Josh’s brain had flatlined.
Now, he managed to move her off the deck and onto the path around the marina to the road without directly touching her.
His heart pounded in his chest.
She glanced both ways, her dark hair swinging in long, slightly messy waves. A more grown up, sophisticated hair cut than she used to wear. She hurried across the road.
A high-end rental car sat in front of his garage.
She stopped just short of the garage office and shot a nervous look back at him. Like she wasn’t sure if he would bite.
Tempting.
He stalked past her, shoving the door open. His skin prickled as she silently joined him in the space he’d forged for himself after their brief marriage imploded.
Would he ever be able to excise the memory of her scent wafting past him as he held the door? The cool, assessing gaze she slid over the space slammed him back three years in time. Could she see her own influence on how he’d organized the space, knowing how it would look in videos online?
Did she know that he still heard her voice in his head every day, even as he tried to drum it out?
“What are you doing here?” He hoped he sounded cold as ice.
“I…I need to talk to you.” That waver in her voice as she started…fuck.
He needed this conversation to be as short as humanly possible. But he also wasn’t willing to show his cards. He crossed his arms over his chest. “About what? We have nothing to talk about.”
“No, Josh, we do. You don't understand. Something… A mistake was made, and I'm not sure how exactly, but I’m going to rectify—”
Jesus. Christ. “As if I’m going to trust your father's legal team,” he snapped. “They didn’t take care of thismistakeproperly the first time, did they?”
Her eyes went wide. “You know.”
“It was quite a shock,” he snarled, “To find out a few days ago that we're still married.”
“I swear I didn't know. As soon as I found out, I hired my own lawyers. Not my father’s. It will take a week or so, but I will—”
“No.”A muscle in his cheek spasmed. “Stop. Just…stop.”
He couldn’t let her dive into a conversation he wasn’t prepared to have.
Not when her voice wavered and his brain hadn’t finished processing that she washere. In hisgarage.In hishometown.
He had imagined variations on a confrontation scenario dozens of times.
He’d pictured himself at a racing gala dinner, a beautiful woman on his arm. Not that he could picture a face or a body or hear a voice or imagine a scent that felt right, but in his most vengeful fantasies there was a woman there, if only to be hurtful. Showing Monica that he had moved on.
Imagined the TikTok videos turning into some kind of reality show that took him back to California, with enough fame they might run into each other.
He'd run through scripts where she was gracious. Maybe a lingering gaze after they exchanged pleasantries, but generally adult about it.
He had fantasies where she was sad. And he didn't like those, but his discomfort at the thought of her being hurt didn’t stop the darker parts of his mind from going there and taking a savage kind of pleasure.
He hadneverpictured this kind of reunion.
Maybe he hadn't for a reason. Maybe he should have known that it would be this hard to look at her, here, in the space he’d built out of the remnants of their relationship.
But now that she was in front of him, none of what he had considered, none of his vengeful fantasies were at all what he wanted.
What he wanted, though, was impossible. And that impossible desire lodged in his chest like a physical weight.
