Love to Hate You: a Hope Valley novel

by Prince, Jessica

  I heard a snort and looked over just in time to see Leo and the other officer duck their heads, but not before I saw the grin on each of their faces.

  Alex’s eyes got huge as all the color leached from his face. “I didn’t—that wasn’t—”

  “You’d already been fucking her for three months by the time we took that trip, dumbass. I guess you forgot that when you were texting me that little trip down memory lane.”

  “Damn,” the officer muttered, shaking his head in disapproval. “That’s a whole new level of stupid.”

  “No one asked you!” Alex rasped quickly before jerking back around to me.

  “You need to take your fiancée and leave,” I said firmly. “Get out of my shop and my town.”

  “Hayden, please. You have to listen to me—”

  “No I don’t. You made your choice. The wife and the child you already had weren’t good enough, so you went out and got replacements. That’s on you.”

  “She was never pregnant!” he shouted.

  The weight of those words slammed into me so hard I stumbled back a step. If it hadn’t been for Micah taking my arms and pressing his chest against my back, I probably would have gone down.

  Everything shifted in that moment. The air, the ground beneath my feet, that goddamn organ inside my chest.

  “What?” I whispered, finding it hard to breathe all of a sudden.

  “She was never pregnant,” he repeated, his voice tortured. “I didn’t know. I thought—I . . . I only just found out there was no baby.”

  Krista at least had the good grace to look contrite as I slowly turned my attention to her. “You’re unbelievable,” I started quietly. Then my voice boomed. “God! You fucking bitch! You knew!”

  “Hayden, baby—” Micah started, but all I could see was red.

  “How many times did we cry together? How many times, Krista?” I shook my head in disgust. “I called you in tears after every miscarriage, after every failed fertility treatment!”

  “Oh shit,” I heard grunted, but was too lost in what I’d just discovered to pay attention to anyone else in that room.

  “You poured me wine and held me while I broke down. You were the only person I had to talk to. You knew how it broke me every single time I lost a child before finally having Ivy. I lived through that pain for years. And you used a fake pregnancy to steal my husband? How fucking low can you get?”

  “That’s absolutely disgusting,” Dani spat, staring daggers at Krista.

  Her chest heaved as her gaze darted around at everyone in the shop, taking in each of their disgusted expressions before snapping, “You had everything! You had the perfect house and the perfect husband and the perfect life! You had it all, and you didn’t even care! I didn’t have anything. I was all alone!”

  Micah’s voice rumbled from behind me. “Because you’re a miserable cunt.”

  My head whipped around, and I looked up at him in shock as Krista snarled, “You can’t talk to me that way.”

  “I can talk to you whatever fuckin’ way I want. Had you pegged the moment I saw you. You’re a nasty bitch who wants what everyone around you has, but you’re too damn lazy to work for it. You think, ’cause you got a decent face and probably starve yourself to stay thin, that shit’s just supposed to fall in your lap. Then, when it doesn’t, you blame everyone else. You were alone before because any man with half a brain in his head can see your bullshit from a mile away.”

  He tilted his chin in Alex’s direction, adding, “You wised up for a second, got your hooks in a fuckin’ idiot who was stupid enough to think shiny and new was better than what he was lucky enough to already have. But you couldn’t keep the act up forever, and the minute he caught a glimpse of the soul-sucking leech you really are, he bolted.”

  Like the Krista I remembered was prone to do when something wasn’t going her way, she covered her face with her hands and burst into tears—or at least pretended to—waiting for someone in the shop to come running to her rescue.

  Turning my head, I pressed my face into Micah’s side to stifle my giggle, but it was no use. The giggle turned into a snort, which turned into full blown laughter that lasted a solid minute.

  When I finally got a hold of myself and tilted my head back to look up at him, he was already grinning down at me.

  “You good, Red?”

  I returned his smile, feeling his warm green eyes like a physical caress. “Yeah, sorry, honey. This whole thing is just so ridiculous.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me,” Alex barked, ruining the moment. “Hayden, you and I really need to talk. If we could just go somewhere—”

  Turning to look at him, I pinned him in place with a flat expression. “No. We aren’t going anywhere to talk, because there’s nothing to talk about. I’m not in love with you anymore, Alex. Stop calling. Stop texting. I honestly don’t give a single shit what happens between you and Krista, but whatever the outcome, it won’t change things between us. We’re done.”

  He threw a hand Micah’s way. “This is because of him—”

  “You’re absolutely right. It is because of him. It’s because he lets me be me. He’s never once tried to change who I am. It’s also because I like who I am when I’m with him. He’s never made me feel like I’m less than anything if I don’t do something he wants. And it’s because he’s constantly showing me in little ways that he knows he’s lucky to have me, and he doesn’t take that for granted. Even at our best, I never got any of that from you.”

  He looked completely ravaged by the time I finished talking, but I didn’t have it in me to care.

  “For Ivy’s sake, I’d like it if you and I could get along, but that’s not my call to make. If you can’t give me that, I’ll be disappointed, but make no mistake, it won’t change how I feel. You’re just the man I share a daughter with, Alex. That’s all.”

