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“Fine, I didn’t want to do this, but I have to.” He exhaled a deep breath before continuing. “You think Dean is such a perfect, caring guy. Well, he knew about Emily. He knew formonths, and he never told you. Not once. He saw you how many times, and let it go on. And the real kicker, he knew that she was at my place that day. He gave you my key on purpose. He wanted you to see us, knowing how much it would hurt you. Because he’s a selfish prick just like me. Considerthat.” Eric finished his horrible speech and watched me with a satisfied smirk on his stupid face.
“Get. Out,” I growled at him.
“Fine. But I’m not lying this time,” he said, then he finally walked away.
I hardly noticed him go. I felt nauseous. And faint. Tears were prickling at my eyes, my nose burned, and I was shaking.
I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible, Erichadto be lying again. That was his last-ditch attempt to save face, it had to be. Dean couldn’t have known about it all that time. Not when we’d seen each other at the Memorial Day picnic, or his grandmother’s birthday party. All those times we had talked, and laughed, and he had said nothing. All those times he sat across from me eating potato salad and making small talk, he couldn’t have known that Eric was cheating on me and just been okay with it.
No way.
And as for the last part, the thought that he had basically set up the whole charade of me finding out about Eric and Emily made me sick. It had been the worst moment of my life. Eric certainly wasn’t my soulmate, but I’d never get the image of him balls deep in someone else out of my mind. Never. I was probably scarred for life after seeing that. There’s no way the guy I was in love with, the guy that I had married after one night could have done something like that.
If he had….
As hard as it was to believe, the Eric-the-jerk might have been right about one thing. I barely knew Dean. Not really. It wasn’t possible to know someone completely in such a short time.
And yet I’dmarriedhim. I’d stayed married to him. We’d done all sort of things together. I’d been about to tell him that I loved him. How stupid could I possibly be? I should have followed my instincts from the beginning and cut all ties with him and his cursed family.
“Jillian?” A voice called from the sidewalk, startling me.
I snapped my head up to tell Eric to get lost once and for all. But it wasn’t Eric this time.
“Why are you standing out here barefoot? Are you okay?” Dean asked, walking towards me.
His brow was furrowed, and his mouth pulled into a tight worried line. He held a small mysterious package in his hand. He must have missed his brother by literally a minute.
Sniffling, I met his eyes. “No. I’m not alright.”
“What happened?”
I straightened my back. “Did you know about Eric and that girl that whole time? Did you knowingly let me walk in on them?”
One look into his eyes and I had my answer.
“We’re over,” I said, swallowing back the tears clogging my throat. “Actually, just like our marriage, it will be like we never even happened.”
I darted for the doorway and locked myself inside the building before Dean could say another word.
CHAPTER12
Dean
Ihurled open the back door to the restaurant in a last-ditch effort to hunt down my soon to be dead brother. I’d been on the warpath for over an hour now, but he’d apparently grown a few brain cells since I’d seen him last, and he had figured out how to effectively avoid my wrath.
Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t answered any of the hundred calls or texts I’d sent him, and I could say for a fact that he wasn’t at his apartment, office, or gym. Aside from attempting to track down each of his equally moronic friends, I was quickly running out of ideas. The restaurant seemed too obvious, which made it a huge long-shot, but it was all I had left.
If nothing else, I was hoping my parents might know where the asshole was hiding. The thought of retreating to my empty home and stewing over the steaming wreckage that was my brand-new relationship with Jillian, was, well, unthinkable. I’d go out of my mind.
Grumbling increasingly creative death threats under my breath, I passed through the tiny staff locker bay and swung into the prep area. It was getting louder and hotter the further I ventured, but I barely noticed. My thoughts were consumed with finding Eric and figuring out exactly what he had done to Jillian. Or, rather, what he had donethis time.
It was becoming a regular occurrence these days. Frankly, I didn’t know why I was remotely surprised by that fact, it was exactly his style; selfishly create a catastrophic mess and then leave everyone else to deal with the fallout.
Unluckily for him, my ‘style’ was single minded persistence. It had served me well in my pursuits of forging my dream career, and it had been beginning to work with Jillian.
Despite the less than ideal circumstances, I hadn’t ever given up on her throughout the entire time she was dating Eric. Then I had doggedly worked at convincing her not to immediately annul our marriage, and finally, I had worked my magic and had gotten Jillian to give us a chance. It had all proven what I had always known; that we were perfect for each other. We had been so devastatingly close to establishing something real before she had sent me packing earlier today.
Which was precisely why I needed to talk to Eric. Specifically, I needed to find out what he had told Jillian. Like,word for word. Based on her out of the blue question about Eric’s girlfriend, I had some ideas about what might have gone down while we’d been apart, but if I knew my brother, there was more to it. And as Jillian had very much not been in the mood for sharing, I would need to get the truth from the dick himself.
