Joe had an idea where Emma was going with this. “I don’t know how it got there,” he told her gruffly, not liking the accusation in her dark green eyes one bit.
Emma arched her elegant brow. “Don’t you.”
He hated the sarcasm in her tone, almost as much as the raging disbelief on her face. “No. I don’t.”
The muscles in her cheeks tautening haughtily, Emma spun away from him. “Don’t play games with me, Joe.”
He caught her by the shoulder before she could go two steps and whirled her right back around. He clenched his jaw. “I’m not playing games with you, Emma.” He stared down at her furiously. “I did not put it there.”
“Then who did?” Emma volleyed right back, looking like she wanted to deck him. “Tiffany Lamour?”
Without warning, Joe flashed back to Tiffany’s request she use their powder room before she left. As he recalled her dashing up the stairs while he went back to the family room to get his cell phone and keys, he felt his gut tighten. Damn it! He had known that witch was up to something. But like a fool he hadn’t pursued the alarm bells going off in his head.
Emma tossed her head indignantly. “This is what she was acting so smug about last night, isn’t it? Why she gave you such an easy interview?”
Joe swore to himself repeatedly, knowing he’d been a fool to withhold anything about Tiffany from Emma in an effort to protect his wife. Because had he told Emma the whole story, they wouldn’t be having this discussion now. “It’s not what you think,” he said quietly. And if Emma would just calm down for a second, he could explain.
Emma regarded him contemptuously. “You’re telling me she wasn’t here, in our bedroom.”
“She was. Obviously. But—”
“Nothing happened?” Emma echoed sarcastically.
Silence fell between them. Joe had only to look in Emma’s eyes to know she didn’t believe he had been true to her. Her lack of faith in him stung.
“She just left her panties here as a souvenir, a promise of things to come, is that right, Joe?” Emma threw up her hands in disgust. She shook her head, moisture glistening in her eyes. “How stupid do you think I am? I know what goes on behind the scenes, how women throw themselves at you and every other pro sports player! I know—” her voice broke slightly, before she got hold of herself “—that there isn’t anything a groupie won’t do for a handsome and sexy and successful guy like you. And yes, I put Tiffany Lamour in that category, too.”
So did Joe. Not that it really made a difference. Tiffany had wanted to get back at him, to really screw up his life for turning down her standing invitation to bed her. Now, finally, with Emma on the scene, and an oh-so-discreet misplacement of Tiffany’s monogrammed leopard-print black-lace thong, Tiffany had. The whole ruse was so pathetic and predictable, it was almost laughable. Except Emma wasn’t laughing, and neither was Joe. Because Tiffany’s mean-spirited shenanigans had pointed out a glaring lack in his relationship with his bride. One Joe would have preferred not to see, or ever know about. “You really think I would sleep with that spoiled little witch?” he asked Emma, eyes stinging. You really think I’m that pathetic, that untrustworthy, that short-sighted and foolish?
Emma pressed her fingers to her temples. “I don’t know.”
Hurt ached through him, more potent than any play-off loss he had ever endured, even the one that had his team falling just short of the Stanley Cup. He glared at Emma, frustrated that he hadn’t let himself see this coming, when he had known all along, that she was more of a good-time gal and a fair-weather friend than a devoted wife who would endure anything to be with him.
Oh, sure, she was happy as could be as long as things were going well. But the first time they faced any kind of hardship or opposition, she was all too ready to head for the exit even as she began to wonder if he was really up to the challenge, after all. And her lack of confidence in him—in the two of them—devastated Joe. “I’ve never given you any reason to distrust me in that regard,” he said coldly. Wasn’t it enough he had the task of proving himself over and over again in his profession? Was he going to have to do it in his personal life with Emma, too?
“You’re right. To my knowledge, up to now, you’ve never cheated on me,” Emma declared flatly, as if that hardly mattered. Just as if everything Joe had done to try to prove himself to her, prove his devotion and his love, barely counted, too.
