“I sent you a text, saying I’d pick you up,” she said, “but I know that you wanted a rental vehicle.”
“I hate not having wheels,” he admitted.
“And I didn’t want you to pay for wheels if you weren’t hanging around for long,” she said stepping back, but her gaze searched his.
He reached out gently, stroked her cheek. “Damn, it’s good to see you, Lazy.”
“And don’t call me by that nickname,” she said, holding up a hand.
“Lazy?” he asked with a lopsided grin. “Man, we made your life hell over that nickname, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” she said, chuckling. “So what’s it to be? Do you want to come home with me or do you want to stop and pick up a rental?”
He frowned at that.
“You can get a rental in town, if you find you need it,” she said. “I can always drive you there later.”
“I have to cancel the one I have on order.”
“Do it now then,” she said. “No point spending any money if you don’t have to.”
He knew where she was coming from because they spent a lot of time growing up without any money. Plus, she knew what he’d been through this last year—or at least a little bit of it. In response, he pulled out his phone, brought up the app he had used, and quickly cancelled the rental car. He wasn’t sure if there’d be a penalty for that, but, at this point in time, he didn’t really care.
She laughed, hooked her arm through his, and said, “Come on. Let’s go.”
“You’re looking good,” he said, eyeing the leggy blonde beside him, like he hadn’t really done before. “But then you always look good.”
“Ha,” she said, tossing him that big grin that he remembered so well. “If I looked that good, you’d have come back and visited me more.”
He snorted. “I had a lot of reasons for not coming back.”
She nodded slowly. “Sorry about that.”
“And yet you wanted me to come for the wedding. Why is that again?” he asked, hating what lay ahead.
“Because it’s holding you back,” she said immediately.
“Like hell,” he snapped.
“Yep. The minute you find something that you don’t want to do,” she said, “you know you have to face it.”
“No, I really don’t.”
“You do. You love your brother.”
“Which is why I told him to run when he hooked up with her.”
She stared at him in shock. “Did you really?”
“Of course I did,” he said. “As you said, I love my brother. That woman’s a viper.”
“I have to admit she does seem a little different now from when she was married to you. Not that I knew her enough to really tell. Once you married her, I didn’t want to be around you two.”
That twisted in his gut too. “So maybe I was the wrong man for her,” he said shortly. “But that doesn’t mean the treatment I got from her was deserved either.”
“Nope, it wasn’t,” Laysha said. “But it is what it is.”
“Yep, I’m with you there.”
“Besides,” she said, tossing him a sidelong look as they dashed across the road, heading for a parking lot farther out, “it’s been four years since the divorce. Surely you’re over her by now?”
“I am,” he said. “I mean, I’ve been divorced longer than I was married.”
“Yeah, a time measurement that makes it easier, doesn’t it?”
“What about you? You were married for a couple years in there too?”
“Yep, I sure was,” she said, as she scrunched up her face. “And I’m glad that’s over too.”
“So what the hell is wrong with us that we get married, think it’s the best thing ever, and then, a few years later, we can’t wait to get out of it?”
“Because it wasn’t right to begin with.”
“I’m not sure I’ll ever believe in that whole getting-married-again scenario,” he said. “I really didn’t think marrying Sarah would be a bad deal.”
“And I didn’t think marrying Paul would be a bad deal,” she said, “but I’m not sure either of us married for the right reasons.”
“Well, I married fast because I was going back out on missions,” he said, “so I’ll give you that.”
“Exactly,” she said, “so you didn’t give the relationship a long enough time to figure out if that’s who she really was.”
“Maybe, but I also thought she was pregnant with my baby.”
“Yeah, I heard about that,” she said with a nod. She pointed across the parking lot. “I’m over there at the far end.” They turned in that direction. “Apparently she lost it soon after you got married?”
“I wasn’t in town,” he said, “but yes.”
“And then you found out it wasn’t even yours?”
“True. And, of course, after that, there’s … well it’s pretty hard to get the relationship back on track.”
“Did you ever think that maybe she was terrified and was just looking for somebody to help out?”
“Then she should have said that,” he snapped.
She nodded. “I definitely agree with that.”
“Besides,” he said, “I tried hard, but, to know that she already tried to pass off my … somebody else’s baby as mine, well …”
“But you didn’t know that right away, did you?”
“No. Not right away. Not until we had a couple fights, and she threw it in my face.”
“Did she ever tell you whose baby it was?”
“No,” he said. “I asked her, but she never did tell me.”
“But you didn’t know originally it wasn’t yours?”
“Nope, I didn’t,” he said. “I’m just a fool. I wanted to believe …”
“That just makes you a good man,” she said, patting his arm.
“I don’t know,” he said. “After I found out what she’d done, I wasn’t a very good guy about it at all.”
“But that’s a human response to betrayal though, right?”
“I know,” he said, “and it wasn’t very much fun to live through.”
“Still, it’s past time now to deal with it.”
“Yeah.” He stopped. They had reached her truck. He looked at her and said, “Did you ever hear anything about it?”
“Not a whole lot, mostly the little
