instructing Nat to “go put your feet up” in her room while they got the girls checked in, organized, and hopefully to sleep in preparation for the game tomorrow.

  An offer Nat couldn’t turn down.

  Nat jumped in the shower to wash off the effects of the three-hour drive with the necessary pit stop of a junk food dinner halfway. The thought of texting Isaac to come join her under the hot spray flittered across her mind, leaving a smile on her lips. But sleeping in separate rooms was an unspoken agreement between them, no matter the temptation to act like a rebellious teenage girl and sneak into her boyfriend’s room.

  She dressed in comfortable lounge pants and a snuggly sweater instead of her pajamas. Although it was nearly ten, the odds were one of the girls might need something, so she’d preempt that by checking on them all before she got ready for bed. If the girls ever calmed down enough to get to sleep. Outside her room, which was on the very end of the ground level of the motor lodge, came the sounds of girls calling back and forth to each other. She was twisting her still-damp hair into a knot when someone knocked on her door. Nat chuckled to herself and secured her hair with a band.

  “Coming,” she called, crossing to the door. “But you girls really need to get to bed.”

  She flung open the door. Her blood iced and froze all movement from her closed throat down. Ten minutes in a shower had refreshed Nat’s tired brain a little, but not enough to comprehend why this woman—why Lucy Gilbert—stood outside her room.

  Lucy was dressed in black from head to toe, including a black anorak with a fake-fur-trimmed hood that almost but not quite covered her face. Still, even in a ski mask Nat would’ve recognized the woman’s almond-shaped eyes and Angelina Jolie pout.

  Lucy subtly shifted her chunky handbag hooked over her shoulder from side to front, as if it were leather armor to protect her from Nat’s wrath.

  “Mrs. Fisher?” she said. “I’d like to talk to you for a moment, if that’s okay?”

  Nat could only stare, so many questions clambering around her throat that nothing but a soft “ugh” escaped. But she stepped aside so the woman could enter. She shut the door and wrangled her thoughts into order. Start with the obvious question. The OMG, has she been stalking me? obvious.

  “How did you know I was here?” she asked.

  Apparently not knowing whether to sit on the room’s queen-sized bed or to stand, Lucy stopped in the middle of the room and faced her. “A little bit of snooping with the aid of Google and applied logic.”

  Applied logic? There was nothing logical about Lucy wanting to talk to her after all this time. “Let me expand on that—why are you here? Why now?”

  Lucy’s dark gaze zipped to the uncomfortable-looking armchair next to the bed. “Can we sit down? I think we should both sit down.”

  Without waiting for permission, she crossed to the armchair and lowered herself into it with the expression of a woman expecting her butt to trigger a pressure bomb. She kept her handbag protecting her stomach and crossed her legs.

  The first twinges of shock turning into unease spiked down Nat’s spine. She walked stiffly to the side of the bed nearest Lucy and perched on the edge, lacing her fingers tightly together in her lap. “So, Ms. Gilbert?”

  “I saw the photos of you and Isaac online and it brought everything up again,” Lucy said. “I got married three years ago—I’m Lucy Johnson now.”

  “Congratulations.” Because what was she supposed to say? The media had mentioned Lucy’s fiancé’s name back then—and the man’s last name hadn’t been Johnson.

  “Thanks. We have a little girl.” Lucy looked down at her hands. “We’re very happy and we keep out of the public eye.”

  Ah…now Nat got it. The publicity surrounding her and Isaac had probably brought the media sharks to Lucy’s door. “I’m sorry if the media is harassing you. Obviously, we never intended this to happen and for you to be dragged into it again.”

  The younger woman’s eyebrows flew up. “Oh, nobody from the press or TV has been bothering us. Brian’s a cop and he knows how to make his family hard to find. That’s not why I’m here. I want to tell you about that night in London.”

  “I know what happened that night. Isaac told me.”