  “You—” He cleared his throat when his voice broke and started again on a pained whisper. “You’re the love of my life.”

  I shook my head, looking at my ex-husband with pity. “For your sake, I hope to God that’s not true. Because if that’s how you treat the love of your life, you’re going to be leading a very lonely existence.”

  Sensing I was done in more ways than one, Micah spoke next. “The two of you have three seconds to get in your cars and get out of my town, or I’ll arrest you both for trespassing and harrassement.”

  Krista proved to be dumber than she looked by attempting to argue. “You can’t do that! We aren’t—”

  The look he gave her could have turned lava to ice. “One,” he growled.

  She caught on after that and scurried out of Divine Flora.

  Alex was slower to go, stopping beside me and staring in my eyes for a few seconds. Apparently, whatever he saw in them backed up everything I’d just said, because his shoulders sunk in defeat, and he left without another word.

  With that over, I looked at the uniformed officer and said, “I’m Hayden, by the way. I know we only just met, but I swear, there’s usually not this much drama swirling around me.”

  His lips trembled. “Fred Duncan. Nice to meet you.”

  “Seeing as you work with Micah, I wish we’d met under better circumstance, but I’ll try to make up for it the second time.”

  His smile was genuine as he said, “I’ll look forward to it.” Then, with a tilt of his chin at Leo and Micah, he headed for the door.

  “Whoowee!” Sylvia called out, standing tall and slapping the countertop. “Talk about drama. I don’t know about you guys, but I could use a drink after that. I’ll go grab the bottle of gin I keep stashed in the back office.”

  Just like that, my aunt managed to break through the tension and make everyone smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Micah

  My cell vibrated on the bedside table, yanking me out of a fitful sleep. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep more than a handful of times in the past month, even with Hayden curled up beside me most nigh
ts.

  After the showdown at her flower shop, things with our relationship seemed to move at lightning speed. But it hadn’t seemed rushed. It felt natural to sit Ivy down and tell her that her mommy and her Mike were in a relationship, even if she didn’t fully comprehend the meaning of that.

  It felt natural to start spending most of my nights in Hayden’s bed. And in the past month, I’d discovered that slow, quiet sex was just as phenomenal as when we fucked hard and rough. Hell, even the few quickies we had to squeeze in every now and then were out of this world.

  None of that freaked me out. In fact, with shit hitting nuclear with the Callo investigation, the only time I’d really been able to breathe over the past few weeks was when I was with Hayden and Ivy.

  Knowing who was at fault and not being able to do a goddamn thing about it was slowly starting to drive me out of my mind.

  Ballistics on the bullet that killed Evan Webb had come back as a match to the bullets recovered from Darrin Callo’s murder, but without the murder weapon, there was no way to link it back to Cormack.

  However, the worst thing about this whole nightmare happened just two days ago when Sidney Callo had come into the department asking questions about her husband’s murder. She still looked like a shell of her former self months later, and the fact we had nothing to give her to put her mind at ease burned a hole in my chest.

  Pulling my arms from around Hayden’s soft, warm body, I sat up and threw my legs over the side of the bed as I grabbed my phone and read the text that had just come in. Alpha Omega. 20 mins.

  Goddamn it.

  Moving across the room, I grabbed the clothes I’d discarded earlier and started pulling them back on.

  I was lacing my left boot when the bedside lamp flipped on, casting a golden glow through the room.

  I twisted my head as Hayden pushed up onto one hand, using the other to push her wild mass of wavy hair out of her sleepy face.

  “Micah?” she mumbled, her voice thick with sleep. “What’re you doin’?”

  “Nothin’, baby,” I replied quietly. “Go back to sleep.”

  She became more alert as she took me in. “Are you leaving?”

  I moved back to the bed and bent over her, tucking her hair behind her ear. “It’s a work thing. I’ll be back as soon as I can, yeah?”

  Worry creased her pretty face. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yeah, Red. It’s all good. Promise. Just go back to sleep.” I leaned in and pressed my lips against hers. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

  With that, I stood and headed out.

  I circled a three block radius around Alpha Omega, keeping an eye out for any other cars driving through town at two in the morning. When I felt the coast was clear, I parked my truck in an alley a block away and stuck to the shadows as I jogged the rest of the way to Lincoln’s offices.

  The back door was unlocked by the time I got there, so I pushed through and immediately started for the conference room. Linc was already there, along with Leo, Dalton, and the rest of the team assigned to this case. But the person I was most surprised to see was Charlie. She sat near the head of the table, her arms crossed defiantly over her chest as she scowled at the room at large. The ponytail on top of her head was askew, flopping off toward one side, and she had pillow creases on her right cheek. It was obvious from her rumpled appearance, she’d been sleeping before this meeting was called.

  “What are you doin’ here?” I asked as I took a seat next to Leo.

  She cut me a scathing glare. “Ask your guard dog. I was dead asleep—having the best dream in which I was smothering him to death with a pillow—when he dragged me out of bed, tossed me in his truck, and drove me here.”

