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He thinks it over for a long moment—like, a long, long moment—and I start to wonder if his contemplative stare at the road will ever end. It’s hard for me to keep my mouth shut that long, but I do it, for him.
“Yeah. Okay. Do it,” he concludes finally, his shoulders rising and then sagging even lower than before. “Honestly, it’s not like it’s going to make it worse than it already is. So…what the hell. Call Caroline back.”
He doesn’t have to tell me twice.
I drop my thumb to the she-devil’s name on his call list and then put the phone up to my ear as it starts to ring. I’m sure Chase would rather me do this on speaker, but I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to maintain as much of a badass façade if he’s listening to every word of the exchange. And if I don’t make the call right away, I don’t know that I’ll have the confidence to do it at all.
On a general basis, I’m about as nonconfrontational as you get. I’m the girl who won’t go back to a fast-food restaurant when they completely screw up her order. I’ll just take the bag full of wrong food home and pray I like it.
But this…for Chase? Feels different.
“Hello? Chase?” Caroline answers, her voice a ball of breathy excitement. I feel like she’s trying to seduce me before I can even buy her dinner.
“No, sorry. Chase can’t come to the phone right now.”
“And who are you?” The purring of a kitty cat in need of my milk is gone, and her voice turns cold as ice. And I’m talking the bad kind of ice. Not the good kind that’s perfectly crushed in easily chewable nuggets. This is jagged, sharp, and blizzard-worthy.
I almost give her my real name, but a light goes off just in time to save me—and my career—from the complications that could cause. “River Rollins. I’m Chase’s girlfriend.”
My eyes bug out of my skull, and so do Chase’s as he glances over at me and then back to the road again frantically.
“His girlfriend?” she screeches. “Excuse me? I’m his fiancée.”
This poor, deluded woman. I know it’s got to be hard, losing a catch like Chase and accepting that it’s a forever kind of thing, but she did it to herself. And I’ve got absolutely no mercy for a woman who can fuck another man behind her fiancé’s back willfully and repeatedly.
“No, Caroline, you’re not his fiancée,” I correct her. “You pissed all over that and then some when you slept with Justin over and over again, don’t you think? You’re not anything to Chase Dawson anymore, so I think it’s a good idea if you stop calling him.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Chase and I are—”
“Absolutely nothing,” I cut her off before she can spout more bullshit. “You threw him away when you had an affair with his best friend, and I know—I know—that has to be hard to hear. But, sweetheart, the facts aren’t changing because of your feelings. Stop calling him. Stop taking advantage of him being a nice guy. Stop trying to insert yourself into his life, and stop thinking you have a shot of getting back together. That shot is less than a shot in hell. It’s literally roaming around at the core of the earth. It’s. Not. Happening. He’s very happy.”
“Oh yeah. He’s happy with you?” she retorts. “You think you’re immune from where I am? You think you’re the woman who’s going to tie him down? Yeah, right. You have no idea what kind of pressure there is living up to a man like Chase Dawson. After a while, I promise you, he won’t be as interested in you as he is right now.”
“No, Caroline. You’re not getting it. I’m not saying he’s happy with me. I’m saying he’s happy. Period. And no amount of groveling on your part is going to change that. Maybe he and I will be together forever and maybe we won’t, but the point is, he’s never going to go back to you.”
Wow, Chase mouths, a small smile curving up the corners of his perfectly full lips.
I smile back, desperate to crack Caroline with an even bigger hammer if it’ll make him smile like that again.
“I don’t believe you.” She continues to delude herself. “Chase needs to be man enough to tell me himself—”
I open my mouth to return fire when the phone is very suddenly but gently ripped from my ear. Chase puts it to his own, his jawline carved out of the very finest of stone. Marble, perhaps.
“Cut the shit, Caroline. I’m tired of hearing it.”
I would wonder how he heard what was going on enough to take over the call, but the glaringly obvious answer from the receiver held slightly away from his ear when Caroline speaks tells me all I need to know. Hell, I might as well have put the dang thing on speakerphone for as loud as the conversation is anyway.
