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I don’t want to ruin this perfect evening by bringing up one of his ex-lovers. “I said it’s nothing, Keats.”
He stalks toward me.
Even with a bare chest and boxers on, he’s commanding. I can tell that he’s not going to drop this, and I won’t lie to him.
“Is your roommate all right?”
“It’s nothing like that.” I shake my head.
“What’s it like?” he asks, ignoring the ring of the microwave signaling the food is warmed.
I struggle with how to tell him or whether I should. I could delete all of the messages and forget this ever happened.
But I don’t.
“I got a message,” I admit. “It was from one of the women who reached out to me after I found Dudley.”
He leans his forearms on the island. “One of the women?”
The question is waiting to be answered, so I do it. “One of twenty-three women.”
His gaze drops to the granite countertop. “Shit.”
I look past his shoulder to the microwave. “Let’s eat dinner.”
His head shoots up. “No. We’re going to talk about this.”
I nod, unsure if I’m supposed to start this conversation or not. My knowledge of his past lovers is limited to their names and the brief details provided on their Facebook profiles.
I only looked up a handful, and that was enough.
Pretty, successful, fun women responded to my posting.
Those same women have slept with the man I just got out of bed with.
“Do you want to see who responded?” I offer my phone to him.
Shaking his head, he raises his hand. “No.”
I’m surprised by that. “Why not?”
“Those women helped me when I needed it,” he says, keeping his gaze locked on mine. “None of them are a part of my life now. I was fucked after my fiancée cheated on me, so I screwed whoever wanted to screw me.”
I’m stunned. I stare at him.
“I came home from a trip early and walked into the bedroom to find her riding the cock of one of my clients.” He grimaces. “Talk about a fucked up mess.”
“I’m sorry,” I mutter.
“I’m not.”
I look for more from him. We’re so deep into this now that I want to know everything.
“Amber was wrong for me, Maren.” He rakes a hand through his already messy hair. “I didn’t realize how wrong until I met you.”
“Until you met me?”
He rounds the island to stand in front of me. “After Layna died, I asked Amber to marry me because I felt lost, and she was there. We’d been dating for a couple of months at the time.”
I nod.
“But, I realized pretty quickly that you can’t chase grief away by ignoring it. You have to sit with it. You need to feel it. I thought planning a wedding would ease the pain, but it didn’t.”
I stare into his eyes.
“Even though I didn’t love her the way I should have, I never cheated on her.” He pats the countertop. “I stayed true to her, and when I found out, she didn’t, I was tossed into a tailspin.”
He glances over his shoulder when the microwave beeps again.
“I used sex to deal with all of it.” He tilts his head back. “I didn’t fully work through Layna’s death, so random fucking buried the pain of that and the hit my ego took when Amber cheated.”
“And now?” I question. “How are you now?”
“Honestly?”
“Honestly,” I repeat.
“I’ve never been happier.”Chapter 49KeatsI stand in front of her, with all of my fucked up bullshit exposed, and my heart laid bare.
Until today, Berk was the only person who knew that Amber was unfaithful.
I told him the night I caught her cheating.
I went to a bar in midtown while she cleared her belongings out of my home. I drank to numb the pain, and then it turned into more.
I swallowed shot after shot to chase away everything.
By the time the bartender got my phone out of my hands and called my brother, I was falling over.
Berk arranged for Sinclair to stay at his place. Then he got in a cab and came to get me.
I cried on his shoulder.
I don’t know what the fuck was wrong with me.
His wife died less than two months before that, but he helped me up the stairs. He put me into the bed in the guestroom and promised he’d help me burn my bed.
That never happened.
Instead, he ordered me a new mattress, and on the day it arrived, I apologized for letting him down.
He hugged me and told me that I was lucky I found out about Amber when I did. He wanted me to know that my pain didn’t matter any less than his. I needed to process the loss I was experiencing.
I shouldn’t have done that by bringing a string of women home, but I did.
Sinclair was living here at the time. She stayed on the top floor and when she’d forget to close the door to the suite, Dudley wandered down the stairs and into the arms of the strangers I’d bring home.