  Lucy’s shoulders sagged. “Thank God. After everything you went through, I saw how happy you two looked together. Please believe me, I’m not a bad person and I didn’t want the lies he told to protect me and”—her lips tightened into narrow strips for a moment before she continued in a lower voice—“your husband, to come between you.”

  Nat’s pulse hammered in her ears, the sound so loud, so all-consuming that it felt as if her brain bounced around her skull with every beat. Something on her face must’ve startled Lucy, as the woman leaned forward and laid a warm palm over Nat’s icy fingers.

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry for being such a stupid, starstruck girl back then. I knew Jackson was married and going back to his hotel to hook up wasn’t right, but I wasn’t thinking of the consequences. I wasn’t thinking about his wife and little girl back home.” Tears filled Lucy’s eyes and spilled down her perfectly made-up cheeks. “But now that I’m married and we have Taylor, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d feel if Brian cheated on me—or even nearly cheated on me.”

  Lucy’s teary-eyed gaze lifted. “I couldn’t be as strong as you’ve been to forgive Jackson and trust someone else. But Isaac is a great guy and I’m so glad you understand why he did what he did—”

  Nat wrenched her hands from Lucy’s grasp and lurched to her feet, emotions like punches thrown by a prize fighter slamming into her. She stumbled away from the bed and stood shaking in front of the wall-mounted TV, her reflection a ghoulish shadow in the dark screen.

  Left hook. Jackson was at the center of that terrible night, not Isaac. It was Jackson who’d invited Lucy back to his hotel, not Isaac. And it was Isaac trying to talk his friend out of making a mistake, not the other way around.

  Uppercut. Was this the first time Jackson had picked up a girl in a bar? Was their marriage built on lies and infidelity?

  Gut punch. Did Isaac know about those infidelities and had been covering for Jackson for years?

  Knockout. Isaac had lied. Over and over—to the media, to his friends, and to her face after they’d made love.

  Nat pointed a trembling finger at the door. “Please go.”

  “Natalie—” Lucy stood, clutching her bag under one arm and reached out with the other as if she was about to head in for a one-armed hug.

  No way. Nope. No, no, no to the nth degree.

  “You’ve cleared your conscience and said your piece.” Each word took an enormous strength of will to force out of her mouth. “I accept your apology, if that’s what you need to hear, but please leave now.”

  Before she went all Exorcist and projectile vomited all over the woman’s shoes.

  Lucy left and Nat flung herself into the tiny white-tiled bathroom—only just making it to her knees in front of the toilet bowl before she lost every last bit of her junk food dinner.

  Chapter 17

  Isaac’s hotel bed was about as comfortable as a bed of nails on top of a concrete slab placed in an industrial freezer for the night. His phone buzzed with a text at a little after midnight, according to the neon digits on the nightstand clock that he was pretty sure was burning holes in his retinas. He rolled over, and when he saw the text was from Nat, the bed felt a little softer—or maybe that was him going girlishly gooey at the thought that his woman might be wanting some company after all.

  He tapped h
is message icon and her text popped up.

  Are you awake?

  The gooey feeling spread through his gut and perked up another part of his anatomy. Awake being Natalie code for: I’m cold and alone in my bed. Come join me.

  His fingers flew.

  You know I am. Missing you, thinking about all the things I’d like to do to keep YOU awake.

  The phone chirped as his message flew past the intervening rooms where the girls slept, into Nat’s phone at the end of the motor lodge. A long, drawn-out silence settled over the room as he waited for a reply or a series of emojis to arrive.

  Finally—

  Meet me outside in the parking lot.

  For a good-night kiss? Yeah, the walls in the motor lodge were pretty thin, and if Nat wanted a good-night kiss, it would be the kind of kiss you didn’t want a bunch of teenage girls overhearing.

  He dressed quickly and left his room, spotting a hunched silhouette on the other side of the parking lot next to the motor lodge sign. The night air was crisp and still, stinging his cheeks as he crossed to Nat. The smile on his mouth from thinking about warm kisses and the likelihood of a clear day for the game tomorrow slipped sideways as he caught a glimpse of her pale face under her jacket hood.

