And yet he’d bought it anyway.
A holdover from his previous life? Probably.
Not that he and his ex-wife had purchased a family home. He’d spent a lot of his short married life overseas, on one deployment or another, and they hadn’t found the time to look. He’d still thought of himself as a married man, a family man.
And twelve months hadn’t changed that.
The day Renee asked him for a divorce hadn’t really shocked him. It was her revelation that he wasn’t the father of the baby boy she was carrying that gutted him.
Then she’d told him who the father was and gutted didn’t begin to describe how he’d felt.
Betrayed? Furious? Cheated? Tricked? Gullible?
Yeah, he’d felt all those and more.
His wife and best friend had been having an affair behind his back for years, and he’d never have known if he hadn’t been discharged from the army. If he hadn’t downed his chopper and required a few months of rehab stateside, he never would have realized how close Renee and Jake were.
Their closeness hadn’t bothered him in those first few months after the crash because he felt relieved that Jake was there to help Renee when he wasn’t. He just hadn’t known Jake was helping Renee become a mother.
“Mr. Conners?”
Rylan turned to the street where the agent he’d used to find the house too big for him was rounding the front of her car.
“Mrs. Russell,” he greeted.
“Am I late? I thought we said five?” she asked as she hustled up the driveway toward him.
“We did.” He smiled in the hope of alleviating her concern. “I’m early.”
“Oh, good. I thought for a moment I’d gotten the time wrong.” She pressed a hand between her ample breasts and finally returned his smile. “So. Anxious to move in?”
“Yep, sure am. Although my furniture won’t arrive until tomorrow. A blowup mattress and a sleeping bag is all I need to stay the night.” Lord knows a blowup bed was better than what he’d had in some places during his twenty-year army career.
“But you don’t have to vacate your apartment until Friday, you could stay there until you get everything moved in here.”
“I could, but as I said, I’m keen to move in.” Even if he would be rattling around inside that huge empty house.
“I guess that makes sense if you don’t need much. And if it’s only for one night . . .”
“Exactly.” He glanced at the house. He’d slept in worse conditions. At least these walls weren’t under threat of being riddled with bullets or blown up. And he was ready for this next step, the planting of roots in his new life. “No point waiting. Besides, I have to be here at seven in the morning for the moving van.”
“That’s early,” she murmured, her brow furrowing and her mouth tipping down on each end.
“They’re driving overnight. Plus, once they’re here, it will probably take the better part of the day to unload everything.”
Fifteen months ago, Renee had walked away with nothing from their home. She hadn’t wanted any of it, and while Rylan had gotten rid of their marital bed and purchased a new one the day she left, he hadn’t changed anything else. It seemed pointless when nothing else had been bought together.
He’d inherited his grandmother’s furniture years ago, and he’d forbidden his wife to replace any of it during their three-year marriage.
Maybe that had been part of their problem? They’d never really combined their lives. In fact, Renee had remained in her own apartment for the first eleven months of their marriage because Rylan had left on deployment a week after their wedding.
The quickie wedding in Vegas.
A quickie wedding that had been unnecessary when they’d discovered the positive test had been a false-positive and the baby they thought they were having didn’t exist. By then, he had been half a world away, and changing their path had seemed pointless because neither of their lives was all that different.
They would probably have been better off going their separate ways then except that certificate between them hadn’t been a problem with Rylan away and Renee’s life continuing as before.
“Well, Mr. Conners.” Mrs. Russell’s voice cut into Rylan’s thoughts. “Here are the keys and the last of the paperwork. All you have to do is vacate your apartment and hand in the key on Friday.”