“But?” Knowing there would be plenty of time to nurse his pain later, he focused on staying angry.
Emma regarded him with more tranquillity than she had any right to possess under the circumstances. “You have put me second to your career in the past,” she reminded him with a weariness that seemed to come straight from her soul. “And my parents made it pretty clear to you that your professional life would suffer if you didn’t somehow protect me from ugly gossip and get Tiffany Lamour to back off. That’s why you married me all over again, why you made us move in together, instead of insisting on a divorce. Because you wanted to protect your position as up-and-coming star player of the Carolina Storm hockey team.”
Like any of that meant anything when compared to his marriage! Or what he thought his marriage had been, Joe amended bitterly to himself.
He glared at her, making no effort to hide his building resentment. “Next thing I know you’ll be accusing me of sleeping with you for that reason, too.” Like he was that lame and selfish and, yes, stupid!
Hurt flashed in her eyes. “Well, it did make me happy,” Emma insisted, her soft lips twisting cynically. “However briefly.”
And didn’t that just say it all, Joe thought.
Damn it. He’d had people doubting him practically all his life. His mother—indeed, his whole family—had never thought he could make it in pro hockey. They’d only been humoring him when they had agreed to let him go off to the junior leagues and try. His coaches had all been skeptical, too. He’d had to work his ass off, day after day, year after year, to prove otherwise. And even then, there had been and were still plenty of doubters. Sports columnists who felt he either wasn’t performing up to par or was playing well past his natural ability, and hence would soon crash and burn, or show his true colors and end up at the bottom of the heap where he should have been all along.
Joe had thought what he and Emma had was different. That she saw him, not as other people figured he was, but as he was. Flesh and blood. Real. All too human, and as capable of making a mistake as the next person. But also as capable of love and tenderness and devotion. He had opened himself up to her, told her stuff he had never told anyone else, given her his whole friggin’ heart, and for what? To find out she was as full of doubts about him and his character! The unexpectedness of her betrayal hit him like a stick to the knees, made him want to double over and howl in pain.
“Which makes it all the worse!” Emma continued, pacing, upset. Her frustration spilled over to poison the room. She turned wounded eyes to him, abruptly becoming as hysterical and overemotional as he had expected her to be all along. “Damn it, Joe, how could you do this to me, to us?” she cried in frustration. “Don’t you understand by giving in to Tiffany Lamour’s sexual demands that you’ve destroyed every ounce of trust between us!”
She shook her head, talking as if he were no longer in the room. “No wonder you were in such a hurry to change the sheets just now!” Obviously berating herself for being such a fool, she clenched her fists at her sides. “No wonder you looked so damn guilty when I walked in unexpectedly this afternoon. Is this what you were doing while I was at the wedding today? Is that why she went so easy on you in the interview last night? Did you make a deal with her before the taping—to sleep with her today?” she demanded ludicrously.
Joe was tired of defending himself. Tired of proclaiming his innocence. As far as he was concerned, Emma either believed him or she didn’t. And she damn well didn’t.
“I’m sorry you feel this way.” He pushed the words between his teeth.
Emma abruptly w
ent very still. Hands balled tightly in front of her, she traded contentious glances with him, then asked, slowly and cautiously, “Meaning?”
What else? Joe thought with a weariness that came straight from his soul. “I’ll have my lawyer call your lawyer.”
Stomach churning, he turned on his heel and headed for the door. He had to get out of here before he said or did anything they would both regret. Because right now, he felt like putting a fist through the wall. And then some.
THE CALL FROM HELEN HART, requesting that Joe stop by the garden center to pick up several bags of fertilizer, topsoil and several flats of vegetable plants came via cell phone message early Sunday afternoon. Her plea wasn’t unusual—Helen used all her sons for heavy lifting, and since Joe had been out of town for numerous years, he knew it was his turn. So Joe borrowed Mac’s pickup truck and did as she bid.
