Page 159 of The Complete Truth Duet
She was gorgeous, funny, and smart—the perfect storm of a woman the devil himself must have planted in that bar to distract me.
I didn’t know what hotel Lisa was staying at, but in the What-if game, rationale didn’t matter.
If Cat hadn’t been there, maybe I would have left earlier.
Maybe I would have driven past the hotel and seen a commotion.
Maybe in those twenty-nine fucking minutes, I could have found her and saved her.
But no, I’d been fucking a woman named Cat while my sister was being beaten, tortured, and stabbed.
Fucking Cat.
So imagine my surprise when, some months later, I started digging into the Guerrero family and her face popped up in the private investigator’s findings.
She was married. Had been for way longer than four years. And she and her daughter had gone missing. Presumably dead. But it seemed all too convenient to me that she was there with me that night. It solidified my suspicions that the Guerreros were involved. That was the moment I volunteered to go to prison. My life was over, and I lost my job after I’d become so wrapped up in my own pain that I stopped showing up. I’d eventually run out of money. The only thing I’d be losing was Shane. And he was a fucking mess. Every time he looked at me, I thought he could see what I’d done until I started avoiding him altogether.
But then I’d miss Lisa, and he was all that was left of her.
Two years in a cell with Manuel Guerrero and the only info I’d truly gotten was that the same woman who I irrationally hated more than anyone else in the world was the woman I had to find in order to finally escape the pain altogether.
I’d hoped she wouldn’t recognize me when Cora had given me directions to her house that day. It had been four years, so maybe I’d ghosted from her memories the way I’d never been able to get rid of her.
One glance and I was back in that bar. Catalina was still beautiful.
But her eyes weren’t the same.
Or maybe it was my eyes.
I knew more about her now. Like why she was on the run. How she had gotten her daughter. And who her husband was. And then other things, like how she was the only person who had ever been good to Cora. And God knew I’d fallen head over heels in love with that woman. Not in the sense that Shane loved her of course, but there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her or those kids.
So when Catalina cornered me in her house that first night, demanding to know who the hell I was and what the hell I was up to, my misplaced hate for her melted away.
I kissed her.
She slapped me.
And then, hours later when she heard Thomas’s gunshot from the bedroom I’d put them in before opening the front door, she screamed my name in such a terrified tone that I’d never be able to erase the imprint it made on my soul.
When Shane had told me that he’d found her in the hall, being choked by a man I didn’t even know was in the house at the time, the weight of failure took out my knees.
Cat and I did not see eye to eye on damn near anything, but there was something about that smart-ass woman. And when she snuck into my bedroom early that morning in Shane’s apartment in Chicago, while he was sleeping on the couch and Cora was in with River and Savannah, we finally got the chance to talk.
And I told her the truth. All of it.
But I didn’t want her truths, because while I thought she was beautiful and incredible, her truths bound us together in ways that made me wish for lies.
She’d been at the bar that night to meet Lisa at seven.
I was supposed to meet her at nine.
My fucking Sherlock Holmes of a sister had been following Catalina and begging her to help take Thomas down. Seriously, my sister was crazytown.
But, apparently, it’d worked, because in Catalina’s purse that night had been all the necessary documentation she was planning to turn over.
And I’d fucked her.
While Lisa was dying and Catalina’s life at home was terrifying, I’d fucked her in the back seat of a car like a whore.
She told me that, at that time when she was taking the first steps to reclaim her life and figuring out who she was as a woman, the fact that someone genuinely wanted her and was kind and gentle about it had been the biggest turn-on of her life.
She’d also told me that, when I’d kicked her out of the car half-naked and alone in an empty parking lot for reasons that I had not explained, I’d changed her life too.
