by Zoe York
All business.
That’s what this should have always been. It had been a mistake to get personal. He’d made that mistake a hundred times before, so he shouldn’t be surprised at himself, but he was.
One day, he would grow the fuck up. Today was not that day.
He followed her to the front door.
“I wanted to kiss you goodnight,” he said. “When I said I wanted to tuck you in, I meant I wanted to make you feel good and leave you with sweet dreams.”
“I know,” she said softly. “And it was sweet. But I don’t need sweet. I don’t need men who hold back a part of themselves to give me only goodness. I want all or nothing. I want complications, you know? I want it all. And it’s okay that it’s not with Brent, that it’s not with you, but it’s not okay that it’s not on the table for me at all. I’m a big girl, Evan. I’ll be fine. Thank you for being my date tonight, I really appreciate it.”
She was fierce and beautiful, and for a split second, he thought about throwing all caution to the wind and pulling her into him, letting her push him up against the door and giving her everything she wanted.
If he were a different man, he’d bare all, and give her all the complicated mess she was looking for. But he wasn’t that kind of man. He’d tried and failed to be vulnerable in that way. Now he wielded honesty as a shield instead, and once you went down that road, there was no going back.
Evan gave every bit of himself to the world, so there was nothing left to share as a precious secret with a partner.
Instead of kissing her, he stepped out into the cold, crisp night.
He left, and he didn’t look back.
When he got to the hotel, he roamed his suite, drink in hand, and tortured himself with the question of whether or not she’d stood at the door and watched him as he made his way down the block to his car.
7
Her resolve to move on—from Brent, from Evan, from the whole mess—lasted exactly thirty-three hours. Monday morning, Jess woke up angry.
She wasn’t sure she had a right to be this pissed, but the therapist she’d seen briefly after Brent had left last year told her that anger served an important purpose, a warning flag that she’d been wronged somehow.
He had dodged her calls for a month. For a year before that. And now she found out from her date—from her God damned date, even if it was a faux-date-for-real—that maybe Brent had a secret reason for leaving her.
He liked men.
Fuck him for not telling her. There was nothing wrong with that desire. Nothing. But keeping it from her? Why couldn’t he tell her? Had she ever said something to make him think she wouldn’t understand?
Maybe he didn’t owe her any explanation, but it was the rudest kind of gut-punch to realize you didn’t know the person you’d shared a bed with. Exchanged vows with.
How long had he lied to her? Deprived her of a full life?
So she did something she never would have done when they were together. She showed up at the firehall.
She made sure she looked good. Heeled boots, tight jeans, low cut and snug t-shirt under a blazer. No lipstick, because Brent had never liked that, but lots of eye makeup. Almost too much for the daytime, but it worked.
Even if he wasn’t interested anymore, his fellow firefighters would be, and that would get to him.
Right now, she was on a warpath, set for destruction.
Hers or his or both, she wasn’t sure.
This is a bad idea, she told herself. But it was the only one she had left. She needed closure.
She was betting hard that he hadn’t changed his work schedule. Brent was a man of firm routines, and sure enough, his truck was in the parking lot.
Heart pounding, she strode toward the front door. A woman in a paramedic’s uniform pushed through it as she approached, and stood there with a smile, holding it open for her.
“Thanks,” she murmured as she brushed past.
She’d been here twice before in the last six years for holiday parties. She knew—generally—where she was going. Instead of storming all the way upstairs, she stopped at the office on the main floor and introduced herself. “I’m looking for Brent,” she said. “If he’s free.”
The guy behind the desk gave her an easy once over, the outfit doing its job. “Sure thing.” She didn’t give her name, and he didn’t ask. He just picked up the phone. “Brent’s got a visitor,” he said when someone picked up upstairs.
It didn’t take long for footsteps to sound, and then he was in the doorway. He was in uniform, and maybe it was because she’d seen him in the dark blue so often, or maybe it was the bright lighting compared to the dark banquet hall on Saturday night, but up close she noticed things about him she’d missed on the weekend.
He’d lost weight, for one. He was looking positively lean, although his arms were still tightly corded and strong, his forearms tanned and dusted with the familiar blond hair she liked to drive her fingers through.
“Jess,” he said, his eyes wide. “What’s wrong?”
She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
His brows pulled tight, and he nodded sharply. “Come on. Follow me.”
Palms slick and throat dry, she did as he instructed. Her anger had disappeared as soon as he’d looked at her, really looked at her, not in the across-the-room bullshit kind of way he had Saturday night.
He’d seen her standing in the office and his face had fallen. He didn’t want to see her right now, but he thought something was wrong—it is, it really is, she wanted to protest, her entire world was wrong and confused—and so he was giving her an audience for that reason alone.
He led her to a small kitchenette off a meeting room, then closed the door behind her so they had privacy.
“What is it?”
Her bravado didn’t return. “I shouldn’t do this here,” she said, her voice shaking. “I’m sorry.”
“Do what?”