  “Nat?”

  She stared at him soundlessly, a flawless mannequin replica of his woman, with the soul sucked out of her eyes and her mouth a bloodless horizontal slash. Even a dumb jock like him could figure out something was wrong. Catastrophe level wrong.

  “Let’s walk,” mannequin Nat said.

  Without waiting for his agreement, she took off along the sidewalk, her booted heels a clicking staccato in the deserted street.

  He caught up with her in a few strides, his knee aching in protest with the cold.

  “What’s going on?” Isaac snipped off the term of endearment he’d been about to add.

  The fact he impulsively curtailed his speech—that he was in deep enough to know calling Nat tahu, the only woman he’d ever assigned that particular endearment to, would upset her more—made his gut twist and his blood pressure soar. Not just what was going on, but what the hell had happened to make her look as if her heart had been torn out and stomped on?

  Nat continued to walk, and Isaac clasped her elbow to slow her down. She started and hurled herself away from him, stumbling a few steps to the side.

  “You don’t want to touch me right now,” she said.

  Her arms crossed tightly across her chest were more effective than armor at keeping him at a distance. Shit, she was already miles away from him even though they stood only two feet apart on the sidewalk. He rubbed his fingers across his forehead, since banging his head against a nearby house’s brick walls probably wouldn’t help deescalate this situation.

  Her gaze slid past him on the darkened street, and he followed it to a fenced-off grassy area, the distinctive inky outline of a children’s swing set swaying in the breeze near the sodium glare of streetlights.

  “Why don’t we sit in the park for a bit?” Isaac kept his voice pitched at the same calming level he’d use with Eddie when his dad’s horse was in a skittish mood.

  Not that he was comparing Nat to a horse—and goddamn, this was so fucked up. What the hell had happened in the few hours since he’d last seen her?

  She gave him a brief nod and headed into the park, finding a spot on the very end of a bench seat positioned near the climbing frame. Subtle. Isaac gave her space and lowered himself onto the opposite end of the seat, leaving a wedge of dead air between them.

  Dead air filled by her husband, his best mate.

  Isaac couldn’t shake off the stupid, eerie image in his brain of Jackson in his old arrogant slouch, legs casually crossed at the ankles, arms stretched either side of the bench’s backrest, his fingers tapping a rhythmic and irritating tempo against the wood. In Isaac’s imagination, Jackson rolled his head toward him with his trademark grin in place, the one that had earned him endless hours of pretty-boy ribbing from his team mates, and said, “Zac, man, you are so busted.”

  “Lucy Gilbert came to see me tonight,” Nat said.

  The name, so unexpected, was a rugby high tackle slamming into his throat and knocking his world sideways.

  Lucy had been here tonight? What the actual fuck?

  He straightened against the hard planks of wood, half turning toward Nat, but she remained staring straight ahead.

  “She wanted to confess what had really happened between you and Jackson and her.”

  Told ya so, dickhead, Jackson whispered in his ear. Bust-ed.

  “Natalie—”

  She swiveled her head toward him, her Medusa gaze turning his tongue to icy stone. “She thought I knew the truth when I said you’d told me everything. She thought I knew that it was Jackson who invited her back to his hotel room. That it was my husband planning to screw a girl he’d picked up from a bar. She even told me how impressed she was that I could forgive Jackson and take up with the man who’d been lying to everyone for the past five years.”

  Isaac’s diaphragm clenched, words sucked out of his mouth by the rack and ruin laid waste in Nat’s eyes. All this time he’d done everything in his power to prevent the truth from finding and shattering her, and yet the truth had found her anyway.

  She blew out a long breath, a stream of misty white in the still night. “If you care anything about me at all, you’ll man up and tell me your side of the story.”

  “Ask me,” he rasped.

  Her eyes squeezed shut and her chin wobbled. When she opened her eyes again, she was back to the mannequin carved from ice.