Trying not to think about what a mess his personal life was now in, Joe turned into the private driveway at the north edge of the Wedding Inn property, and drove through the trees that separated the house from the rest of the manicured grounds.
As he expected, his mom was waiting for him.
She came out of the two-story, seven-bedroom transitional home and met him in the driveway where a wheelbarrow stood at the ready. As always on summer days when she wasn’t working, she was dressed in old clothes—jeans, gardening clogs, a wide-brimmed straw hat and an oversize man’s work shirt.
“Thank you for doing this.” She smiled at him gratefully.
“No problem.” Joe unlatched the gate and began unloading. He caught the thinly veiled concern in his mother’s eyes as he handed her the flat of radish plants she had asked for. He swore inwardly. There were no secrets in Holly Springs. “Cal told you, didn’t he?”
“What?” Helen was all innocence as she carried the flat over to the garden bed she had prepared for planting.
Joe tried not to think about how stiff and sore he was from trying to sleep on a too-short sofa. “That I bunked at his place last night.”
Helen inched on her garden gloves. “Your brother didn’t say a word.”
“But you know,” Joe persisted as he set a bag of topsoil down on the grass next to the rabbit fence.
Helen shrugged and picked up her hoe. “I saw your car there last evening and again this morning. And since it was highly unlikely you were paying Cal a social call that lasted all night, when you and your new bride have a home just five minutes away, I had to wonder what was happening with you and Emma.”
Which was why, Joe thought, she had called him over there in the first place. Joe went back to the pickup and tossed a forty-pound bag of fertilizer and another of planting mix onto the wheelbarrow.
“Especially since she apparently slept on the sofa in her office at the Inn last night,” his mother continued as he neared her again, not about to let the subject drop.
Joe’s brow furrowed. He had left the house specifically so Emma would have a place to sleep, until they could figure out how to proceed from here.
Joe dumped the bags onto the ground with the others. “What did she have to say about that?” Joe asked gruffly, aware his own foul mood was worsening with every second that passed.
“I didn’t ask her. I’m asking you.” Helen adjusted the brim of her gardening hat. “So what’s going on with you two?”
Might as well get it over with. “Exactly what everyone expected to happen,” Joe muttered, as if it didn’t matter in the least, in any case. “We split up.”
“Why?”
Why do you think? Joe used the sleeve of his T-shirt to wipe the sweat from his brow. “She doesn’t trust me.”
Helen knelt beside the garden bed, trowel in hand. “In what regard?”
Joe watched his mother tap the bottom of a green plastic cup so the starter plant would slide out. “In the being faithful to her regard,” he said.
Helen paused, whatever she was thinking well hidden. “Did you cheat on her?” she asked cautiously after a moment.
Good to know everyone had a lack of faith in him these days. “No I did not.”
Helen sat back on her heels, the plant and attached dirt still in her hand. “Then why would she think you had?”
Joe clenched his jaw. “A woman I am not interested in left an item of her clothing where Emma was sure to discover it.”
Helen narrowed her eyes. “What kind of item?”
He swore inwardly once again. “A thong, if you must know.” Could this get any more embarrassing?
Apparently not, judging by the way Helen winced.
“Unfortunately, it’s not the first time something like this has happened to me,” Joe continued sagely, ready to lay it all on the line, if only because he really needed someone to talk to, and he hadn’t felt like confiding details like this to Cal. “And because of what I do for a living, it probably won’t be the last. If Emma can’t handle that—well…” Joe shrugged, making a great show of indifference. “That’s her problem.”
“And yours.” Helen scowled disapprovingly.
“Not necessarily.”
Helen put down the plant and stood. When he tried to walk away, she grabbed his arm. “Joe, you can’t end a marriage because of a simple misunderstanding.”
Who says? Joe thought bitterly. “Listen to me, Mom. I can’t be married to a woman who doesn’t believe in me.” Who would think even for one red-hot second that I am capable of something like that.
