“I don’t know. Yet. But I’ll find out, and if I’m right, we might just want to talk to Ms. Travers again.”
CHAPTER 18
He remembered.
Just like that.
James stepped into the shower on Monday morning, turned on the spray, careful to keep the bandage covering half his head dry, and in that clarifying split second, his memory rushed back—all kinds of images. As he stood under the streaming water in his hotel bathroom, he saw Megan as she had been then. That night. So furious she could barely speak. Tears glistening in her blue eyes, her lips, shiny with lip gloss, pulled back over her teeth.
“You shit!” she’d yelled, shaking and sputtering. “You fucking, two-timing shit!”
He’d just finished a dinner of chili and cornbread—takeout from this very hotel—and had intended to settle down to a night of basketball on TV when she’d burst through the front door.
She held a note in her balled fist, and she tossed it at him. “I was going to leave this,” she shrieked. “I—I didn’t think you’d be home. I thought you’d be with her. Just like you’ve been for the last week and a half. Right?”
Oh . . . damn . . .
When he didn’t say anything, she’d glared at him. “Oh, what? No denials? Come on, James, give it a try,” she baited, eyes flashing. “You’re not going to try and lie to me and tell me you’re not cheating on me with that . . . that . . .”
“With Sophia,” he said.
“You admit it!” Before he could answer, she cried, “Oh, I get it! She’s here now, isn’t she? That damned slut is upstairs in your bed!”
“No.” He shook his head. “No one’s here.”
“But she was. I saw her car . . .”
“Here?” He was trying to keep up with her rant.
“At the inn!” She glared at him as if he were dense.
“She works at the inn.”
“But she could walk over here. Leave it there so no one would know and come here and . . . and . . .” Her voice broke, her anger abating at least for the moment. “You made me look like a fool,” she said, suddenly sobbing. “Rebecca warned me, but I thought she was just jealous. God, James, couldn’t you have at least had the decency to . . . to . . .”
He awkwardly stepped toward her. Reached out. “I was going to tell you.”
“When?” she spat, dashing her tears away with the back of her hand.
“I thought . . . after the holidays.”
“Oh, yeah, right. Carry on behind my back, so what? I can have a Merry Christmas? So we can ring in the New Year together, and then you were going to lower the boom and come clean? Oh, save me!” She violently shook her head. “You’re so clueless. What does Christmas have to do with us? With this?” She threw her hands up. “I loved you, James. I thought you loved me too!”
He didn’t take the bait, wasn’t about to step into that trap.
She was full-on crying now, sniffing and fighting sobs. “I thought we were going to get married.”
“What?” he asked, so loudly that Ralph, curled in his bed near the fire, gave off a startled “woof.”
“I thought you would propose to me at Christmas.”
“But, Megan, why would you think that? We . . . we’ve only been dating for . . . for . . .”
“God, you don’t even know, do you? It’s been nearly six months, James. June. Remember? I do. It was summer in Seattle. You were there for some builders’ convention.”
And to see Rebecca.
“In your display of the tiny house? Remember?”
He did. All too vividly, despite the fact that he’d drunk far more than usual at the convention. He recalled how she’d come on to him. How she’d told him that Rebecca had been cheating, showing him pictures of Rebecca out to dinner with another man. When she’d wrapped her arms around him and kissed him, sliding her tongue into his mouth, he should have pushed her away, but he hadn’t.
“Don’t you get it? I love you. God, how can you be so dumb! And then you go behind my back? With her? Why? Jesus, James, why?”
He wanted to say that it had just happened, that he hadn’t intended to get involved with someone else before ending it with her, but it sounded so lame, so cliched, that once again, he kept quiet.
“I thought when you left Rebecca for me, that it was because we had something special, something unique, something like no one else!” She stopped then, her eyes glistening, her misery palpable. “I was wrong. Just another fool. Another girl to fuck and leave.”
“No, God, no.” But there it was. “I didn’t mean . . . Look, Megan, I’m sorry,” he said, and that was the truth. He felt like the shit he was. He’d never intended to hurt her, but, of course, he had. “I should have told you.”
“You should never have cheated on me in the first place!” she said, and her pain morphed once more into a fierce, bright anger.
“You’re right, I should have broken it off before—”
“No! Don’t you get it?” she asked, advancing on him. “You should have just been faithful. Is that so damned hard?”
Yeah. It was. But he couldn’t say that. He couldn’t say anything. He’d already tried to apologize, and she was having none of it.
“You’re the worst,” she charged, standing in front of him, breathing hard, her face flushed, her gaze scathing. “You know that, don’t you?”
He kept his silence.
“A rich boy who grew up coddled, always knowing he was going to inherit a fortune, so you just think you can do whatever you want, don’t you? That you can hurt whoever gets in your way.”
“Not true,” he ground out. Yeah, he’d grown up knowing he’d inherit, and he’d borrowed against his trust, but he’d worked every day of his life, making it on his own, trying not to become a typical trust-fund
