“Where did you find it?” Garrett asked, taking her hand in his and stroking her fingers, hoping to calm her riotously angry expression.
“Apparently, he hid it in the bottom of my closet in my old gym bag right before his young, new ‘wife-to-be’ announced she was pregnant and everything changed in rapid succession.
“Chucky never came back to the apartment to retrieve it, that I know of. Although, to be fair, Madeline and my boss had him on a pretty tight leash until they officially tied the knot.
“By then I had my own problems to deal with. I’d let my lease go on my apartment because I’d planned to move in with dumbass until our…wedding.” She took a deep breath. He squeezed her fingers.
“Anyway. I had to move in quite a rush. Luckily, I’d been planning to move anyway.
“Still, I had quite a bit left to box up. And I was doing it alone. I put my things into storage until I could find a new place to live. I found that old pink gym bag and used it to stuff all my important paper work into without realizing the box of stamps was in there.”
Garrett let his mind wander to the possibilities. Chucky undoubtedly knew she’d moved in a hurry. He must have known about her storage space.
“Then you left your job?” he asked out loud, not expecting an answer.
“Well, I was pushed out because the boss’s new son-in-law decided he wanted my office and my title. After taking an unexpected four day absence to deal with moving myself, I came back to a very uncomfortable meeting with my boss who made it sound like he was doing me a favor by letting me resign quietly after ten years.” She put her hands to her face and started crying quietly.
Seth gave him a dirty look, taking her into his arms again as she sobbed for a few moments.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping tears from her face. “The truth is, I am way better off here than I was staying in that situation. Especially now that I’ve met two better men.” Her hand landed on Garrett’s knee. She gave him a watery look of approval.
Meanwhile, Garrett wanted to find both Chucky and her old boss and punch them in the nuts for hurting her like they had.
Garrett was completely sincere when he said, “I swear I’ll never do that to you.”
“How do you let a girl down gently?”
He leaned in close, kissed her lips gently, and retreated only far enough to look into her eyes. “We never choose women who don’t understand our one-time only philosophy.”
“Until me.”
“Until you.”
“What’s going to happen with us?”
“I’m keeping you.”
“For how long?”
His eyes narrowed and a smile shaped his lips before he could stop it. “Until you break our hearts and leave us.”
“Really?”
He glanced at Seth who was grinning like a loon.
“Trust me, I know it’s crazy. I know we haven’t been together long, but there is something about you that I can’t let go of.”
“Is it unsettled lust?” she asked with a smile.
Garrett laughed and watched Seth kiss her. “That’s it. All that unsettled lust racing through my soul. I also can’t imagine being without you. I don’t even want to consider it.”
They might have stared like that for quite a while, but Seth’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He answered it, had a brief conversation that obviously didn’t make him happy, and soon excused himself.
“I’ve got a crisis at the motel. I’ll be back in time for dinner. In the meantime, you two have fun.”
Seth kissed her passionately and took off to deal with his motel issue.
Garrett took her hand and led her to his room. “Where are you taking me?”
“To my lair.”
“Excellent.”
He put the issue of her ex on the back burner of his mind to focus on what he’d come home early for. Sex.
Undressing her slowly, he said, “I wanted to pick up where we left off after lunch, if that okay with you. I still want that ‘nooner’ we talked about earlier.”
“Of course, what else would we do in your lair?” she asked, laughing delightfully.
As he pushed her slacks down her legs he noticed a mark, and then another one, close by on her hip the size of fingerprints. “What’s this?”