Page 90 of Secret Husband
“This is the man you were considering sharing your life with.” The thought of it infuriated me. “If you know it’s wrong, then what good will talking do?”
“So we should just make rash decisions and to hell with the consequences?”
I nudged her shoulder. “Yes.”
“Been there, done that, got the—actually, I didn’t. No sign of a ring, Nazarov.”
“It wasn’t that kind of ceremony.” There was a ring, but if I told her that, she would have questions I was not yet ready to answer.
“I need to apply logic to this. Reason. Common sense.” She eyed me. “I don’t enjoy feeling utterly out of control, coloring outside the lines. It’s not me.”
I opened my mouth. She held up a hand.
“Alexei, I’ve spent most of my life trying to follow the rules and not go against the grain. My father’s criminality made me ashamed. It made me feel like I shouldn’t stand out, at least in my personal life. I poured it all into my career, first as a hockey player, now as an agent. I want to be a good person, an upright person, and I want to help my clients. And yes, I want a little happiness for myself.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“But whenever I try to reach for that in my personal life, it doesn’t click. I should have spotted Thad’s faults sooner, but I was willing to ignore those red flags because I … I’m lonely, I suppose. And then there’s you.”
I held my breath.
She met my gaze head-on. “I know it’s stupid to hold a grudge about something that happened when we were barely legal drinking age. But your appearance in my life—and in this OTT way—is not good for me, Alexei.” She added in the most soul-crushing whisper, “You broke my heart.”
I had, and the pain in her voice broke mine. Her distrust of me had erected this unscalable barrier between us.
I rushed to defend myself. “Are you blaming my twenty-one-year-old idiot self because your boyfriend is a jerk?”
“No. But I clearly attract men who are all wrong for me. Maybe the fact you’re here has made me think harder about what I want. Thad’s not it. And you? Definitely not it.”
My heart sank, but I couldn’t let her see the effect of her words. “Yes, I am very bad for you.”
“You are!” She punched my arm, not so lightly. When I winced, she grasped it and apologized. “I don’t know my own strength, sometimes.”
“This is true. You don’t.”
“I see what you did there. Some sort of compliment about my mental endurance and general kick-assery.”
“And smart as well.”
She started laughing. “God, we so need to divorce.”
“Yes, marriage ruins relationships.”
“We barely had a relationship, Nazarov.” She sighed. “But I did get the card and flowers you sent after my father died. That was kind.”
“I would have come, but I didn’t want to make it all about me.”
I could have told her now. How the day after graduation, the day after I broke her heart, I was in Russia, dealing with my father’s arrest. Desperately trying to figure out where they had taken him and what they were doing to him. But unloading all that now would only appear self-serving.
“Perhaps after all this, we can be friends,” she said. “If you’re going to be hanging around Chicago.”
“I am here for the long haul. You will be seeing me all the time and soon, you will realize that there is no escaping me.”
“As a friend.”
“Sure. A friend.”
She looked unimpressed. I used to be a much better liar around her.
