Page 13 of The Clover Chapel (Jamison Valley 2)
What was I going to do?
Swiping my phone from an end table, I pulled up my friend’s number.
“Hey!” Steffie answered. “Meet any hot cowboys yet?”
I laughed. She knew I was in a committed relationship with Logan but that didn’t stop her from wanting me to find a mountain man to climb. Steffie was quite open with her sexuality. In college, her antics had been amusing and . . . enlightening. When she’d started dating my father, I had told her in no uncertain terms to never bring up her sex life to me again.
“No cowboys, though I did run into my husband.” I held the phone away from my ear, waiting for the shriek I knew was coming.
“What!” she shouted. “You’re fucking kidding me!”
“Not kidding.” For the next ten minutes, I filled her in on the details from the party and how I had reacted to seeing Nick.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
I sighed. “I don’t know. I have to tell Logan all the details even though he’s going to be so angry. But keeping it from him feels like a betrayal.” I had only given Logan a vague account of my marriage, blaming my decision on youth and alcohol. No one but Steffie ever knew the truth about that night and why I’d married Nick: that I’d fallen in love with him in only five hours.
“Yeah, Logan’s going to flip. So is Trent.”
I winced at the mention of my father. “I know this isn’t fair of me to ask, but please don’t tell him. Not yet. I’m not ready to deal with him.”
“I get it. Consider my lips sealed.”
I didn’t have a loving father-daughter relationship, but even with my father being her boyfriend, she never wasted effort pushing for us to get closer.
Trent Austin had never had any interest in his daughter. I wished I could pinpoint when it had started, identify that trigger and fill in the missing pieces, but as far back as I could remember, he just . . . didn’t like me. He tolerated my brother, Ethan, and at times made some effort in his son’s case. But I had never been much more than just another person living in his house.
After I was born, his marriage to my mother had started to deteriorate. Maybe he blamed me, instead of himself, for chasing her into the arms of another man. Regardless of the reason, my father and I had never been close.
And I had never been quite good enough.
It was only a couple of years ago that I’d finally stopped trying to meet his unreachable standards.
It was acceptable for him to parade around with younger women and for my brother to get divorce after divorce, but being embarrassed by his daughter was deplorable. My marriage was an embarrassment of unfathomable proportions.
On the flight home from Las Vegas, I had debated not telling my father about my marriage. Had I not needed to discuss my divorce options with his attorney, I would have kept Nick a secret. As it was, an Austin marriage without a prenuptial agreement put our family at financial risk and I’d been forced to have an extremely unpleasant conversation with my parents.
I had disparaged our family’s reputation by acting like a stupid whore, those having been his exact words.
At the time, he had been screwing his twenty-two-year-old secretary.
“So? What are you going to do about Nick?” Steffie asked, pulling me from my thoughts.
“I don’t know. Go back in time and not be so stupid?”
Not fall in love.
Was it love? Nine years was a long time to dissect every bit of one night, but in all that time, I still couldn’t come up with the right answer. Deep down, a part of me still believed that my connection to Nick had been real and he must have had good reason to leave.
“It’s been a long time. Talk to him. Go from there,” Steffie said.
“You’re right. I’ll take a few days to pull myself together and then approach. Thanks. And thank you for not mentioning this to Father.”
“Chicks before dicks.”
I rolled my eyes before laughing.
“What are you going to tell Logan?” she asked.
