She lay on her side and curled her knees in, getting comfortable. “I guess a crappy childhood leads you to go one of two ways. You search for something better, or you decide never again.”
Meg wanted better. Scott knew that without asking. For all her talk about standing on her own—and he believed that’s what she wanted—deep down inside, she also desired the happily ever after you only read about in books.
Which begged the question: What was he doing getting so involved with her now? Any way he sliced it, she’d be having a baby and settling into a domesticity he’d never envisioned for himself before or after Leah.
“Go on,” Meg said into his extended silence.
He blinked, her voice bringing him back to the present. He cleared his throat. “You’re right. I had no intention of getting married.”
“So what happened?”
He shrugged. “Hurricane Leah. I met her at a Thunder Christmas party. She was a model and had come with one of the players, but they weren’t getting along and broke up before the night even ended. He left her there; she was stranded . . .”
“And you stepped up. Scott Dare, to the rescue.” She waved her hand through the air.
He heard the bitter irony in her tone, but he couldn’t deny it. Apparently he had a pattern, or at least he’d done the same thing twice. Seen a woman in trouble and stepped in to save her.
Instead of addressing Meg’s comment, he merely went on. “We seemed to want the same thing out of life, which, back then, was a good time. And I liked having someone to come home to. We moved in together pretty quickly. I won’t deny that I knew she liked the status of being with a Dare. She wanted the perks that came along with having my brother as president of the Thunder and my father as the owner of a string of luxury hotels. To be honest, it didn’t bother me at the time.” He glanced at Meg.
“That’s almost as sad as me dating men, hoping they’d change, and keeping them around long past their expiration date so I wouldn’t be alone,” she said.
Wow. That hurt, he thought, letting her words bounce around his brain. But . . . “You have a point there. And if I’d had my brain in the right place, I might have realized it was inevitable that the relationship would go south. Instead, I listened to my—”
Meg laughed before he could finish the sentence. “I get the point.”
“Right. But I really did think I loved her at the time. I knew she wanted to get married, what we had was fine, fun . . . so I agreed. And it remained fun until about a week after the honeymoon when she started pressuring me to leave the force and take a job with Ian or my father.”
Meg’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “First of all, you would never work for your father. I got that about you pretty quickly. And second, sitting behind a desk with nothing to stimulate you would kill you. You need the excitement of some kind of investigative work. Surveillance, digging into facts, reading motives, going after bad guys, and helping people.” She shot him a look filled with pure disappointment. “I can’t believe you married someone who didn’t understand that about you.”
Scott shook his head, a mixture of emotions filling him as he listened to Meg’s succinct summary. In a couple of weeks, she knew him better than Leah, who he’d been with for a year before they’d married. Meg not only understood who he was, but she innately knew what he needed. And holy shit, that blew him away.
“Okay, well, yes, you’re right. I like to chalk it all up to me being young, horny, and stupid.”
“Your words, not mine.” She grinned, and the smile reached inside her, lighting up her eyes with a sparkling twinkle. “I think there’s more though?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, there’s more. Leah and I had agreed neither one of us wanted children.”
Meg’s expression dimmed at that, and Scott felt the loss of that megawatt smile.
Might as well get it over with, he thought. “But then Leah got pregnant, and it was a shock because we’d both been careful.”
“The unexpected does happen,” Meg said dryly.
The sun began to set behind her, the fading rays hitting her hair, burnished-auburn and red highlights capturing his attention.
He wished he were free to wrap himself up in her, but this story was having an impact on them both, and he felt her curling into herself. He hated it, but he had to finish and then deal with the fallout.
“It started as shock, but like you, I wrapped my head around the reality pretty quickly, and I started thinking about a life beyond just myself and Leah. And I could see it. The family I never thought I wanted, kids I didn’t think I’d have . . . I got excited. And invested.”
“You bought this house.” Meg’s gaze fell on the structure behind him.
He nodded. “But Leah wasn’t as fired up as I was. In fact, she was depressed. I wanted to show her how good things could be. So yeah, I bought it as a surprise and started the renovations immediately. Eventually, I brought her out here. I figured if she could look at things through my eyes, she’d see what I saw and want the same thing.”
“Except she didn’t?” Meg asked.
Scott shook his head, and Meg wondered what in the world was wrong with the woman Scott had married. Meg’s baby’s father had thrown her against the nearest wall when he’d found out she was pregnant. Scott had bought a fricking McMansion. And his ex-wife still hadn’t been happy.
“What happened?” Meg asked, needing to hear the rest.
“She looked around, asked me why in the hell I’d think she wanted to live anywhere
