Chapter 11 Arden #2
She could hear it all over downtown. At first it had been nothing except music and people wandering in and out, but now Grant was up on the small stage beside the gazebo with a microphone. She couldn’t understand the static-garbled words, but she knew the cadence of his voice.
It was him. He was really here.
But that was Grant to a T. He was a very hands-on politician, traveling to small towns all over the state.
Years ago, when she didn’t know him nearly as well as she did now, she had been impressed by it.
She thought it meant he cared. Now she understood it for what it was: a blatant ploy for attention and votes.
Senator Grant Hamilton was a lobbyist’s dream come true. He would take money from anyone who wanted to slide him a kickback under the table. He had never met a party plank he wouldn’t kick down if someone paid him to vote the other side of the aisle. He didn’t have a spine so much as a rubber band.
There had been a time when Arden had basked in his attention, astonished that he was interested in her at all. Her slowly growing disillusionment had struggled with the fact that she did genuinely love him. Had loved him. All of that had been left behind her now. Grant was her past, not her future.
But she was still curious what he was talking about. What was he stumping for this time, the ban on shifter-human marriage that he had been talking up during the final stages of their divorce, or some new bill about something else entirely?
The crowd had grown larger. Arden wandered along the outskirts of it. With her sun hat jammed down on her head and her hair in profuse humidity-enhanced curls, she felt comfortably anonymous in the crowd; no one was going to look twice at—
“Arden!”
Arden nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of her name.
A hand settled on her arm. Turning, she found herself face to face with her ex-husband’s personal bodyguard.
“It is you,” he said, holding her implacably against her attempts to squirm out of his grip.
“I saw you sneaking around the edge of the crowd, and I couldn’t believe it.
I thought, surely that can’t be Arden. Arden said she was leaving and didn’t want anything to do with us.
So that can’t be Arden, it has to be someone who looks a little bit like her. ”
“Get your hands off me, Sloan,” Arden gritted out between her teeth.
She and Sloan had always been reasonably friendly, as he had been an inevitable fixture of her married life; he went everywhere with Grant, not out of personal friendship but because Grant paid him well.
But she had thought he liked her. Sloan was one of the only people she had thought about confiding in as her married life became a misery.
Now she felt as if the two of them were on opposite sides of a vast wall.
“You disappeared so completely that the best private detectives Grant’s money can buy couldn’t find you.
Even I couldn’t find you.” Sloan frowned down at her.
He had the oddest eyes she’d ever seen on anyone.
Heterochromia, it was called; she remembered him telling her that once.
One eye was green, the other a brown so light it was nearly gold.
“We thought for a while something might have happened to you.”
“Like you’d care,” Arden snapped, making another attempt to pull away. “Grant took everything from me in the divorce. The house, the money, everything.”
“None of that was yours in the first place.”
“Some of it was! I helped him build that. He didn’t have to fight me so hard. He was trying to punish me, and you knew that, Sloan,” she spat between her teeth. “And you went along with it.”
“You could have it all back, if you want it.”
“I don’t want it back!” She saw guilt on Sloan’s face, and Arden followed up on her advantage.
“You know what he’s like, Sloan. You know how controlling he is.
I mean, you’re the person he ordered to follow me whenever I wanted to go anywhere.
I wasn’t even allowed to go to my mom’s funeral because he was afraid I was going to cheat on him! ”
People nearby were starting to look at them. Sloan leaned in closer. “If you don’t want a scene, settle down.”
“Maybe I do want a scene,” Arden said between her teeth. “All Grant cares about is appearances, after all. I spent my whole married life trying to be Grant Hamilton’s perfect wife, and it nearly broke me. Now I’m free, and I’m not going back.”
“You’re not divorced, Arden.”
Arden reared back as if he’d slapped her. “What?”
“You didn’t know that, did you? You need a decree of marriage dissolution. He didn’t get it.”
“I signed everything he gave me! He told me—” Arden broke off, grinding her teeth. Of course he’d lied to her about that too. “What do I need that I don’t have?”
“The actual divorce needs a judge’s signature, and you don’t have it.
He’s still waiting for you to come back.
If he finds you, he’ll make you come back.
” Arden stared at him. Sloan let out a huff of some fierce, angry emotion.
“You little idiot! Don’t you realize I’m trying to help you? The minute he sees you here—”
“What are you doing to her!”
The roar came from behind her, and an instant later Baz came down on Sloan like a whirlwind.
Baz wrenched Sloan’s hand off Arden’s arm—although he was already letting go; she got the impression that if he didn’t, his fingers would have been snapped like five twigs—and Baz interposed himself between her and Sloan.
For an instant, Sloan bristled as if he planned to fight Baz himself. Then he looked around. People in their vicinity were moving away from them, a few people had raised their phones to film the interaction, and up on the stage, Grant had noticed that something was happening.
