Chapter 7
“Ican explain,” she said, but the words were hollow even to her own ears.
Thad turned to Rocco, trying not to focus on Saphire at all. He wasn’t sure he could trust himself to speak to her until his temper returned to earth. “What are you talking about?”
“I had her checked out,” Rocco said, as though it were of little importance.
“You had me investigated?” Her look was one of abject horror. “What the hell?” She pushed up from the table, shaking now from rage. It was a welcome relief from embarrassment and guilt. “Who the hell are you to think you have any right to meddle in my life like that?”
Rocco’s tone was impatient. “I have no care for your life. But as for my friend …”
“You don’t think he’s a big enough boy to take care of himself?”
“Apparently not,” Rocco responded harshly. “Or he would know better than to get mixed up with a woman like you.”
Thaddeus held a hand up to silence Rocco. Slowly, he turned to face Saphire. “Is it true?”
Guilt was back, bouncing through her like a fast-paced ball. “I’m not going to talk about it in front of him.”
Thad’s eyes dropped to her hand. There was no ring. Saphire had taken great satisfaction in ripping it off in the hallway of her home and throwing it dramatically against the carpeted floor seconds after discovering her husband’s infidelity.
“Is it true?” He repeated, his voice colder than she’d ever believed him capable of.
She gripped the side of the table for support. “It isn’t like it sounds.”
“You are either married, or you are not.”
“I …”
“Tell him,” Rocco urged, satisfied at least that she truly felt a weight of betrayal now that her dishonesty was revealed.
“Yes.” She nodded, every part of her numb. “I’m … married.” The sentence tasted like bile.
Thad pressed back in his chair and stared out at the ocean. The words kept chasing around his brain, and he could make no sense of them. Yes. I’m married. I’m married. I’m married.
“Thad?” She put a hand on his shoulder, but he angled his head to show his displeasure in the contact.
“You should go. I have no interest in getting in the middle of a marriage.”
“Thad,” she sobbed his name and squeezed his shoulder but he wouldn’t look at her.
“If I had known, I would never,” he turned cold, bitter eyes to face her, “have touched you. Not a hair on your head.”
She shook her head. “Please, let me explain.”
“You’re married.”
She nodded. “But …”
“No.” He shouted the word, timing it with a slap of his palm onto the table. She startled at the aggressive response. “Am I not being clear? Get out. Go.”
A sob bubbled from her and she pressed her hands to her mouth to stop any more. “How?” She whispered, for she was a virtual prisoner on this island.
“My helicopter can take her,” Rocco said softly. Now that his point had been made, he almost felt sorry for her.
“Fine,” Thad nodded without so much as a look in her direction.
She stared at him, her eyes overflowing with tears, her face blotchy. Silently she willed him to look at her. To see her for who she was, to see the love that flowed through her.
“Go.” He said again, his face autocratic.
“Is that really what you want?” She forced herself to ask the words.
“I want … what I want is to … erase everything we’ve shared from my memory.”
It was decisive and cutting, as he’d intended it to be. He watched her leave, and immediately felt a need to beg her to stay.
“I’m sorry,” Rocco said gently.
“You don’t need to do that.”
“To apologize?”
Thad’s expression was grim. “No. To … I don’t know. Why did you get your guy to look into her?”
Rocco toyed with his watch. “You sounded different.” He lifted his shoulders. “You were …”
Happy.
“I guess I should thank you.” Strange, given that Rocco had destroyed everything Thaddeus had been reveling in.
“It’s not necessary. I know you would have done the same for me.”
“God, Rocco.” Thaddeus turned to stare at the ocean. “Married?”
“Yeah. Only a few months.”
Thaddeus swore. “I cannot believe it.”
“I saw the certificate.”
“Perhaps there is a mistake. Or they have now separated.”
Rocco’s expression was apologetic. “The husband’s some sort of aspiring politician. I saw a photo of them at an event only a fortnight ago.”
Another curse escaped from Thaddeus’s lips. “What’s he like?” He shook his head. “Don’t answer that. Knowing would kill me.”
Rocco’s laugh was without humor. “Come on. Forget her. She’s gone. And if there’s one thing you never have any trouble with, it’s meeting women.”
But he’d never met a woman like Saphire.
Not one.
And she owed him an explanation.
* * *
After several wrong turns and a couple of panic-attack moments, Saphire burst out of the house and into a courtyard. The helicopter was way across the grass, and there was a pilot-looking-person propped against the side. She ran towards it, her eyes blurred by the constant stream of tears.
