Jace and I had history. Not the good kind. Our grandmothers were friends, which meant we’d been forced into each other’s orbit at charity events and holiday gatherings for years. I’d spent my teenage years trying to befriend him the way I befriended everyone—through charm and strategic conversation. Jace was immune to both.
The man sanitized his hands after every handshake and kept a radius around himself that he defended like a sovereign border. Every casual comment I’d ever made was met with a monosyllabic response and the distinct impression that he was counting down to my departure.
Then, years later, at an awards ceremony, I’d met Anna. Beautiful, warm, charming. I’d flirted with her for exactly ninety seconds before Jace appeared beside her like a six-foot-threeapparition and looked at me with an expression that suggested he was mentally selecting a burial site.
I hadn’t been interested in Anna. I’d just wanted to see if Jace Hunter was capable of an emotion other than contempt. He was. The emotion was murderous rage. It was the most personality I’d ever seen from him and I found it genuinely entertaining.
He had not forgiven me for those ninety seconds. I was fairly certain he would never forgive me.
“Hunter,” I said.
“Vale.” He didn’t move. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m looking for my wife.”
“Your wife.” He said it like something bitter. “The one who showed up crying? That wife?”
“Yes.”
“She’s in the backyard.” He didn’t step aside. “I don’t appreciate you intruding on my family’s gathering.”
“I’m not here for your gathering. I’m here for Miley.”
“You’re standing on my in-laws’ porch.” He looked at me. Then at my shoes. “Take those off before you come inside.”
“You want me to take off my shoes.”
“Is that a problem?”
I kicked off my shoes because arguing with Jace Hunter about footwear while my wife was fifty feet away was not how I was going to spend this day. I muttered something about him being the most annoying human being on the planet.
“I’ve been told,” he said, with zero indication that he cared.
I walked past him into the house. The hallway smelled like barbecue and baked goods, the walls lined with family photos of happy people.
Anna was in the kitchen. She said nothing, but her face said enough.
I walked through the kitchen, guessing my way through the back door, into a yard that was green and strung withlights, still decorated with balloons and paper lanterns from the celebration.
Miley was on the porch steps, holding a glass of lemonade, laughing.
Laughing at a man I didn’t know. Young, tall, sitting beside her, leaning toward her with interest he wasn’t hiding. She was smiling at him, the real smile with the overlapping tooth, the one she only gave when she forgot to hold it back.
She was giving that smile to someone who wasn’t me.
Jealousy hit me so hard I stopped walking. Hot, territorial, and completely irrational. I didn’t know this man. I didn’t care. Miley was smiling at someone else and every primitive instinct I had wanted to cross that yard and put myself between them.
He saw me first and stood, confused. Miley followed his gaze. Her smile vanished. The laugh died. She set down her glass and stared at me, her face cycling through shock, then pain, then cold anger.
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to talk.”
“I left a letter.”
“I read it. Every word.” I stepped closer. “And you’re wrong about almost all of it.”
“Then there’s nothing to discuss.”
