Page 25 of Strict Confidence (Rochester Trilogy 2)
Jane sucks in a breath. She can see where this is going.
“Yeah.” I drop my head back on the pillow, feeling like a bastard for the millionth time. “I slept with her. It was stupid. And it was bad. And it was cheating.”
“Because she wasn’t really getting a divorce, was she?”
“No. I mean, maybe she thought about it, but it wasn’t going to happen. Even as I was fucking her, she had to know that it was a revenge fuck. I wasn’t going to marry my brother’s ex. I sent her back to him.”
“That’s why it hurts you so much,” she says, planting a kiss on my arm. “You feel guilty.”
“Of course I feel guilty. This is how guilty people should feel. Guilty.”
“He stole her from you first.”
“That really doesn’t make it better. I never even spoke to him after that day. Couldn’t. I don’t know if he even wanted me to call him. We were basically strangers by the end.”
“You were family.”
“When I got the call about the accident, I swore to myself, if he woke up from the coma, we’d talk it out. I’d tell him what happened, see if he still wanted to be my brother. But he never did wake up. Finally the doctors advised me to pull the plug.”
“Oh my God.”
“Right there in Regional Hospital, walking the same blue and red tiled floors that I walked to find you that night. They gave me a few minutes to talk to him before they did it. I could have told him then. It wouldn’t really have mattered. They swore there was no brain activity. But then I thought, what if they’re wrong. What if there’s a chance they’re wrong, and he hears me, but he can’t swear at me. He looked so fucking small in that bed. He couldn’t have punched me, and I deserved to be punched. So I didn’t tell him. I walked away with that secret.”
“Hey,” she says, propping her chin on her palm. Her hair does this sexy flop thing onto my chest. “You had a toxic relationship with your brother. These things happen, but you are not a bad person. You were reacting out of hurt. You didn’t mean to hurt him, and that you wish you could take it back… wherever he is, he knows that now.”
Rhys is a bastard, and whatever hell he’s in, I hope it burns. I don’t tell her that. I don’t tell her what I learned from Emily’s diary the day after I pulled the plug on my brother. Instead I tell her, “You’re going to make an incredible social worker one day.”
A lopsided grin. “Really?”
I spell the letters on her shoulder. Really.
She’s warm and sexy and everything I want in my very own bed, but I have things to do. People to see. Security to arrange. I can’t pull her against me and ward away the cold.
“You need to sleep,” I tell her. “Your eyes are already closing.”
My sleepy girl rolls to her side, palm under her face as she watches me dress.
I find my jeans first. Then the shirt, which landed over a chair by the window.
She’s already drowsing by the time I slip out of the bedroom. In the room next door, I check on Paige, but she’s still sleeping. That’s good. The doctors said that’s normal. I should be sleeping too, and wouldn’t I love being wrapped around Jane?
I can’t let myself drift off in her bed. Look what happened last time. A fire. Devastation. Death.
Mateo is in the kitchen, which is predictable. He can usually be found wherever there’s food, even in the middle of the night. It’s something of a miracle that he stays as fit as he does, even with regular workouts. There’s a plate of scones in front of him, a dish of clotted cream, but he’s ignoring them in favor of his phone. There’s some argument about what constitutes exclusivity in his contract with a major production company.
He sees me and ends the call. “My agent,” he says.
“Want my lawyer to take a look at it?”
“Nah. They’re just busting my balls because they want me to accept a bullshit offer for the sequel, but I’m going to hold out until they give me what I’m worth.”
I grab one of the scones and scarf it down in two bites. “Would you have ever imagined the two of us like this back when we were sharing a shithole?”
“This was the plan. Getting rich. Taking over the goddamn world.”
Wind knocks some flowers outside against the window. “Remember a few years back you had that nutjob stalker? The one who sent you dead animals?”
“I try to forget about that honestly. I still shudder when I see a raccoon.”
“The cops ever find the guy?”
“There was a profiler who thought it was a woman. And no. After a while, the packages stopped coming, and there was no reason to continue. They said maybe she found a new target.”
