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I shrug. The less I say, the better.
“None of us can figure out who invited her,” Nic says through a yawn as she flicks the glossy pages. “Wasn’t me. Dorian swears it wasn’t him. Burke looked shocked when he saw her, though who knows. He could’ve been acting for your sake.” She nods toward the wall clock. “I think it’s strange that you’ve been out here quite a while and he hasn’t once come to check on you.”
“He doesn’t have to check on me. I’m a grown woman.”
“She broke his heart,” Nic says. “And the second she’s back in his life, you’re chopped liver. All I’m saying is I’d be livid.”
“You and I are pretty different.”
“Fair.” She sniffs. “I guess the entire thing doesn’t sit right with me.”
“I’m sorry, Nicola, but I really don’t want to have this conversation with you.” I cross my legs, take a deep breath, and pray she doesn’t bite my head off. There’s a contentiousness emanating off her in waves, and I don’t want any part of it.
A familiar-looking nurse with thick crimson curls piled on top of her head trots into the waiting room, scanning the sea of unsmiling faces until she finds Nicola.
Abandoning the shiny magazine—and our conversation—Nicola races over to her. Their words are too soft for me to hear from this side of the room, but three seconds later, they’re both gone.
Whatever it is . . . it can’t be good.
Several minutes pass before I decide to head back to the room to see if Burke needs me, but before I so much as get out of my chair, I spot Audrina passing by.
She must have noticed me at the same time because she makes a beeline in my direction.
“Briar?” she asks when she’s closer.
“Yes?”
“I’m Audrina.” She extends her hand, gifting a soft smile that contradicts the pain behind her bright-blue eyes. “Thank you for letting me know about Redmond.”
“Of course,” I say, though it was never my intention.
“Do you mind?” She points to the seat beside me.
“Not at all.”
Tucking a loose strand of platinum hair behind her ear, she cups her dainty fingertips over her nose and mouth and breathes out.
“Did you see the way he looked at me?” she asks.
I didn’t—because I was behind Burke and his back was to me the entire time. From the moment we left the hotel and climbed into the Uber (to take us a mere three blocks because Burke didn’t want to walk in the early-morning drizzle), Burke shut me out emotionally, physically, and otherwise. After breakfast, he said maybe five whole words to me. And once we arrived at the hospital, he walked at least three steps ahead of me from the main entrance to the elevator to the ICU.
After learning about Burke’s inheritance situation—and witnessing how lifted his spirits have been since his father’s medical crisis—I’m realizing I’ve pegged him all wrong. The only reason I contacted Audrina at all was because I felt sorry for Burke. Now I’m beginning to think he wasn’t heartbroken over this woman so much as he was licking his wounds.
Men like him aren’t used to rejection because they’re usually the ones doing the rejecting.
He wasn’t devastated. He was nursing a bruised ego.
“He seems angry that I’m here,” she says with a bittersweet sigh.
“Burke?” I shake my head. “I didn’t get that at all.”
“No, Dorian,” she says.
“Why would Dorian care?”
Her full lips press flat as her eyes search mine. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Before I was engaged to Burke . . . I was engaged to Dorian.” Her lips flutter into the faintest smile as she says his name, but it vanishes in an instant. “I ended things with Dorian when I met Burke. Dorian’s schedule was so different than mine. We were both too invested in our careers to put our relationship first.” She pauses as if she’s reminiscing in a silent memory. “And then I met Burke. He was like the suit-and-tie version of Dorian. And he was always in New York—which is where my primary apartment is. Burke felt like home base, I guess. He felt solid. Like a sure thing. Driven as hell too. And as much as I hate to admit this, I found his arrogance charming—at first. Dorian acted like giving me a ring was like imposing some kind of death sentence on him. I swear when he proposed, he had tears in his eyes and not the happy kind.”
The idea of Dorian getting down on one knee seems farcical given what I know, but I’m too busy attempting to digest all this information to form a sensible response, so I simply nod and listen.
“Anyway. I suppose I don’t need to get into the dirty details of how everything went down,” she says. “It wasn’t pretty, I’ll say that. I wish it could have been different.”
