It was him. He was really here.
But that was Grant to a T. He was a very hands-on politician, traveling to small towns all over the state. Years ago, when she didn’t know him nearly as well as she did now, she hadbeen impressed by it. She thought it meant he cared. Now she understood it for what it was: a blatant ploy for attention and votes.
Senator Grant Hamilton was a lobbyist’s dream come true. He would take money from anyone who wanted to slide him a kickback under the table. He had never met a party plank he wouldn’t kick down if someone paid him to vote the other side of the aisle. He didn’t have a spine so much as a rubber band.
There had been a time when Arden had basked in his attention, astonished that he was interested in her at all. Her slowly growing disillusionment had struggled with the fact that she did genuinely love him.Hadloved him. All of that had been left behind her now. Grant was her past, not her future.
But she was still curious what he was talking about. What was he stumping for this time, the ban on shifter-human marriage that he had been talking up during the final stages of their divorce, or some new bill about something else entirely?
The crowd had grown larger. Arden wandered along the outskirts of it. With her sun hat jammed down on her head and her hair in profuse humidity-enhanced curls, she felt comfortably anonymous in the crowd; no one was going to look twice at?—
“Arden!”
Arden nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of her name.
A hand settled on her arm. Turning, she found herself face to face with her ex-husband’s personal bodyguard.
“Itisyou,” he said, holding her implacably against her attempts to squirm out of his grip. “I saw you sneaking around the edge of the crowd, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought, surely that can’t be Arden. Arden said she was leaving and didn’t want anything to do with us. So that can’t be Arden, it has to be someone who looks a little bit like her.”
“Get your hands off me, Sloan,” Arden gritted out between her teeth.
She and Sloan had always been reasonably friendly, as he had been an inevitable fixture of her married life; he went everywhere with Grant, not out of personal friendship but because Grant paid him well. But she had thought he liked her. Sloan was one of the only people she had thought about confiding in as her married life became a misery. Now she felt as if the two of them were on opposite sides of a vast wall.
“You disappeared so completely that the best private detectives Grant’s money can buy couldn’t find you. Even I couldn’t find you.” Sloan frowned down at her. He had the oddest eyes she’d ever seen on anyone. Heterochromia, it was called; she remembered him telling her that once. One eye was green, the other a brown so light it was nearly gold. “We thought for a while something might have happened to you.”
“Like you’d care,” Arden snapped, making another attempt to pull away. “Grant took everything from me in the divorce. The house, the money, everything.”
“None of that was yours in the first place.”
“Some of it was! I helped him build that. He didn’t have to fight me so hard. He was trying to punish me, and youknewthat, Sloan,” she spat between her teeth. “And you went along with it.”
“You could have it all back, if you want it.”
“I don’t want it back!” She saw guilt on Sloan’s face, and Arden followed up on her advantage. “You know what he’s like, Sloan. You know how controlling he is. I mean, you’re the person he ordered to follow me whenever I wanted to go anywhere. I wasn’t even allowed to go to my mom’s funeral because he was afraid I was going to cheat on him!”
People nearby were starting to look at them. Sloan leaned in closer. “If you don’t want a scene, settle down.”
“Maybe I do want a scene,” Arden said between her teeth. “All Grant cares about is appearances, after all. I spent my whole married life trying to be Grant Hamilton’s perfect wife, and it nearly broke me. Now I’m free, and I’m not going back.”
“You’re not divorced, Arden.”
Arden reared back as if he’d slapped her. “What?”
“You didn’t know that, did you? You need a decree of marriage dissolution. He didn’t get it.”
“I signed everything he gave me! He told me—” Arden broke off, grinding her teeth. Ofcoursehe’d lied to her about that too. “What do I need that I don’t have?”
“The actual divorce needs a judge’s signature, and you don’t have it. He’s still waiting for you to come back. If he finds you, he’llmakeyou come back.” Arden stared at him. Sloan let out a huff of some fierce, angry emotion. “You little idiot! Don’t you realize I’m trying to help you? The minute he sees you here?—”
“What are you doing to her!”
The roar came from behind her, and an instant later Baz came down on Sloan like a whirlwind. Baz wrenched Sloan’s hand off Arden’s arm—although he was already letting go; she got the impression that if he didn’t, his fingers would have been snapped like five twigs—and Baz interposed himself between her and Sloan.
For an instant, Sloan bristled as if he planned to fight Baz himself. Then he looked around. People in their vicinity were moving away from them, a few people had raised their phones to film the interaction, and up on the stage, Grant had noticed that something was happening.
“Baz, Baz,” Arden whispered, touching his back. “Let’s just leave.” She pulled her hat down. Grant wouldn’t recognize her at this distance, hecouldn’trecognize her.
But Sloan would tell him everything that just happened. Sloan liked her, but he had always taken Grant’s side.
