Page 8 of At the Heart of It (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #4)

Since Jonah didn’t reply, Kate was forced to guess. “You’re whoring yourself out for dog adoptions?”

“Pretty much.” He started walking again, putting an end to that line of questioning.

“So why didn’t you mention it when we met?”

“That I’m a shirtless dog walker?” He shrugged. “Didn’t seem relevant.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. You’re smarter than you’re pretending to be right now. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what the hell that’s about.”

She thought she saw him flinch, but he kept walking, not missing a stride. He said nothing for a long time. She’d just decided it was pointless to keep pressing for information when his voice came out in a low rumble.

“You’re asking why I didn’t mention I’m the co-author of a bestselling relationship guide?” he said. “You figure that’s the sort of thing that might have come up during several hours of conversation, followed by an hour of heavy petting?”

“There was no heavy petting!” she argued, earning herself a startled look from the middle-aged joggers running past. She glared and lowered her voice. “You might have had your hand under my jacket?—”

“ My jacket?—”

“But you certainly didn’t grope me or even—” She stopped and frowned up at him. “Wait. Are you trying to distract me?”

Jonah sighed. “It was working until you decided to get technical. I may have learned a technique or two from four years married to America’s leading authority on communication strategies.”

“Unfortunately for you, I’ve read all those books.”

“That is unfortunate.”

He walked a little faster, and Kate had to pick up her pace to keep up.

“I’m just saying,” she continued, struggling not to sound too breathless. “That night in Ashland—we talked about literature and careers and even my breakup,” she said. “Hell, I even quoted from But Not Broken during dinner.”

“You did,” he acknowledged. “Though I didn’t write anything for that book.”

“But you were in it,” Kate argued. “You were part of her happily-ever-after at the end.”

Jonah grunted but said nothing, and it occurred to Kate she was arguing the wrong point entirely. “Jonah, come on. Why didn’t you say anything?”

He raked his fingers through his hair, but didn’t look at her. He kept walking, but his pace slowed just a little.

“All right, fine. Look, I wasn’t thrilled with the way I was portrayed in the book.”

“ But Not Broken ?”

“No, On the Other Hand .”

“The way you were portrayed?” She frowned. “Didn’t you write it?”

“I wrote the sidebars . The comic relief. And yeah, the words were mine—mostly—but not the spin. The whole Average Joe thing—that wasn’t me at all.”

“How do you mean?”

Jonah shrugged and caught her hand. For a second she thought he was trying to hold it, but she realized he was guiding her around a puddle of spilled milkshake, saving her expensive Prada heels.

He let go the instant they were past it, and Kate hated the small flutter of disappointment in her belly.

“I did counterintelligence work in the Marines,” Jonah said slowly. “I was trained in elicitation techniques—ways of evoking trust and comfort in a subject to procure information.”

“You mean like interrogating spies?”

“Something like that. There’s more to it than that, but the bottom line is that I’ve studied communication techniques from some pretty unique angles. The book was supposed to reflect that. To give my insights from that perspective.”

“It did mention you were a Marine,” she said. “Right inside the dust jacket, it said you were a military veteran.”

“It didn’t say what I did in the military,” he pointed out.

“Just that I was a Marine. And a football fan. And an avid fisherman. And a ‘handy guy’ who stomps around the house in a tool belt fixing shit.” He cleared his throat and glanced over at her.

“For the record, I don’t own a tool belt.

And I haven’t been fishing since I was eight. ”

Kate frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I’m saying the publisher decided I was more marketable as an everyman. A regular fella. Not as a cerebral guy, but a blue collar one. The all-American, Average Joe.”

“You couldn’t be both?”

She watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, but he didn’t look at her. “Not according to the publisher.”

“And you went along with it,” she said. “You pretended to be someone you weren’t.”

He shrugged. “I was star-struck and love-struck and blinded by newlywed bliss,” he muttered. “The publisher said the book would sell better that way, and they were right.”

Kate kept walking trying to digest the new information. “So you’re saying you’re not really the guy in the book. The guy who wrote, ‘A relationship is like a fart: if you have to work real hard and strain and force things, it’s probably shit.’”

Jonah laughed. “Actually, I liked that one. And it’s true.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

He sighed, but didn’t say anything. Kate was getting used to these long stretches of silence. In a way, it was nice knowing he cared enough to take the time to formulate a response instead of blurting out the first words that came to mind.