  “Was Lucy telling the truth?” she asked.

  Isaac studied the drawn lines either side of her downturned mouth, the slump of her shoulders. She already knew the answer.

  “Yeah.”

  “Had Jackson cheated on me before that night?” she asked in the clinical tone of a telemarketer reading off a script.

  It didn’t fool him for an instant. Jackson had broken her heart all over again.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t know? The two of you had been friends for years. Maybe it’s just that you don’t want to break the bro-code.” Bitterness slipped into her voice.

  “There was no bro-code,” Isaac said. “And I wasn’t with him every moment of every tour. It’s possible he might have been with other women, but if he was, he never confided in me.”

  “I’d know if one of my friends was cheating on their man,” she said. “You were his best friend.”

  And wasn’t that rubbing salt into an already festering wound?

  “Guy best friends and girl best friends are completely different. We never talked about our relationships or personal stuff in any more detail than ‘Nat’s got the flu, Livvy’s taken up ballet lessons, and hey, did you catch the game last night?’ Maybe some male friends Dr. Phil with each other about feelings, and probably some assholes boast about how they’re tapping all the women in their neighborhood, but not me and Jackson.”

  She jerked back, her cheeks sucking in as if he’d struck her.

  “I’m sorry,” he added gently. “If I’d known for certain Jackson was unfaithful before London I would’ve beaten him senseless for being such a fucking idiot. There’s no bro-code, because you were my friend, too, and I wouldn’t have seen you hurt for anything.”

  Nat dipped her head in silent acknowledgement.

  “What I don’t understand,” he found himself saying out loud, “is why that night he chose to hit on Lucy right in front of me. Almost as a test to see what I’d do, or a way to strike out at you. He must’ve known the risk of someone taking a photo of him and the girl if he took her back to the hotel.”

  “Maybe it was a little of both,” she said. “And maybe his ego felt a little fragile from a wife he probably thought should be adoring him on the days he was home instead of reminding him the house needed painting and Olivia needed some quality time with her dad.”

  “Th
at’s a bullshit excuse.” But knowing what he did of Jackson’s character, it was harrowingly accurate.

  She shrugged. “We’ll never know.” Then her face crumpled and she covered it with her hands, swearing quietly under her breath.

  He couldn’t help himself, stroking a palm down her curved spine as she hunched into herself. But once again she jerked away, dropping her hands from her face and glaring at him.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t. I can’t even begin to process all the shit swirling around my head about Jackson, because as devastating as that betrayal is, I’m so pissed you lied to me I want to punch you in the nuts.”

  Heat rose like a lava tide up his throat. “I lied to protect you and Olivia.”

  “I’m sure you thought you were doing the right thing so media wouldn’t savage us any more than they did, so I wouldn’t suffer any more than I was knowing the man I’d loved and lost wasn’t who I thought he was. I’m grateful you carried that burden for us in those first few soul-crushing months after he died.” Her mouth pinched shut. “But after that? After Jackson’s death became yesterday’s news and Livvy and I started to get back to some sort of normality, you still allowed us to cut you out of our lives. You still allowed me to blame you, grow bitterness toward you, all for something that wasn’t your fault.”

  “I was better out of your lives and keeping my mouth shut. Telling you what had really happened would’ve only caused you more pain.”

  “I’m in pain now.” She threw up her hands and leaped to her feet. “Pain you caused because, even after we’d had sex, you lied to my face.”

  “It wasn’t the right time.” Isaac stood also, and moved closer to her. This time she didn’t flinch or back away. She stood toe to toe with him, her fists clenched at her sides, bristling with emotion.

  “You’re right,” she said. “The right time was before we slept together. Before I fell in love with a man who doesn’t trust that I’m strong enough to deal with all the shit he’s had to carry alone. If you’re waiting for me to thank you for treating me like a poor, sensitive little buttercup of a woman these past few months, you can go to hell.”