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“Pig,” she muttered and tightened the sash around her waist, a move that highlighted her cleavage because the robe was at least two, possibly three sizes too big for her.
“How about I pour us a glass of wine? I’ll keep my snout out of your glass, promise.” I winked and she growled, actually growled at me.
“Just pour the damn wine,” she grunted again and tightened the sash once again for good measure.
“Still bossy as hell, I see.” It was one of the things I loved most about her. She was tiny as heck, but with a personality three times as big, not to mention she was always in charge of everyone. All the time.
“Not bossy,” she clarified. “Goal oriented.”
“I knew you were gonna say that.” She hated being called bossy. “Nothin’ wrong with a bossy woman. It’s damned sexy, let me tell ya.” She’d always been the sexiest girl around with her fiery red hair, feminine curves and sassy attitude.
“Plenty of bossy women on tour?”
“That depends,” I drawled. “Are you jealous of these fictious bossy women beating down my backstage door?”
“Hardly. Plenty of guys making false promises about forever and other things. Don’t need a rock star for that.”
“Ouch. You wound me, Pip.”
“Stop calling me that!” She marched over to the small coffee table and plucked her glass from the table with a grunt. “My name is Pippa, or Ms. Carson is you prefer.”
I arched a brow. “Not Mrs. Carson?”
“No,” she snarled. “I kept my name because it’s mine.”
I smacked my lips together. “Not very southern of you, Pip.”
“Yeah well, I’ve grown and I don’t let things like traditions determine how I live my life anymore. Did that once and it didn’t work out too well for me.” She took a big, unladylike sip from her glass and sighed loudly. “I suppose that means you have a Mrs. Gregory walking around free in this world?”
“Is that curiosity I hear?”
“Nope,” she insisted a little too quickly. Too easily. “Just making conversation since we’re stuck here until the rain lets up.”
“She might have kept her married name, I don’t rightly know. My best guess is she was as eager to get rid of it as she was to get rid of me.”
Pippa smacked her lips together in a fake pout. “Were you a bad husband?”
“Absent more than bad.” Just thinking about that too short marriage made me mad as hell. “She knew who I was when she married me, and then she punished me because I was on the road, doing the job I did when we met.” It was silly to marry Shelby and I could be honest now; I’d done it to forget the woman staring at me from across the Lover’s Suite. “I never should have married her.”
“Why did you?”
Her blue eyes bore through me as if she could see my truth, as if she knew the only reason I’d married Shelby was because she was a poor substitute for the one woman I never could forget. Not that Pippa would believe me if I said as much to her. “Because I wanted to prove something.”
One fiery brow arched in question. “What?”
“That I was over you. That you no longer had a hold on me or my heart.”
Pippa’s blue eyes shuttered immediately and she buried her face in the glass. “Joke’s on you, because I never had a hold on it as it turns out. I was just another place holder. Your first groupie.”
Heat infused my body at her words. “That right there is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard, and I think you know it.” She was unbelievable, so determined to rewrite history. “I loved you more than I have ever loved anyone in my whole life, Pip.”
She snorted and finished off her wine, keeping as much distance between us as possible while still grabbing the bottle for a refill. “If that’s true, I can see why you and your ex didn’t make it. I didn’t mean anything to you. First loves are a joke. A fantasy that only seems great under the rose-colored lenses of adolescence.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I do now.” She plopped down on the far end of the sofa. “You cured me of that girlish fantasy, so really, I should thank you. I thought we were so in love, I was mad for you back then.” She shook her head, eyes glazed over as if she was back in the past. “I thought we’d have a truckload of babies, live in a big brick house, and I’d get to be your date for every music awards show on the planet, cheering you on while you won award after award.”
That had been my dream too, I just hadn’t seen how to make it work back then.
“Turns out you had other plans, and they never, not once included me.” She shook her head and took a long, fortifying sip that finished half the glass. “I was so hurt, so humiliated. And as time went on, I realized that I never saw us as we really were, not truly.”
