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“Oh, thank God! He told you? Jesus. I didn’t think that guy would ever come clean,” Eric says with a shake of his head.
I don’t think admitting he couldn’t cook would be considered coming clean. The first time I opened his fridge it was pretty obvious.
“I told him he needed to just trust you and tell you the truth. Even though he acts like an animal and isn’t exactly in touch with his feelings, I think the big guy was so afraid of hurting you, he couldn’t see past that bullshit. I knew you’d understand the issue, and you’d be more than willing to help him get past that nonsense.”
Okay, I don’t think we’re talking about cooking lessons anymore. I try not to be embarrassed that Eric seems to know about my sex life with Vincent and why he kept putting me off, but it’s not like I haven’t shared the intimate details of these things with Cindy and Ariel.
“Oh, yes! He told me, and it’s fine. It’s perfect, actually. He admitted everything the night I danced at Charming’s, and of course I understood, but it was just silly for him to be so afraid of hurting me,” I tell him with a shrug.
“Exactly! Silly! I mean, you’re a sweet, understanding woman. It’s not that big of a deal the guy needs a wife to get a green card to stay in the country.”
Eric laughs, and it takes me a few seconds for his words to penetrate. I shake my head, thinking I might have misheard him, but Eric happily continues talking, oblivious to the blood rushing through my ears and my stunned silence as I process what he’s saying to me.
“And really, even if you didn’t agree to the plan, it’s not like Canada is a million miles away. There are worse places he could get shipped back to,” Eric says with another chuckle as I grab onto the closest chair for support, feeling like the floor is dropping out from under me. “It’s not like it’s all his fault, this grand plan. I mean, I’m sure he told you I’m the one who was at the bar across from the library and saw you locking up and never coming back out. I put two and two together and figured out you were living there for whatever reason. The guy already had a thing for you, even though he wouldn’t admit it, so it didn’t take much on my part to convince him he should ask you to move in with him to get the ball rolling. But honestly, it would have saved you both a lot of grief if he’d just told you from the get-go his work visa was running out and he needed to get hitched to stay here.”
There’s no need for me to pinch myself now to see if this is a dream. All of the happiness I was feeling when I came in here to bring Vincent lunch rushes out of me, and the lunch bag I’m still clutching slips out of my hand and drops to the floor. This isn’t a dream, it’s a nightmare.
How could I be so stupid? How could I be so clueless? Me, the woman with a brain full of so much useless knowledge, and I couldn’t even see the truth staring me right in the face all this time. My instincts were right all along, and I should have listened to them. Of course a man like Vincent wouldn’t really be interested in someone like me unless he had another, more important reason. And I guess I know what that is now. It all makes sense. Vincent asking me to live with him when he barely knew me, his parents thanking me for saving him, Vincent trying to tell me he had something important we needed to talk about and being so concerned with hurting me. All along he was keeping this huge secret from me, and it was the only reason he let things go further with us. Not because he actually liked me and wanted to see if it could be something more. Because he wanted to use me.
“I . . . I have to go,” I whisper distractedly to Eric as I turn and blindly make my way across the club, bumping into chairs and not paying any attention to what I’m doing as my eyes fill with tears.
“I’ll tell Beast you stopped by!” Eric yells after me.
“Don’t bother,” I mutter, swiping angrily at the tears as they fall down my cheeks.
Thanks to Vincent, I have plenty of sexual confidence to be a stripper. And I also now know what it feels like to have your heart broken. Who knew, even after years and years of reading romance novels, that it would actually be a physical pain that explodes inside my chest, which feels like a knife right through my heart?
