She shook her head slightly to block out the painfully impossible image. Too fast, Sophie. The man is just now beginning to speak in full sentences. Let’s not rush him to the altar.
Taking a steadying breath, she smiled easily at him. “I just can’t picture a loner like yourself as the marrying kind,” she said teasingly.
Liar, her heart said.
“Yeah, neither could Jessica,” he said without expression.
“Tell me about her.”
“No.”
“Gray.”
“Sophie.”
“Did we not fight our way through a pile of plastic balls today? Did we not shimmy up a net like a couple of chimps?” Did you not kiss my brains out and tell me I was yours? she added silently.
His lips twitched. “That was different.”
“True, it was. Different in that there were about a billion people that could have seen and overheard. Here it’s just the two of us. Nobody but me, wanting to know about you.”
Take a chance on me.
He glanced at her briefly, then looked away. Glanced back again. “It’s not a good story, Sophie.”
“Breakups rarely are. C’mon, spill. I’ll tell you about all of my ex-boyfriends.”
“I don’t want to hear about ex-boyfriends.”
“Jealous?” she teased.
He didn’t respond, but she saw a little tic in his jaw.
Sophie sighed. “Okay, fine. We won’t talk about your precious Jessica. I’ll just ask your brother. Jack’s much more forthcoming. And friendly. And—”
“She left me,” he said sharply, staring down at his wineglass. “She’d been sleeping with a partner of mine for months. Someone I considered a friend. He got drunk at our engagement party and announced to two hundred people that he’d been fucking the bride-to-be.”
“My God,” Sophie said. She’d sort of suspected cheating, but not a public spectacle of it. “Did she try to deny it?”
Gray snorted. “Nope. Didn’t even blink in guilt. Just told me that I should have seen it coming. That someone like her couldn’t be expected to be satisfied by a mannequin. I think there was something in there about me not having a heart worth caring about.”
Sophie gasped, both at the cruel words and the carefully removed tone with which he said them. She felt waves of guilt. Hadn’t she been guilty of thinking the same thing about him since day one? She wondered how many of her careless observations about his lack of emotion must have reminded him of Jessica’s words.
“Gray,” she said, laying a hand on his arm.
He surprised her by turning his hand up to grasp hers, his thumb rubbing her knuckles as he looked down at their clasped hands.
“Don’t try to put a Band-Aid on this one, Sophie. Let it be.”
She swallowed, her heart hurting at his ragged expression and what it meant.
“You loved her,” she said with surprise.
She’d assumed that whatever he’d had with Jessica must have been a sterile, businesslike arrangement. A mutually beneficial convenience.
But the raw expression on his face said otherwise.
“I thought I did,” he said in answer to her question. “It felt something like that. She was friendly and pretty, and everyone liked her. She could make me laugh.”