Dalton, Tymber - Stoneface (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (26 page)

All the pieces suddenly clicked into place. Bob had been on a business trip the same time Amy left.

Bob hadn’t been available to help Liam move.

Ruthie still swore Bob was having an affair.

The prepaid phone Gwen spotted in Amy’s stuff.

Gwen didn’t want to contemplate if Jack knew about this part of Amy’s secret or not. Had she even told him about Ruthie? She couldn’t remember.

As the full impact of Amy’s betrayal hit Gwen, her breath left in a whoosh. She stood on feet that had suddenly gone numb. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head and backing away from them. “I don’t believe it. I
can’t
believe it. After all she went through, you do
this
to her?”

Bob tried to speak, but Gwen pointed at him. “No. Don’t. Don’t you
dare
make excuses!”

Amy hadn’t moved from her chair. “Gwen, please, we didn’t mean for it to happen. It just did.”

Gwen felt ill. Worse, she felt like an idiot. No wonder Amy didn’t want to tell her and Liam about the secret man in her life. “How long has this been going on?” Gwen shrilly asked. She didn’t care that the whole waiting room had gone silent and was staring at them.

“Six months,” Amy softly admitted.

Six months.
For six months, Ruthie had kept insisting something was wrong.

How right she’d been.

Gwen couldn’t stop shaking. She somehow managed to turn herself around and get pointed toward the exit. Bob caught up with her outside and tried to grab her arm to stop her, but she wheeled on him. “Don’t fucking touch me, you son of a bitch!” she screamed. “How the
fuck
could you do this to Ruthie?”

“You don’t know what it’s like living with her, Gwen. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but it did. I’m sorry this is going to hurt Ruthie, but I’m not sorry I finally have a chance to be happy with a normal woman after all the years of crap I’ve had to deal with.”

Gwen’s stomach rolled. She thought she might actually throw up. She held up a hand to silence him and stumbled backward. “Get the fuck away from me, you lying bastard. I can’t believe I actually thought you were a good guy.” She ran for her car, only realizing she was sobbing once inside. Her fingers trembled so bad she dropped her key three times before she seated it in the ignition and started the engine.

When she walked into the living room at home, she found Liam on the couch, working on his laptop. “How’d it go, sis?” Once he spotted her tears, he set the computer on the coffee table and opened his arms.

She fell onto the couch and Liam held her while she sobbed. She felt grateful he didn’t bother asking what happened.

Retelling it might make her sick.

Her BlackBerry rang—“Wipe Out.”

Ruthie.

She shoved it at him. “I can’t talk to her,” she said, her voice a haggard whisper. “Please, talk to her. Tell her anything, but I can’t talk to her yet.”

Confused, he answered. “Hiya, Ruthie, what’s up?…She’s upstairs taking a nap. I kept her up late last night. Don’t want to talk to me, huh?” he joked. “That’s okay, you know I was just teasing you, kiddo. So what’re you up to?” After chatting with her for five minutes, he got her off the phone.

His eyes met Gwen’s. He brushed the hair from her forehead. “All right, sis,” he quietly said. “I take it things didn’t go well. What happened? Talk to me.”

“I met the baby’s father,” she managed to choke out. “Now I know why Amy was terrified to tell us who he was.” She stared at her phone, which he still held.

He frowned as he studied the phone. Then he closed his eyes and swore as he connected the dots. “Oh, no.”

She nodded. “Oh, yes. The fuckwad was there at the doctor with her.”

He looked at her. “Oh, fuck me. Poor Ruthie. Did he explain himself?”

“I didn’t give him a chance. There’s nothing either of them can say to me to explain themselves. They’ve been seeing each other for six months.” She laid her head in his lap and let him stroke her hair. “There is no excuse. What? She accidentally fell on his dick enough times to get knocked up?”

He laughed. “That’s a good one. You should use that in a book.”

“It’s not funny.”

He sighed. “No, unfortunately, it’s not funny.”

She wanted Tim and Jack. She wanted to curl up in their arms and sob herself to sleep. But they were a half a country away in Rapid City, and Jack wanted nothing to do with her.

“I can’t tell Ruthie,” she finally said. “It’ll kill her. Or she’ll kill him. Or I’ll kill him, I don’t know. All I do know is I can’t tell her.”

“Don’t tell her. You shouldn’t. It’s not your job.”

“But what do I say? She’s my friend.”

“That’s why you shouldn’t say anything.” He stroked her hair. “It’s between Bob and her.” He glared. “And Amy.”

“I hate Amy for this.” She looked back at all the times Amy made snide comments about Ruthie. “She knew, all this time, what she was doing and could look me in the eye and…” She swallowed back bile. “I hate them.”

“I think it’s safe to say you’ll agree with me on rescinding our invite to her to live with us.”

“Uh, yeah. And she can fend for herself with Mom and Dad.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes. He laced his fingers through hers. “I hear real estate’s pretty reasonable in South Dakota. You know damn well Jack loves you, too. I saw how he was over you, talked to him myself. He was probably trying to protect his heart, afraid you’d never come back once you left for Ohio.”