  I turned to Dalton and cocked a brow in question. He shrugged like it was nothing. “My job’s to stay on her and keep her safe. Can’t do either of those things if I’m here and she’s at home in bed.”

  That sounded reasonable enough to me, so I shifted my attention to Linc. “Why’re we here?”

  “I have some good news and some bad news. Got word less than an hour ago. You’ll be gettin’ a call later this mornin’ that the gun you’ve been lookin’ for in the Callo and Webb shootings has been recovered.”

  That didn’t put me at ease in the slightest.

  “And the bad news?” Leo pressed.

  “The gun was found in the home of one Sergeant Wayne Gilmore of the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Department.” The second name Charlie had given us weeks back. “His body was found hanging from a rafter in the garage, and there was a note on the kitchen table in which he confessed to the killings. They also uncovered close to a quarter million in cash, as well as enough meth and heroine to supply a third of the goddamn town.”

  “Goddamn it,” I boomed, driving the side of my fist into the table top.

  Charlie looked around the table, her eyes wide, the normal hardness replaced by panic. “So what does this mean?”

  Leo answered, ranking his hands through his hair agitatedly. “It means, unless the medical examiner rules it otherwise, we’re gonna be expected to close the case.”

  “But you can’t!” she cried. “It wasn’t him. Gilmore was an asshole and a dirty cop, but he was just a soldier. For this to end, you have to cut the head off the snake.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I grunted. “A case like this, everything bundled together with a tidy bow like that . . .” I shook my head in defeat. “Our captain’s gonna push for this to be the end of it.”

  “But you can at least wait for the medical examiner’s report, right? I mean, you can’t close a case until the cause of death is listed,” she stated with no small amount of hope in her voice.

  I focused my attention on her, gentling my tone and expression as I said, “That’s not gonna take long, sweetheart.”

  “Well then make it take long!” she cried, slapping her hands down on the table and whipping her head around to Lincoln. “Put one of your guys on him,” she insisted frantically. “That scary-looking computer dude. Have him press the guy to drag his feet a little longer.”

  Silence enveloped the room for several seconds before Lincoln’s guy Trent broke it. “Actually, that’s not the worst idea. If anyone can coerce that guy into waiting, it’s Xander. He’d scare the piss outta just about anybody.”

  Lincoln spoke in response. “I’ll have a word with him.”

  We called an end to the meeting shortly after, and I rose to my feet slower than the rest of the guys, my gaze pinned on Charlie. I caught her by the arm before she could clear the door, turning her around so I could see her face, most specifically, her worry-filled eyes. “You good?”

  “No,” she croaked, giving her head a shake. “This has to end, Micah. I need this to end.”

  I pulled her into a hug, feeling her body tremble against mine. This was taking its toll on everyone here, but I was starting to think this girl, a girl who’d already dealt with more shit than any one person should, was reaching her breaking point. “I know, darlin’.” I gave her a squeeze, hoping like hell it offered at least a small bit of comfort. “We’re gonna get this guy. We’ll get him and shut this shit down once and for all, and you’ll never have to worry about it again. You have my word.”

  Dalton came up to us, and I shifted Charlie in my arms, twisting her around so he could take over comforting her. I knew, as soon as she burrowed in instead of pulling away, that she was at the end of her rope.

  We needed to end this. Because Sidney Callo deserved justice for her husband. And because Charlie Belmont deserved to finally have a good life.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Hayden

  I felt like I’d spent the week walking on eggshells. I knew with the kind of job Micah had, his hours could be erratic, and some cases might weigh heavily on his mind, but as the month ticked by, it felt like he was living in a constant state of stress.

  The first red flag had gone up when his phone started going off constantly. If he was with me when it
did, he’d either ignore it or take it into another room, always saying it was a work thing. The second happened when I began to ask him what was going on. All he’d tell me was that it had to do with a case, but that he couldn’t tell me any more about it.

  My mind had gone back to when he and Dani had both warned me to stay away from Greg Cormack. Micah had gone so far as to tell me the man was dangerous, but no matter how many times I’d asked him to explain, his response was always the same. “I can’t tell you right now, Red. But I swear I will as soon as I can.”

  As much as it pained me, I pushed that all to the back of my mind, telling myself it was just residual uncertainty left over from my relationship with Alex, and that I was putting past experiences on Micah when he didn’t deserve it. After all, when we were together, he was still as affectionate and demonstrative as always. There hadn’t been a day that passed where we hadn’t had sex at least once. It was as if he couldn’t get enough of me. And at night, he’d hold me so close it felt like he was trying to become a part of me.

  The biggest, most glaringly obvious flag came two nights ago, after he’d left in the middle of the night, claiming another work thing. I’d tried waiting up for him, determined to get answers no matter what, but the more time that passed, the harder it was to keep my eyes open, and eventually I fell into a fitful sleep.

  I’d woken when he climbed back into bed over an hour later. When he’d rolled me into him and held me close, I caught a faint smell of perfume on his skin—the sweet, scent I’d never worn before, like chocolate and caramel and vanilla. I leaned toward subtle floral body washes and lotions, and what I was smelling on his skin was more gourmand. Definitely not my style.