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It might take a moment or two for her to figure out how to handle Cole’s reaction in a way that would be gentle yet firm.
“Roger wanted the furniture worse than he wanted the house,” she continued, handing Blake a napkin to put under his glass. “I got the dishes. He got the tools.”
She sat.
Blake’s gaze settled on her as if he could see inside her just as well as he used to. She wished he wouldn’t do that.
“It sounds like it was an amicable parting,” he said.
She nodded tentatively. On paper it had been. But privately, in those conversations when they acknowledged that they had to part, there’d been nothing but disappointment. And pain. And guilt. His pain and her guilt. And in the end, her pain, too.
In marrying Roger, who’d been her friend for years, she’d hurt someone she loved. Horribly.
“I heard he left town,” Blake said, and Annie stared at him. He was a little too close to her thoughts.
“He has an uncle in Ohio with a farm equipment company. Roger’s running the place for him now.”
“Does he like it there?”
How would Annie know? She wasn’t in the habit of talking to her exes—as Blake was well aware.
“According to his sister, when I ran into her at the post office about six months ago.”
“She’s still in town?”
“They moved to San Antonio this past summer. Her daughter needed a gifted program….”
“What about his parents?”
“His dad died several years ago, and afterward his mom remarried and moved to Dallas.”
And that just about took care of Annie’s second marriage—and nearly four years of her life.
“Do you have any regrets?”
No one had asked her that before—not regarding her breakup with Roger. That was a question she’d heard many times, however, after Blake had returned and she’d chosen to honor her current marriage over her first. Most often she’d heard it from Roger.
“He’s a good man who’d have given his life for me, and I hurt him,” she said simply. “Of course I have regrets.”
“You stayed with him.”
“I was committed, and I did love him. But he knew I wasn’t in love with him.”
She didn’t realize exactly what she’d just revealed—and to whom—until Blake took a slow sip of his wine, peering at her over the top of the glass.
“From the beginning?” His question, as usual, went straight to the point.
“He knew from the beginning, yes.”
Blake didn’t say any more, and in spite of all the things left unsaid between them, neither did she.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE WINE WAS GOOD, but Blake sipped slowly.
It would be so easy to let the libation do his work for him. Too easy. And infinitely more difficult to regain his self-control.He’d been that route. And had managed to haul himself away from the detour before it destroyed him.
But there were others.
