Page 37 of About that Fling (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #2)

“Nana just cleared her throat and said, ‘excuse me.’ As soon as Gramps’s tormentor turned around, Nana decked her.”

“What?” Jenna laughed, picturing a little old woman smugly sucking a bruised knuckle. “She hit her?”

“Yep. She was aiming for her jaw, but just got her shoulder. Still, it was a good punch. She grabbed the cane back and told the woman not to touch any member of her family ever again. Guess it worked. No one ever messed with Gramps—or with Nana—after that.”

Still laughing, Jenna shook her head. “I’d have loved to see that.”

“I’ll have to show you the video sometime.”

“There’s video?”

“Yeah. It was at my wedding. Actually, Gramps’s tormentor was Mia’s mom.”

Jenna blinked. “Seriously?”

Adam nodded, while Jenna’s mind reeled. She’d heard this story before, but from a completely different viewpoint. She could hear Mia laughing a little sadly over cocktails one night not long after they’d become fast friends.

I’m divorced, yes. Probably should have known the marriage was doomed when someone from his family punched my mom at the wedding.

Mia had chuckled uncomfortably at that point in her story.

It was the only time all day that my new husband stopped complaining about how much everything cost and actually smiled.

Jenna must have fallen quiet for a few beats too long, because Adam shot her an inquisitive look. “What’s on your mind?”

Jenna looked out the window, considering. “Do you think there’s any chance Mia regrets leaving you?”

Adam didn’t respond right away. He also didn’t ask what prompted the question, which surprised her. She studied the side of his face, enjoying the way his eye color changed in the flash of oncoming headlights.

“Do I think she regrets the affair? Sure, in hindsight I think she realized it wasn’t the most graceful way to exit a failing marriage.”

“No, I don’t mean that, exactly,” Jenna said. “I guess I meant—I don’t know, do you ever think she wants you back?”

Something dark flickered in his eyes, but it might have been headlights again. The sun had dropped low behind the coastal range to the west, casting dark shadows on the interstate. “Why would you ask that?”

“I don’t know. Just wondering. Is it harder to be the person who leaves or the person who’s left?”

“That’s a question I’ve thought about myself.” He turned and looked at her as if assessing something. Jenna waited, hands folded in her lap.

“I’ve never told anyone this before,” he said.

“What?”

He drew a deep breath, hands still steady on the wheel. “About six months after she moved out, Amelia’s car broke down. She was in a seedy neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. It was late at night and her tire blew out.”

“That must have been terrifying.”

“She called me. Mark was out of town, and the place she got stuck wasn’t too far from my office. It was late at night, but she knew I’d still be working.”

“She couldn’t have called a tow truck?”

“She could have, but she didn’t.”

Jenna tucked her other leg up under her, feeling chilled even though Adam had switched the heat on a minute ago. “What did you do?”

“I went to get her, of course. It was nearly midnight, and I was scrambling on a case I had to present the next morning, but I didn’t want her to get hurt. So I went.” He took a breath, and Jenna waited, not sure she wanted to hear the rest of the story.

“Did something happen?”

She tried to keep her voice from shaking, but must not have succeeded. Adam glanced over, then shook his head. “Nothing like that. Not like you’re thinking. But I can’t say it wasn’t on her mind.”

“How do you mean?”

“I let her wait in my car while I changed the tire. After I finished, I got back in and told her she was good to go. That’s when she broke down crying. She kept saying how sorry she was, how she felt scared and confused and that she missed me.”

Jenna gripped the armrest, hating the image of Mia in tears almost as much as she hated the thought of Adam sitting solid and strong beside his ex-wife with his arm around the back of her seat, trying to comfort her.

“Was it the first time she’d apologized for—for what happened?”

“God, no. She’d apologized so many times at that point that I’d stopped hearing the words. But this was the first time I’d seen any sign she genuinely regretted it. That if she had a do-over, she’d have done things differently.”

“She wanted you back?”

He nodded tightly, just once. “She said she did. Right then, I think she believed it. I told her no. I gave her a Kleenex and sent her on her way. Called later to make sure she got home safely.”

“Did she bring it up again? Or did you—did you talk about it with her when things cooled down?”

