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It’s been like nothing else in my whole damn life.
She’s nodding slowly with me, a stricken look on her face. “It has been fun. And I— I thought we were on the same page with everything. No one was getting ideas. I wasn’t—”
Shewasn’t getting ideas, but I was. Even knowing better. Damn it. “That’s not what this is about. It’s not you—”
She cuts me off with a pained, brittle laugh. “You are not actually giving me that line.”
“I am, because it’s true.” I meet her eyes. “I fucked up. It happened before I even met you. But it’s big. And now—”
How the hell can I tell her when I know it means she’ll never look at me the same again? I’m disgusted. With myself, with Jess, with a careless act that has the potential to do more damage to Stormy’s life than any of the secrets she’s kept of her own.
“Liam, talk to me. Please.”
“We need to move up the timeline on the divorce.”
She rocks back, stunned. But there’s no easy way to say this. No gentle lead-in to soften the blow.
“Why? No,” she whispers. Then firmer, “No. We can figure this out. Just tell me what happened.”
This is it. “I slept with my father’s wife.”
“In college?” she prompts, drawing out the words like a plea, but she already knows. She just doesn’t want to accept it any more than I do. So, she leans into the denial, speaking louder. “She was your girlfriend. Okay, it’s a little messy. And I know how embarrassed you must be, but—”
“Not from college. Not my girlfriend. My ex.” I take a breath, push it out, refusing to let the shame blistering over my skin stop me. “My father’s wife.While they were married… not that I knew it at the time.”
“W-what happened?”
I shake my head, then drop it into my hands and press the heels into my eyes, trying to blot out the shock that crosses her face. “I have no idea how they hooked up or when. Only that at some point after they married she must have discovered he’d cheated on her like he did with everyone else. She wanted payback and tracked me down at a hotel in Atlanta.” With the bunny boards, it isn’t hard to find out where the team is staying, to book a room to stay there too.
“Hell, maybe I was lonely. But when we ‘accidentally’ ran into each other, I figured it would be nice to catch up some. And later, when she asked if I wanted to go upstairs”—for old times’ sake—“I took her.”
Stormy searches my eyes. “You didn’t know she was married?”
“She said she’d been between relationships for a while.” I’d assumed she meant for more than the evening, but even when we broke up in college, I had the sense there might have been some overlap between me and my teammate. Not that I’d been invested enough to really care.
“After, she didn’t try to make plans or suggest staying in touch. She just told me she’d see me around. And a week later, when I went home for Christmas, she did.”
“She was there?”
“Snuggled up against my dad’s side as he introduced her as his wife of three months.” He joked about how he’d only flirted with her when we were dating to get a rise out of me. But something must have stuck.
“I was sick. Stunned. I couldn’t understand how the hell he could be giving me that self-satisfied look, acting like he’d bested me when I’d screwed his wife the week before.”
“She hadn’t told him?”
“No.” She pulled me aside under the pretense of smoothing my ruffled feathers, and my dad laughed, sending her off with a pat on the ass. “She wasn’t going to tell him, and she didn’t want me to either. She reminded me of the code of conduct clause in my contract and how bad it would look if it got out that I seduced my own father’s wife.”
Stormy sits back, eyes wide as she stares at me. I can guess what she’s thinking.
“I almost told him anyway. But then he walked back in and told me he knew it stung to see him get the girl that left me… but I’d have to grow up and get over it.”
There’d been no missing the gleam in his eyes as he blindsided me with a marriage he could have told me about at any time over the previous three months. But instead, he’d waited so he could see my face when I walked through the door and found my ex-girlfriend wearing his ring. He’d wanted to gloat.
“Liam.”
“I left. I didn’t want any part of that fucked-up relationship. All I wanted was to get away. Forget it was Christmas. Forget everything.”
“And you went to Vegas, where you met a woman who wanted to forget about everything too.”
