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Oh, yeah. Greyson was pissed. That probably shouldn’t have made me feel so warm and fuzzy inside.

“His exact words were you’re just not the kind of girl I should be with.”

“What an asshole. You said Eddie, right? What’s his last name?”

I lifted my head to look at him. His teeth were gnashing together and brow furrowed. I couldn’t hold back my smile in the face of his rage on my behalf. “Why? You want to hunt him down and kick his ass for something that happened over a decade ago?”

He faltered, and I knew that he heard how crazy that sounded. “Maybe I just want to talk to him.”

I chuckled. “No need. I don’t care about Eddie anymore. It was a tough time in my life. It hurt, and my confidence was shaken for a long time, but I don’t need you to defend my honor after all this time.”

“Have you had any serious relationships since?”

I shook my head, relaxing against him again. “No. I’ve dated over the years, of course, but I’ve never seen a future with any of the men. The spark just wasn’t there.”

But as Greyson ran his hands up and down my back, I knew that our connection was real. It felt stronger than anything I’d felt for another man, more real.

“Audrey is the only real relationship I’ve ever had,” he said after a while. “But we never really had the spark either.”

“What? How is that possible?”

“Christine came along. Audrey and I were in our mid-twenties and hadn’t been dating long when she got pregnant. I liked her well enough, and like I said, I wanted to be a better dad than mine was. So, we got married.”

“Were you happy with her?” I asked, not sure if I really wanted to hear the answer.

He kept stroking my back as he thought about his answer. “I was content for a while. I always knew we weren’t in love, and it never really felt like it might grow into that kind of relationship. But we did both love Christine, so we tried to have a good marriage. For a while.”

“But you ended up getting divorced.”

“That was my call. Over the years, the NFL took up a lot of my time, and Audrey didn’t handle that well. Maybe it was because she never had a career of her own. I don’t know for sure what her reasons were, but she eventually started cheating on me.”

I couldn’t imagine a woman even looking at another man when she was married to Greyson.

“It happened with more than one man, and the first few times that I discovered it, we tried to work through it, for Christine’s sake. And I was still playing, so I was too busy to fret about what Audrey was up to.”

“That sounds…”

“Terrible, I know. By the time I stopped playing football, our marriage was pretty damn toxic. Then, I was home all the time, and it was harder to ignore the irreparable cracks in our marriage. She was still unfaithful, and I was more unhappy than ever. About a year after I stopped playing, I decided that we should get divorced. Staying together for Christine just didn’t make sense anymore because we were so unhappy together. By then, she was old enough to see it, and that wasn’t good for her. Or for any of us, really. Audrey fought me on the divorce, making promises to change and then insisting on a long separation before she’d agree to the divorce. Even then, it took a while because she was difficult about it. But like I’ve told you, it was just because she wanted to keep living the good life I’d given her until then.”

“Do you have any regrets?”

“No.” The answer was definitive. “But I don’t know if I would ever want to get married again. I spent too many years in a bad marriage, and I’ve never been able to imagine taking that step again.”

I told myself it was silly to be upset by that. We hadn’t even discussed dating after this vacation was over, and we were nowhere near considering marriage.

Still, there was an ache in my chest that I tried to ignore. I didn’t know what to say, so we lapsed into silence again, with just the sound of rolling waves and rustling palm leaves in the air.

“Do you want to come inside?” he asked in a husky voice.

This time, his hand didn’t just trail down my back. It glided over my ass, giving it a squeeze that made my entire body flush.

I looked up into his dark eyes and knew that no matter what the future did or didn’t have in store for us, there was only one answer to that question.

“Yes.”

Chapter Thirteen: Greyson

Ipulled Heather into the house, barely pausing long enough to pull the curtains across the glass door before I started undressing her. She was wearing a dress again, which I loved because it was easy as hell to strip her down to her underwear.