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I was breathing heavily after my final sentence. It felt like I’d run an emotional marathon.
“Your ex-husband accosted you in a bar while you were on a date,” Heath hissed.
I managed to hide my flinch at his harsh tone this time. I was getting good at it.
Hiding things.
“Yes, I am aware, I was there,” I said mildly. “And I was also there when you accosted me in my apartment about the incident so you being here is not to repeat the performance.”
“No, it’s not,” he agreed.
Another hidden flinch.
“But he’s unpredictable,” he continued. “And he obviously has no problem trying to get physical with you. Shit is obviously going down with him. And it’s lookin’ like there’s gonna be blowback on you because he’s an asshole with a bruised ego. And he lost you.” Something moved in his eyes. “Losing a woman like you makes a man dangerous.”
My stomach lurched. And in nowhere near a good way.
Heath’s expression did not change. Not one bit. “We’re looking into it. Until we are satisfied that shit can’t blow back on you, Keltan’s got a team on you. It was my rotation.”
I digested all of this.
And it wasn’t going down well.
Not just because this cold version of Heath was the one serving the news.
“You’re looking into my ex-husband?” I clarified.
“Keltan is,” he amended.
Ah, he needed to make it very clear that he didn’t care enough to do such things, it was part of his job. This, being anywhere near me, my business with the man I’d married instead of him was definitely not his choice.
“It’s not any of Keltan’s business,” I said, folding my arms. “Craig was having a bad night. He doesn’t deserve—”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Heath seethed, fury leaking onto his blank face. “You’re defending the fucker?”
I didn’t react to the pure judgment in his voice. “I’m saying he deserves to get on with his life without whatever Keltan and his team is planning on doing to disrupt it.”
“He sure as fuck didn’t care about disrupting your life,” he countered.
I somehow held his gaze. “Love turns people into someone different from themselves. Heartbreak does that further still,” I whispered. “Pain makes people change, Heath.”
Heath’s face stayed blank. My words were doing nothing to him. What did I expect? There was only so much a man like him could take from a woman like me before washing his hands of it.
It had been years of pain. Of chaos. Of me toying with both of our hearts. I couldn’t expect him to be holding on like I was. Especially when he thought I was the one that let it all go.
“You still love him?” It was an accusation, pure and simple.
But, like us, not at all pure and simple.
I could’ve lied. Most likely any other person in the world would’ve. You had to be crazy to admit to the man you’d loved since you were eighteen that you loved your ex-husband who hit you, yelled and you and was just an all-around dickhead.
But no one had ever accused me of being sane.
Plus, I was already telling enough lies to Heath, to myself, I couldn’t stack something like this onto the pile.
“You want me to stop loving him because he’s a bad person?” I smiled because these days it was either smile or sob. And I could only deal with my sorrow smiling. “It doesn’t work that way. I fell in love with the man, it has nothing to do with what he’s shown me now, that love sticks. So I’m not going to just shake it off and move on. Not care about where his life goes now. About what will happen to him if I don’t at least try and stop Keltan from doing something because of me. Because that’s not how I work. And if that’s how you expect me to work, then we have nothing more to talk about. Because that means you never knew me at all. I don’t want a man who expects a woman to let go of love so easily. Because that means he’ll do the same too.”
And then I got in my car and drove away.
I was proud of myself.
I didn’t break down until I got safely inside my apartment.
Chapter Eleven
“Can you believe it?” I huffed after I told Lucy and Rosie the tale of my day and Heath’s part in it.
They were around for dinner, at the place where they both used to live, no matter the fact that they both had much bigger, nicer apartments. It was girl’s night. We’d had them regularly before I left, in the place where we could bask in the good and bad of the past, the simplicity of it, and the warmth of each other’s company.
“Can I believe it?” Lucy repeated. “Um…yeah? Have you been absent for, I don’t know, the whole time every alpha male we know has been drawing breath? Something dramatic happens to us and they turn up the drama and call it protection. I mean, there are more drama queens in that security firm than on all eleven seasons of Ru Paul’s Drag Race,” she said.
