This wasn’t her first time in Europe, nor her first round with jet lag, but this was the first time it had hit her so hard. Sarah, as goddamn usual, was right.
She’d been more exhausted than she’d even let herself realize.
As she half-heartedly wondered if Sarah got sick of being right, a voice purred down the line.
“April? Baby? Don’t put the phone down.”
For a second, April’s dazed and sleep-addled brain didn’t recognize who the voice belonged to. Then, when she did and she actually heard and understood the words, she bolted upright.
Her tongue felt thick in her mouth as she spat out, “What the hell are you doing calling me?” She wasn’t sure if she felt nauseated from his brazenness or just so goddamn mad she wanted to toss the phone into the ocean.
Never had she been so glad for a huge body of water to be this close.
“I needed to talk to you, baby. I love you. I hate that we ended the way we did. Come back to me. You know you love me and want to be with me. We’re so good together.”
For a second, she wasn’t sure what was astonishing her more. That her body was still on another time zone or that the cheating bastard she’d just dumped was calling her.
“You mean, you hate that I found out you were cheating on your wife, with me?” she corrected with a sneer as she blinked sleep from her eyes. The way his words rolled from his lips felt practiced. And, undoubtedly, they were. A notion that had feeling flushed with anger.
She was easy in his eyes. Spin her a few lies, tell her some BS to get her back in bed without having to lay out too much time on her… It pissed her off that she could understand his logic.
The bastard.
Jesus, he’d done her a favor by showing her his true colors. Time was one commodity that was too precious to waste, and she’d already wasted too much of it on this SOB.
It was weird how that realizati
on came to her in the midst of the worst jet lag she’d ever experienced, but hell, maybe that kind of mental clarity came with the salt air?
“No, I don’t mean that. Not at all, April. How could you think that? Look, you don’t understand. I’m going to leave her, April. Harper and I… we’ve been over for years. We’re together for Jeremy. A divorce is in the making and has been for years.”
“And what’s going to change that then? Jeremy no longer needs a dad?”
Silence sounded down the line as if Mike was trying to figure out a way to answer that without sounding callous.
She squinted into the darkness, inadvertently catching sight of the moon glimmering over the bay beyond. It stole her breath. In a good way. Not like Mike had just done. Robbing her of air out of his sheer fucking nerve.
With a grunt, he admitted, “It’s not good for Jeremy to be around a couple as dysfunctional as Harper and I, April. It’s not necessary now I have you.”
Was the man insane?
Did he think she was born yesterday?
“You have me, huh? When are you leaving Harper if I’m so goddamn important to you, Mike?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, I need to break the news to her and Jeremy. They’re still in the mode of ‘everything’s going to work out between us’, and I need to show them differently. Then, after that, a couple of months?”
She gawked at the moon—this time, not because it was beautiful, because Mike truly had to be one of the most conceited sons of bitches she’d ever known.
“Let me get this right—you want me to stay on the sidelines until your family is ready to come to terms with the fact you and your wife need to divorce. Then, a few months after that, you’ll tell them about us?”
“Hell, of course I would, April. You mean the world to me.”
Her mouth gaped at the bastard’s sincerity. Did women fall for this shit?
Really?
“Mike?” she said softly, her voice more of a purr than anything else.