shadows.”
“I cared about what happened to you.”
“Is that what you call it? I would say you were nothing more than a coward trying to quiet a ghost. But I know my brother. I know Hunter would never stop haunting you. He expected more, Jack. And so did I.”
Ten
Meri lay on her bed facedown, fighting tears. Betina sat next to her, lightly rubbing her back.
“I can’t believe it,” Meri said into her pillow. “I can’t believe he did that.”
Betina patted her shoulder. “I can’t believe I have to ask, but who are we talking about? Andrew or Jack?”
“Both of them,” Meri muttered, then rolled onto her back and wiped away her tears. “That’s my current life. I have two men betraying me.”
She could say the words, but she didn’t believe them. She couldn’t believe any of this. How had everything gone so wrong?
Betina sighed. “I’m shocked by what Jack found out about Andrew. Do you believe him?”
Meri nodded. “He wouldn’t lie about that. He said Andrew and his wife had a whole scam going. I’m not sure what his plan was with me. He couldn’t have married me, and I wouldn’t have given him money for anything.”
Although, now that she thought about it, he had mentioned a few investment opportunities right before she’d left.
Her stomach hurt from all the emotional churning.
“I thought about marrying him,” she admitted. “When I found the ring, I knew he was going to propose and I thought about saying yes.”
“You didn’t.”
“He didn’t ask. I don’t know what would have happened. Maybe he was planning to propose, then tell me I had to pay off his wife so he could get a divorce.” She shuddered. “It’s awful. I slept with him. I slept with a married man. I would never do that.”
“You didn’t know. He tricked you. You’re the innocent party in all this.”
Meri didn’t feel very innocent. She felt dirty and gross and confused.
“I liked him,” she said. “I don’t know if I ever really loved Andrew, but I liked him. Shouldn’t I have known? Shouldn’t I have sensed something wasn’t right?”
Betina shook her head. “Why? He set out to deceive you. You’re a decent person who accepts people for who and what they are. You did a regular background check on him and it came back clean.”
“I’m never using that investigation agency again,” Meri said. “I wonder if Andrew found out the name of the guy and bought him off.”
“Very possibly.”
“I hate Andrew.”
“No, you don’t.”
Meri wiped away more tears. “I don’t. I can’t care enough about him to hate him. I feel disgusted and I’m sick that I let myself get played. That’s what hurts about him. That he used me and I was too stupid to recognize what was going on. I hate being stupid.”
“No one is smart all the time. Meri, it’s awful. It sucks big-time. But here’s the thing-you escaped Andrew relatively unscathed. Nothing bad happened. The only thing hurt is your pride, and not even very much at that.”
Meri knew her friend was right. Still, memories of all the time she spent with Andrew flashed through her head.
“I introduced him to my friends. You guys never liked him. I should have paid attention to that.”
“We have amazing insight. What can I say?”
Meri started to laugh, but the sound turned into a sob. She rolled onto her side.
“Jack was spying on me. He watched me from a distance. He never cared enough to even take me to lunch, damn him. How could he do that? It’s gross and creepy.”
It was more than that. It was painful to think that Jack would keep his word to Hunter enough to pay others to keep tabs on her but that he didn’t care enough to do it himself.
“He was wrong to act like that,” Betina said soothingly.
Meri raised his head. “You’re going to defend him, aren’t you? You’re going to say he did the best he could with what he had. You’re going to say he was hurting, too, that he blamed himself for Hunter’s death. He does, you know. Blame himself. Hunter had melanoma. He saw this weird black thing on his shoulder and wanted to go to the doctor. Jack teased him about being a girl and worrying about nothing.”
“That can’t be easy to live with.”
Meri sniffed. “Statistically, getting the diagnosis a few weeks earlier wouldn’t have made any difference in the end. Hunter was going to die. Not that Jack would care about that. He would still blame himself, because that’s who he is.”
“I don’t have to defend him,” Betina told her. “You’re doing it for me.”
“I’m not. He’s a low-life who cared only about himself. I was totally alone. My mother was dead, my father is possibly the most emotionally useless man on the planet. I was seventeen. I had no one. No friends, no family to speak of. I was alone in the world and he abandoned me.”
“He should have stayed,” Betina said. “He should have stayed and taken care of you. I wonder why he didn’t.”
“Guilt,” Meri said with a sigh. “Guilt about Hunter and maybe guilt about me. About how he handled things.” Betina knew all about Meri’s pathetic attempt to seduce Jack years ago and how badly he’d reacted.
“He was twenty-one and nowhere near grown-up enough to be responsible for a seventeen-year-old with a crush on him. So he left and I had to deal on my own.”
“You did a hell of a job,” her friend told her. “Hunter would be proud.”
Meri considered that. “He wouldn’t like my plan to get revenge on Jack.”
“Brothers rarely enjoy thinking about their sisters having sex with anyone.”
That made Meri almost smile. “You don’t approve of it either.”
“I don’t approve one way or the other. I’m worried about you. I think you wanted to sleep with Jack for a lot of reasons, and none of them have anything to do with punishing him.”
“You think I’m still in love with him.”
“It would explain a lot.”
Meri rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. In love with Jack. Was it possible? The way her personal life was going, it made sense. He’d spent the last ten years doing the least he could justify when it came to her, and she might have spent the same amount of time desperate to give her heart to him.
Jack was staring at his computer screen when Colin walked into his office.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“You hurt Meri,” Colin said. “That’s not right. You can’t be so insensitive that you wouldn’t know how much the information about Andrew would bother her. Not to mention the fact that someone she respected and thought of as a friend had been spying on her.”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” Jack told him.
Colin moved closer to the desk. “That’s not good enough.”
Was Colin trying to intimidate him? Jack didn’t think it was possible, but Colin was a changed man since his night with Betina.
“She had to learn the truth about Andrew. She said things were getting serious. Andrew could have taken her for a lot of money.”
“It’s not about the money,” Colin told him. “It’s about trust and caring and being there for someone. She expected more of you, and you let her down.”
Small words. Unimportant words, yet they made their point, Jack thought grimly.
“I was trying to protect her,” he said, knowing it wasn’t enough of an answer.