“Yeah. A week later, I got an email from her. It was all businesslike, mostly talking about divorce papers and court dates. Toward the end, she apologized for her ‘moment of weakness.’ That’s what she called it.

Said she hadn’t meant anything by it and could we please forget the whole thing happened. ”

“You never discussed it again?”

Adam shook his head. “I’d mostly pushed it out of my mind until now.” He cleared his throat. “The thing is, I believed her. She really didn’t mean it. She didn’t want me back. But the fact that I screwed up her narrative—well, that threw her for a loop.”

“Her narrative?”

Adam seemed to hesitate a moment, his eyes on the horizon. Or maybe he was just watching traffic. It was surprisingly thick for a Friday evening with stars pricking the black sky and a soft spatter of rain on the windshield.

“When you make a decision to leave someone, you tell yourself a story,” he said.

“You convince yourself you have no choice, or the relationship is doomed, or the person or the situation is so awful that this is the only thing you can possibly do. You have to save yourself. You believe the story with all your heart. You need to believe it if you want the courage to leave.”

Jenna nodded. How many times had Mia said that? I had to leave, I was dying inside.

How many times had she said it herself?

I couldn’t marry Shawn. Not after everything, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life with him.

“So you messed up her narrative by coming to her rescue,” Jenna said. “By leaving work to be there for her when she needed you.”

He nodded. “Something I hadn’t always done. I can admit that.”

“Sometimes, kindness is the worst thing,” she said. “Especially if it unravels your entire justification for something you’ve done. Something you might not be very proud of in the first place.”

He looked at her. “Very true.” He glanced back at the road, quiet again. “How about we talk about something else? Something more uplifting.”

Jenna untucked her feet, lowering them to the floor. She let her left hand drift so it was touching his now, fingers twining with fingers.

“More uplifting than your dying grandmother and your painful divorce?”

He smiled, his eyes flicking to hers. “Sure. Like the Holocaust.”

“How about dead puppies?”

“The black plague?”

“Euthanasia?”

He lifted his hand, folding his palm over hers. He slid them both to her knee, the heel of his hand rubbing her knuckles like the space behind a cat’s ears.

“That’s what I love about you, Jenna. You always know how to make me smile.”

She smiled in response, almost a required reaction to the word smile . Or maybe the word love . It was getting difficult to tell.

Early the next morning, Adam drove from their Seattle hotel to his sister’s house in Ballard. Beth had tried to convince them to stay over the night before, but he’d insisted he didn’t want to bother her by arriving late.

It wasn’t the whole truth.

In reality, he wanted more time alone with Jenna. He’d made sure to book a hotel room with two beds, not wanting to presume anything.

But Jenna had taken one look at the setup, tossed her suitcase on the bed closest to the door, and turned to smile at him.

“Looks like we’ve got a place to store our bags.

” She’d grinned wider, then pulled her sweater off over her head and reached for the button on her jeans.

He stood there blinking at her in the rosy light of the hotel room, utterly transfixed by the creaminess of her skin, the static that made her hair float like a halo around her head.

He’d never seen anything so beautiful.

Adam shook his head and hit the blinker, bringing himself back to the present. Probably not a good idea to show up with a hard-on for his first visit with his sister in three months.

He turned onto the narrow avenue where Beth had lived for the last five years, counting off houses and hoping he’d remember which place was hers. He’d been there plenty of times, but he usually came straight from the airport from some nearby city where he’d been contracted to do mediation.

He glanced over at Jenna, who was smoothing her hair with her hands. Reaching over, he rested a hand on her knee. “You’ll do great.”

She gave him a weak smile and nodded. “I hope so.”

“Just be yourself.”

“Yeah, but which self? The professional self who stoically holds it together in business meetings about illicit penis pictures, or the self who gets giddy on wine at girls’ night?”

Adam grinned and pulled into his sister’s driveway. “You weren’t that stoic.”

“My stoic self is insulted you think so. My girls’ night self admits you’re probably right.”

He turned off the ignition and leaned over to plant a quick kiss on her mouth. The temptation to make it a longer kiss surged like a wave, but he resisted. “Just be whichever self feels right in the moment. Maybe not the one who did that swirly thing with her tongue last night, though.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, and reached for the door handle.