She ignored the last part of his comment. “I’m
not
leaving you.”

“Who says you have to?”

She rolled over in his lap and looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “There’s nothing keeping me here. I sure as hell don’t want anything to do with Amy after this, either. I think my relationship with Mom and Dad would benefit from some distance and a few state lines between us. I can work from anywhere I have high-speed internet. I bet Tim’s offer is still good.” He played with her hair. “You and Jack could have a heart-to-heart and patch things up.”

“You’d do that for me?”

He nodded. “Uh, duh. You’re my baby sister. You’re the one person in my life I know loves me the way I am.” He brushed another stray hair away from her face. “You’re as miserable without them as I was living at Mom and Dad’s. I’ve got my happily-ever-after, romance writer girl. Well, happily enough for me for now considering what the past couple of years have been like. It’s time for you to get yours.”

She snorted. “Tell Jackson Kelly that. I won’t ask Tim to break up with him, and Jackson made it perfectly clear to me where I stand with him.”

“So? Then we can move anywhere you want. You name it. I’ve got health insurance, so that’s not an issue. I’ll pay my share of the bills. Roomies. We could move to Laguna Beach.” He winked.

She ignored his implication. “Too expensive to live there.” She’d never lived anywhere but Ohio, within twenty minutes of her parents. “I don’t know. Moving’s a huge step.”

“Think about it. Whatever you want to do, kiddo. Seriously. You and me.” He held her chin and made her meet his gaze. “Let’s take a chance and do it. As long as we have each other, we can do anything, right? Just you and me.”

She patted his arm. “You and me.”

* * * *

Jack spent a miserable morning at work. He knew he radiated a foul mood from the minimum ten-foot distance everyone gave him. He threw pens and file folders down on his desk, and nearly broke his desk phone when he slammed the handset down.

It didn’t help that he’d gotten into a screaming match with Tim the night before over the phone, and again this morning. Now he was wondering if he’d lost both Gwen and Tim because of his stupidity.

I should call her. I should call her, apologize, and beg her to come back.

He couldn’t make himself do it. Mostly, because he didn’t know why he wanted to do it. He still wasn’t convinced his feelings for Gwen were really
for
Gwen and not because she looked like Mel. Sure, Gwen was a great person in her own right, but would it be fair to her in case in a month or a year he realized he wasn’t in love with her for who she was?

That didn’t ease the ache in his heart.

* * * *

She called Ruthie back a little later, after she’d blown her nose and washed her face and didn’t feel like throwing up. She forced cheer into her voice. “Hey, girlie, what’s up?”

Ruthie sounded subdued. “I need to talk to you.”

Gwen’s stomach knotted and threatened to upend. “About what?”

Gwen heard her take a deep breath. “I’m going to leave Bob.”

“What?”

“Before you ask me, yes, I took my meds this morning, and yes, I had breakfast and lunch.”

Gwen ignored Liam’s questioning look. “Honey, what’s going on?” As if she couldn’t guess. Gwen wondered if the rat bastard told Ruthie she’d confronted him and Amy at the doctor’s office.

Ruthie actually sounded calmer and more rational than she had in years. “I overheard him talking to someone on the phone last night. I didn’t confront him. I heard him talking about meeting her today. So I called him on his cell a little bit ago, asked him how he was doing, and he said he was at work.”

Gwen closed her eyes. “And?”

“So I hung up with him and called his office. I told them who I was, that I’d just got off the phone with my husband, and said he asked me to call them to see if he left his umbrella there. See? I didn’t go off half cocked. The receptionist went and looked for me. Obviously, he wasn’t in his office. So I called him right back and pretended like I forgot I needed him to bring stuff home for me from the store and talked for another minute or two, like everything was fine. Then he told me he has to go, that he’s going into a meeting.”

“Maybe he didn’t mean at the office.”

“No, he told me his receptionist came in to tell him his appointment was there early.”

Gwen didn’t know what to say, so she kept her mouth shut.

“Gwen, I can’t live like this. I know I don’t always think clearly, but dammit, for the past six months, something’s been different about him and even I know it. He hides his cell phone all the time. If he leaves it around, he’s wiped the call logs. He changed the password on his e-mail account. He did a bunch of little stuff I didn’t think about at first. I know I’m not easy to live with, but I can’t live with him if I can’t trust him.” She cried. “He’d be better off without me anyway.”

“Ruthie,” she soothed, “please don’t talk like that.”

She let out a snort of disgust. “I don’t mean killing myself. I don’t even mean killing him.” She sniffled. “I already called my brother. He’s driving over right now. He said I can stay with them. He’s always hated Bob anyway.”

“Are you sure this is what you want to do?”

“Yeah. I don’t even want to know who it is. I don’t care.”

Gwen stifled a guilty pang. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

Ruthie sniffled again. “Listen, I need to get off here and pack some stuff. If Bob calls you looking for me, don’t tell him where I am, okay? Please? Just tell him I’m safe and that I wanted to go away for a few days. I need to get my shit together, get my life back. I’m tired of living like this. You can call me on my cell, I’ll have it with me.”