Warren had been that man for a far-too-brief blip in time.
No. That had been an illusion. Good thing. She couldn’t imagine the conversation if her residency status had gone differently.
Because, in the end, if he’d asked her to stay married after she got her green card, she wouldn’t have refused.
CHAPTER TEN
Get over it.
The phrase haunted Warren. Had haunted him for a decade. But it had been fresh on his mind all day, courtesy of Tilda, who was on her way to the airport in his limo.
Without him.
Because he couldn’t get his head on straight.
Tilda needed something bigger than he was capable of giving her. Obviously. After everything that he’d done and tried and bled all over, she still flinched when he forgot to be careful with her. And clearly he’d forgotten. His ham-handed qualities had been proven over and over.
Still. He could have gone to the airport with her, if for no other reason than to say goodbye. Right? They had a professional relationship that would extend for the next nine months or so. They’d be speaking by conference call on Tuesday, if not sooner, pending whether her connecting flight from LAX was delayed.
The reason why he didn’t accompany her had to do with the burn in his chest, the one that made it impossible to explain he couldn’t stand the thought of watching her fly out of his life. He couldn’t go with her. He couldn’t keep her here. It was a merry-go-round nightmare that had no exit.
How the hell had he gotten here? His nice, simple green-card marriage had exploded in his face, and he couldn’t even turn to his friends for comfort because they would laugh. The word sanctimonious would likely come up. “I told you so” would be thrown around more than once.
The house echoed with emptiness. Or was that his heart? Both. Neither.
The staff hadn’t gone anywhere and there were no fewer than five people within shouting distance. But, as always, they were invisible, keeping their distance because that’s what he’d always preferred. His heart had no business feeling anything other than guilt for the sin of bleeding all over Marcus and then Tilda.
Loneliness was his due, and he’d been combating that for eons. Of course, that had been easier when he didn’t have a basis for comparison. The ghost of Tilda was everywhere. In his bed, in the bathroom, at the dining table. Behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes. Thankfully, he wasn’t in the habit of frequenting the terrace, so he didn’t have to see it or the garden below ever again if he didn’t want to.
That was a good plan. Just avoid everything that reminded him of how he’d screwed up and gotten in way too deep with the woman he’d married.
So deep that it had actually wrenched his soul from his gut when she’d flinched last night. Just as well. He didn’t need it anyway. Souls were for people who didn’t have a friend’s suicide on their conscience.
That’s why it was better for Tilda to go. He wasn’t good for her. In fact, he’d let her go for her own safety, because he did care.
If he repeated that a thousand more times, it might sink in, too.
Morose and sick of himself, Warren barricaded the door of the study and drowned himself in work. That lasted about an hour. He’d gotten so good at delegating as he focused on the Australia project over the last three months that he had little to do. Blasphemy. There was always something for the CEO to do. He captained the whole ship, for crying out loud.
Digging into some of Thomas’s reports put him in slightly better spirits. There were discrepancies in the inventory numbers. Grateful for the distraction, he fired off an email for an explanation and moved on to the next report. Five minutes later, an email popped into his inbox. Thomas’s reply: I’m aware. That’s why the discrepancy is explained in the quarterly report I sent out three days ago.
Warren rolled his eyes. Fine. He dug around until he found the report in the wrong folder on his desktop, read it and had to agree that the explanation seemed reasonable enough. What was the world coming to, that his brother had a better handle on the operations of the business than he did?
That was a question better left unanswered. And now he was thinking about Tilda all over again.
His phone dinged and greedily he snatched it up, hoping for a text from Tilda that her flight had been canceled or the airport had been destroyed in a tornado. Australia had fallen off the map. Anything that meant she wouldn’t be getting on a plane and going to the other side of the globe.
Jonas: Roz and Viv are doing a girl’s thing tonight. They want to pick up Tilda. Okay?
He groaned. Excellent timing. Now what was he supposed to do, tell them everything?
Warren: Tilda is.
What? Sick? Busy. Tilda is busy. But, instead, the word gone appeared on the screen and he hit Send in the millisecond before he realized his Freudian mistake. He groaned. No point in recalling it now.