They kept walking, passing a pair of twenty-something women on a park bench who cooed and leaned down to pet Buster. Jonah doled out the business cards and ran through his spiel about adoptable pets at Clearwater Animal Shelter. Kate watched him, mystified by these dual versions of the same guy.

And by his abs. God Almighty, the man should never wear a shirt.

They started walking again, and Kate waited, wondering if he’d pick up the conversation where they’d left it. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded defeated. “Look, I just can’t go back there.”

“To that persona, you mean?”

“The persona, the role—the relationship with Viv.”

She felt a dull ache in her belly and a sharp pang in her chest. Physical manifestations of feelings she couldn’t quite name. Sympathy for him, maybe, and something a little like jealousy. That was dumb. It’s not like she had any claim on Jonah, or any reason to resent his ex-wife’s claim on him.

“Sit with the feelings!”

Viv’s words rang in her brain, an echo from chapter five in But Not Broken .

“You don’t need to analyze or categorize or judge them. Just feel them.”

Kate took a deep breath and ordered herself to keep an impassive expression. “You still love Viv?”

“God, no!” Jonah looked mortified. “Not like that, anyway. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still friendly. And I don’t hate her either, if that’s your next question.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I’ve moved on. She’s moved on. It’s better that way for both of us.”

“I see.”

She was trying to see, anyway. Part of her wished he’d tell her more, that he’d explain the arc of his love affair with Viv and how they’d reached this point.

But part of her—a tiny, jealous part—didn’t want details. Didn’t want to imagine the two of them together laughing, touching, exchanging loving glances across a crowded room.

She was still thinking about it when Jonah spoke again. “What do you remember about the way Viv described me in But Not Broken ?”

His voice was so soft and the question so random that Kate thought she’d heard wrong at first. “Um—well.” She thought back to chapter twelve, the point in the book where Viv had healed her broken heart was getting to know the man who would become her husband.

“She liked that you were rough around the edges,” Kate recalled.

“That you were so different from the abusive asshole she’d been with before—that Ivy League professor?

” She took a deep breath of salt-tinged air, feeling more than a little awkward.

“She loved that your size and your strength made her feel safe instead of scared.”

“Right,” Jonah said, glancing over at her.

“‘Here was a man who’d served his country with dignity and honor,’” he recited, startling Kate with the sound of Viv’s words spoken in the low rumble of the man they’d been written to describe.

“‘A man who didn’t need cocktail parties or college lectures to validate his self-worth. A man who could sit for hours with my feet tucked under his thigh on the sofa, comfortably enjoying silence without needing to fill it with the sound of his own voice.’”

Tears pricked unexpectedly at the edges of Kate’s eyelids. She blinked hard, wanting to stay professional. “That’s beautiful,” she said. “I always thought so.”

“It’s bullshit.”

She turned and gave him a sharp look. “What?”

“I mean she fell in love with an idealized version of me,” he said. “The opposite of her, the opposite of the guy she’d been with. But that wasn’t the whole me. It was a caricature.”

Kate opened her mouth to protest. To defend Viv’s intentions or meaning. But Jonah got his words out first.

“Look, I’m not saying she was the only one who screwed up,” he said. “I did the same damn thing. We both had this idea that our differences complemented each other. We liked the idea of each other, but not the day-to-day drudgery of it.”

“I can see that, I guess.” Kate thought about her last relationship. How she’d started out fascinated by Anton’s passion for expensive Scotch and glamorous parties, but in the end, those were the things she’d grown to resent.

“The only thing opposites really attract is misery,” Jonah said softly. “And I just can’t go back to that.”

“Oh.”

Well, hell. She couldn’t really argue with that. If the guy didn’t want to work with his ex, who was she to tell him he ought to? She couldn’t blame him. The thought of having to work with Anton made her stomach knot up in a big, sour ball.

Still, the circumstances were a little different. Jonah might not know how different. She owed it to him to spell it out.

“Look, Jonah. There’s something else you should know.”

“What’s that?”

“After you left Viv’s place, we had a meeting with some executives from the Empire Network. She, uh—let them know you’re uncertain about being part of the show.”

“Uncertain?” He frowned down at her. “What part of fuck no sounded uncertain to you?”