Page 74 of Contentious

“Uh-huh.”

“Hmm, well… You’ve done quite a number on me in a very short amount of time.”

“I’ve done a number on you?”

He twirled a length of her hair around his finger. “I was just minding my own business…”

“Haha, you mind other people’s business for a living.”

He laughed. “That’s true, but in this case, I didn’t intend… I mean… This must be nothing new for you, but for me…”

“It’s new for me, too.”

“How’s that possible?”

“Since my career took off, it’s been hard for me to tell who likes me for me and who’s using me to get themselves ahead like Marlon tried to do.”

“Tell me about that.”

She grimaced. “Do I have to?”

“Only if you want to. I’m curious about how you ended up with him.”

* * *

Carson braced himself to hear about her history with other men. “I dated an older guy for a couple of years. I was really into him, thought he was it, you know?”

“No, I don’t know what that’s like.”

“Right, you’re new to all this. But this guy… He was smooth. I’ve since learned the term ‘love bombing.’ Do you know what that is?”

“Not really. Love isn’t my thing.”

“You’re really selling yourself, Mr. Remington.”

He chuckled. “I’m a major project in that regard.”

She gave him a side-eyed smile. “I love a good challenge. Anyway, so love bombing is when someone tells you everything they know you desperately want to hear, keeping you right where they want you while they’re off doing God knows what with other people. And when you find out it was all a game to them, the shock and hurt are… Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“That sounds awful,” he said with a wince. “I’ve heard of that happening to our clients, but I hadn’t heard it called love bombing. That term fits the crime.”

“It is a crime, you know? I truly loved him. Would’ve done anything for him, but none of that mattered. It was all a game to him. The worst part is that it happened less than a year after I lost my mother. And into that nightmare stepped Marlon, to console and comfort me, to hold me when I sobbed over the rotten guy and to pick up the pieces and put them back together. He was a really good friend to me during those awful months.”

“I’m sorry you went through that. Despite everything I see and hear in our practice, I’ll never understand why people treat each other that way.”

“I haven’t thought about it in years, but at the time, it nearly broke me. Marlon and I were close, but I only slept with him twice and cried both times because he wasn’t the one I wanted. I felt terrible about that, but I was honest with him. He knew better than anyone what I was going through. The sex was about comfort more than anything, and from that came the best thing to ever happen to me.”

“Funny how that happens, huh?”

“I know. When I first found out I was pregnant, I was so shocked that I could barely function for days. I was always careful about birth control and couldn’t figure out how it happened. One of my friends told me he probably messed with the condom or did something to try to trick me into staying with him when he knew that wasn’t what I wanted.”

“That’s even more messed up than what the other guy did.”

“Right? When I confronted him about how I could’ve gotten pregnant when we used a condom, he immediately jumped on the defensive. But he has this ‘tell,’ a twitch in his eyebrow when he’s lying, and that eyebrow was dancing all around when he swore up one side and down the other that he’d never do something like that to me. He told me that day he had no interest in being a father, and I should ‘get rid of it.’”

“He said that as soon as he realized his trick wasn’t going to work to make you want him.”

“Exactly. He was outraged when I told him I was keeping Ty and that we didn’t need anything from him but to leave us alone, which he did for many years. He’d send an occasional gift to Ty and ask to see him once or twice a year, but that was the extent of it. I don’t think his family even knows he has a son, which is fine with me. I liked it better without him involved, but he’s asked me for money in the past and I gave it to him to make him go away, but this time he was much more aggressive and insistent.”