She knew that she would never get over this.
That leaving him was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.
But that she had to do it.
He’d given her no choice.
Her feet stumbled on uneven ground and she fell all the way to the grass. Her hands smashed against it and she cried out. The temptation to fall flat and sob and wail was great, but she pushed up instead, standing fluidly and resuming her journey to the aircraft.
She was almost there, about to step off the island and away from the dream that had quickly become the worst kind of nightmare.
Her eyes and thoughts were focused solely on the escape route.
She didn’t hear him running behind her. Nor did she see the way his face was etched with emotion when finally, he caught up to her.
The first indication she had that he was with her was his hand, hard and demanding, as it wrapped around her arm. “You are really just going to leave like this?” He shouted the question, his whole manner tautened by fury.
“You told me to get out,” she fired back, pulling her arm free with a force that she knew would quickly give way to weakness and grief.
A muscle moved in his cheek. “I need to know why.” Another shouted statement.
In contrast, her words were barely louder than a whisper. She couldn’t meet his eyes. The anger she saw in them was chilling. “Why do you think?”
“I have no idea. I would never have thought you capable of this.”
“Me either.” She sucked in a deep breath and forced herself to stare up at his beautiful face. Intense wistfulness besieged her.
“Why? Just tell me why, before you go.”
His words were like little hammer blows of desperation against her stricken heart. “You really want me to go?”
“Of course,” he snapped. “You’ve made a fool of me. You’ve used me. You are dishonest. But I still need to know.”
She had carried the secret for days and she was so sick of its burden. “Please just let me speak.” Tears stained the words. “Don’t … don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
Her eyes shimmered. “Like you hate me.”
“Just … tell me,” he commanded flatly, trying to suppress the betrayal from his features.
Her hair lifted in the breeze. The words came out with deceptive neutrality. “Remember I told you last night about my friend Anita?”
He expelled a harsh breath. It was worse than he’d thought. “So? You wanted to compete with her? Do something just as sick to prove your friendship?”
Saphire blanched. “No. God, no.” Her blue eyes were filled with pain that he could, even briefly, believe her capable of such childish gamesmanship. “I was the other woman. The husband she’s sleeping with? That’s my husband.”
Comprehension slammed into him. Anger, love, sorrow, it all threaded through him. “Jesus. You are telling me your best friend slept with your husband?”
She nodded, and angled her body away, so that she could stare out at the ocean.
Every thing seemed to still, as feeling enveloped them in its folds.
“I found them in our bed together. The day I met you. I went straight from that particularly unpalatable scene to the airport. And I booked onto the first flight I could find with every intention of drinking myself into oblivion so that I didn’t have to remember what it was like to see my husband screwing a woman I’ve grown up with. ”
“Saphire,” he groaned, positioning himself into her line of sight. He studied her with an increasing sense of worry. She was miserable. And he should have known. He should have read her vulnerability and pushed her to disclose its root. “I wish you had told me.”
Her lips twisted into a smile, though it was eerily humorless. “You were meant to be a stupid one night stand. Revenge sex.”
“Revenge sex?”
She nodded. “Stupid, idiot me decided that the only way I could ever go back to him and forgive him was if I did something just as horrible to him. Don’t you see that? It has a crazy kind of logic to it. I wanted to hurt him, Thad. I wanted to rip his heart out and stomp all over it.”
Thaddeus’s own heart was being shredded by her words. “So you planned to fuck me until you felt like you’d leveled the score, and then you were going to go back to him.”
She flinched at his harsh curse. “I’m not proud of it. I’m so not proud.” She sobbed again. “By the time you and I had gone beyond just stupid sex it was too late. I didn’t know how to tell you.”
He dragged a hand through his thick hair and stared at a point in the distance. “You were going to leave now and go back to him?”
Her shoulders were tiny as they shrugged her confusion. “This was a fantasy. Nothing more. That’s my real life. And I have to go back. I have to go back and face the music at some point.”
Thaddeus stared at her long and hard. “Is it the life you want?”
A tear rolled down her cheek and splashed onto her breast. Another followed but Thad caught it with his fingertip.
“What I want is for my husband to have not cheated with my best friend. What I want is to have not met you two months after I married him. What I want is to have realized sooner what a douche he is, and not to have wasted more than ten years of my life devoted to him.”