Helen dropped her hand. “So you’re saying because Emma let you down, it’s over.”
“Right,” Joe said emphatically.
“Wrong.”
Joe stared at his mother. She had scolded him for a lot of things growing up. He had never heard that particular tone in her voice before. The tone that said if he didn’t do the right thing before the end of the day she was taking him to the woodshed. “You married Emma for better or for worse, Joe Hart!”
This was definitely the worse, Joe thought.
“And the two of you need to understand there are going to be times when you fail each other,” his mother continued emotionally, tears of empathy suddenly brimming in her eyes. “It’s moving past those times, finding the strength and will to forgive each other that adds real staying power to your love.”
Joe sighed. If she really loved me…or had faith in us… With effort, he tried to explain how it was to his mom, who in her own way was an absolute romantic because of the abiding love she still had for his dad, even though his dad had been gone for twenty years. “If I thought we had a chance of making our marriage last…” But he didn’t, Joe thought firmly. It was that simple.
“Well,” Helen scoffed, looking extremely irritated with him once again, “it’s a good thing you didn’t apply that kind of attitude to your hockey career, Joseph Hart. Or you would not have ended up where you are today, that’s for certain.”
There she went, with the given-name stuff again. “What’s your point?” Joe demanded harshly.
Helen trod closer. “My point is that you made up your mind hockey was going to be your profession when you were only ten years old. You had plenty of chances to change your mind and quit, but you didn’t, Joe. You stuck with it, despite all the obstacles—and there were plenty of them—in your way. Why?”
Joe shrugged, aware this was the first time he had really felt his mother’s respect. “Because it felt right.”
“You just knew,” Helen paraphrased for him.
“Yes.”
“Like you knew when you were only nineteen that Emma was the only woman for you,” Helen said.
Joe swallowed. Leave it to his mom to put it like that. In a way that couldn’t help but conjure up all the love he was trying so hard to forget, and make him feel broken-hearted and at a loss all over again.
Helen touched his arm, gentle now. “I don’t believe those feelings you had for her then have ever changed.”
They hadn’t, Joe thought. That was the hell of it. They hadn’t. Even now…
&nb
sp; “Your hard work and commitment toward your career really paid off,” Helen continued persuasively, searching his eyes.
It would have taken a moron not to see where this lecture was going. Joe was no moron. “You’re saying I need to devote myself to my marriage, and Emma, in the same way,” Joe said in a rusty-sounding tone, recalling his mother’s earlier advice to him, too.
Loving someone doesn’t magically happen…it’s a decision you make every day.
Helen nodded, then reached over and gave Joe an encouraging hug. “If you love her, Joe, if Emma truly is the woman for you, then you need to forget your pride, forget the angry words and stick with her, too.”
Chapter Fourteen
Emma was making up the final bill for the Snow-Posen wedding-that-wasn’t Monday morning, when a rap sounded on her door. She looked up, hoping against all common sense to see Joe.
Instead, Benjamin Posen was standing there. He was dressed in his usual suit and tie, but the look on his face was unerringly grim, and there were circles under his eyes indicating he hadn’t slept.
“Got a minute?” Benjamin asked.
Still unable to believe the charming man was a mastermind to a robbery ring, Emma put down her pen and nodded slowly. She could tell by the defeated set to his shoulders and the apology in his eyes, he wasn’t here to do any more damage.
“I’m trying to make amends with all the people I’ve hurt,” Benjamin said in a low, discouraged tone.
It wasn’t going to be easy. He had a lot of people to see. But then, Emma thought, maybe that was what Benjamin needed to do to get back his dignity. Having handcuffs slapped on, being taken away in a squad car and thrown in jail had to have been a heck of a wake-up call.
Emma couldn’t overlook the crimes Benjamin had committed, but she could forgive him. “Have you spoken to Michelle?” she asked gently.
Benjamin shifted his weight and ducked his head in shame. “She won’t see me. Neither will her folks. In fact, they took out a restraining order against me.”
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