“Baz, Baz,” Arden whispered, touching his back. “Let’s just leave.” She pulled her hat down. Grant wouldn’t recognize her at this distance, he couldn’t recognize her.
But Sloan would tell him everything that just happened. Sloan liked her, but he had always taken Grant’s side.
You’re not divorced, Arden.
Her entire soul and body shuddered away from that terrible reality. She could not let Grant see her. He could not know that she was here.
“Baz, please. I want to go.”
She expected Baz to ignore her entreaties, just like every man in her life always had. But with her hand on his arm, he backed away from Sloan, glaring at him with an if-looks-could-kill expression.
“You put one finger on her again, buddy, and you’re going to have a huge problem,” Baz snarled—and it was a snarl, rumbling up from inside his chest, where his animal lived.
Arden was too shaken to fully register it, but for an instant she thought she saw Sloan’s two-toned eyes flash gold.
Grant Hamilton—notorious anti-shifter senator Grant Hamilton—couldn’t possibly have a shifter bodyguard ... could he?
Then Sloan whirled to intercept several people trying to film the commotion with their phones. “Get those down. Knock it off. There’s nothing happening here. Put those down, people, or I’m getting the cops over here for crowd control.”
Meanwhile, Baz hustled Arden away with his arm around her.
She realized that she was shaking. She couldn’t have seen what she thought she saw; it must have been the afternoon sun glinting off Sloan’s eyes.
There was no way she could have been around the man for years without realizing he was a shifter.
“What the hell was that guy’s problem?” Baz demanded. But he kept his voice low, trying not to draw any more attention than they were already getting. “Did he hurt you? We can press charges. Like I told you, Lexie’s dad is the former sheriff, and his name still carries a lot of weight around here.”
Arden shook her head. She forced herself not to look back, like a child hiding under the covers, as if Grant wouldn’t see her if she didn’t look at him.
“Let’s just get out of here.” Her breath hitched in a sob.
Before she realized what was happening, Baz’s strong arms were around her, pulling her close. Arden resisted briefly, and then, with a small gasp, let herself be pulled to his chest and held there.
“Are you okay?” Baz asked the top of her head.
“I’m fine.” She choked on a half-sob, but her trembling had begun to ease. “Let’s just go.”
“Yes. Of course.” He held her for another long moment until she pushed away and turned to climb up into the passenger side of the truck. Baz got in the other side, frowning.
“It doesn’t seem like talking would help, but I’ll listen if you need me to.”
“I know,” Arden murmured, looking down at her hands, where she had clutched the handles of her shopping bags tightly enough to leave red marks in her skin. “Thanks.”
“Are you hungry? There are a few good lunch places in town.”
Arden thought about the risk of running into Grant anywhere around town. Or Sloan, which at this point was almost as bad.
You’re not divorced, Arden.
“I—I’m not really hungry yet,” she said, swallowing. “Can we get takeout and take it back to Windrock and eat there?”
“Sure,” Baz said easily. “The others would love something that didn’t come from a cooler or a can. We can pick up burgers.”
He didn’t push her to talk. They got carryout from a drive-thru. Once they were back on the road, with the radio playing and the town falling behind them, she began to feel the knots in her chest loosening, one by one.
The radio went into a newsbreak. — and Senator Harrison is on the second week of his tour of smaller towns, raising public awareness of the shifter marriage ban that the Senator is co-sponsoring, currently under debate on the Senate floor —
“Oh, that guy,” Baz said, his voice full of scorn. “Is that what upset you so much? Don’t worry, that kind of thing never passes. He doesn’t have the votes. It’ll be all right.”
He reached over and turned off the radio. Arden opened her mouth, then closed it.
Baz was right, but not for the reasons he thought.
Grant Harrison was often associated with anti-shifter legislation, but he didn’t care about shifters, either to hate them or like them.
He signed on to anti-shifter bills for the attention and the kickbacks.
If the bill didn’t have the votes to pass, Grant would just find some new cause to associate himself with.
He had no real vested interest in the legislation itself.
But what he did worry about was his image. Such as the blow from having his pretty young wife very publicly leave him.
What the hell had Sloan meant, the divorce wasn’t final? What did that mean for her?
She realized Baz was looking at her with concern.
“I’m okay,” she said. “My blood sugar’s a little low, I guess. Maybe I should’ve had something to eat in town after all.”
“You can eat in the truck, I don’t mind.”
“It’s okay. I can wait ‘til we get there.”
As Baz signaled the turn at the red-painted boulder, she looked in the truck’s rear-view mirror. It seemed to her that a car had been following them for a while, but so far back that she couldn’t make it out clearly.
It had to be just because there was nowhere else to go on this road, she thought.
But once they turned off on the old road leading to Windrock City, the trees closed around them so quickly that she didn’t have a chance to see whether the car went on by at regular highway speeds, or slowed down when it passed their turn.
She told herself she was just being paranoid.
She almost believed it.