“You’ve—I’ve been texting you.”
His jaw flexed. “Yeah. I know. I’ve been a dick about that.”
It wasn’t an apology. Just an acknowledgment, but it was enough to spur her forward a bit more. “I just wanted to talk, and…” She gestured around the kitchen. “Obviously I know this isn’t the right space. And maybe I need to listen to your silence.”
“You’re here now.” He scowled.
“So?”
“So we can talk.”
It was a pretty curt invitation. She wasn’t sure she should accept it. “If you wanted to talk to me, you’d talk. At some point in the last year, you’d have texted me or shown up on my doorstep and said, ‘hey, there’s some things you should know.’”
“Did you come here to pick a fight about me not talking?” He frowned. “What do you need, Jess?”
“Why did you leave?” The question tore out of her, rawer and more anguished than she meant it to.
His face twisted. “I told you. I needed time to think.”
“About what?”
“What kind of husband I wanted to be.”
Bullshit. She shook her head. “Maybe you just don’t want me to know who you really are. Maybe we were always meant to be strangers, and for a while there I got in close, but that wasn’t right for us.”
“We’re not strangers,” he ground out.
“No?” She held his gaze, and he let her.
It was hard to look at him. Hard to see the pain there, pain he would never verbalize to her.
“When I saw you on Saturday night, and you saw who I was with—you looked…” She laughed. “I thought you looked all torn up over the fact I had brought a date, but that wasn’t it, was it?”
Bullseye. His face drained of colour.
She nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. You hit on my friend,” she said coolly. “At the gala. And that’s a hell of a thing to find out about your ex, I gotta say, although I know it’s none of my business. Genuinely, I do. I just—”
I’m just hung up on you, and maybe
if you tell me that you’re into men now, I’ll be able to move on. It was a stupid thought. Moving on had to come from inside her, not from some release he could give her. And now, shockingly late in her plan, she was realizing with a horror how much it would hurt if Brent said he wasn’t attracted to her anymore.
That would hurt more than she could bear.
So she did the only reasonable thing under the circumstances, and she ran away.
Brent called her name as she wrenched open the kitchenette door, but he didn’t follow her. And she didn’t look back. She kept her chin up and her eyes fiercely glued on outside, on freedom.
The tears didn’t fall until she got all the way home, the home she once shared with him.
The home that still smelled like his favourite laundry detergent at the most unexpected of times—like when she threw herself on the bed and burst into tears on a fresh pillowcase.
Fuck.
As soon as Brent got off from his shift, he went by her place, but her car was gone and the house was dark.
He went to pick up some food for dinner then tried again. When the house was still quiet, he pulled out his phone to text her, but the long chain of unread messages from her shamed him and he put it away.
He’d made a fucking mess of things.
And that guy—that fucking guy she’d been with. He hadn’t helped. Brent hadn’t done anything wrong.
That resentment chewed at his insides all night. He didn’t sleep much, tossed and turned more than anything. And when he got up in the morning, and Jess’s place was still dark, he did a quick search on his phone for Go West Winery.
He’d asked around at the gala. He couldn’t help himself. People were more than happy to pretend they knew Evan West personally, and rave about him.
So he knew who the guy was, and where he worked. Dialling the number on their website, he put on his crispest, do-not-fuck-with-me voice when a woman answered. “Hello?”
“Is Evan there?”
“Not yet, but I expect him shortly,” the too-trusting person on the other end of the line said cheerfully. “Do you want his voicemail?”
“Sure.” He hung up as soon as she transferred the call. Then he plugged the winery into his map app and hit the highway.
It took two hours, and by the time he arrived, he had cycled through cold, crisp anger and hot, furious outrage a few times, and settled somewhere in the middle.
When he arrived, he strode in the front door like he owned the place—and almost ran directly into the man who actually did own it.
Evan took one look at him, and pointed to the stairs. “Follow me,” he said, his voice tense.
Well, at least he didn’t kick him out.
Brent took a deep breath and did as instructed. Evan led him down a hallway, past other offices, to the door at the end. His name was on it.
Evan West, Chief Executive Officer.
Brent wouldn’t be impressed. And he wouldn’t be overwhelmed or daunted by the wealth, either.
Fuck this guy. That was his motto. Fuck his nice winery, and his fancy office, all darkly modern, with a heavy wooden desk in the centre of it, and a slick black leather couch against the wall.
“What are you doing here?” Evan asked, getting right to the point.
Brent crossed his arms over his chest. “What the hell did you say to my wife?”
“She’s not your wife.” The other man glared at him, then glanced past his shoulder. “And you might want to close the door.”
“This won’t take long.”
“You drove two hours to ask me that question, man. Close the damn door unless you want my employees to hear your deep, dark secrets.”
Brent’s pulse jackhammered in his neck. “I don’t have any dark secrets.”
“So they’re only deep, then?” Evan’s jaw flexed hard, his eyes glittering like onyx. “We all have secrets. Every single last one of us. Stop being ashamed of who you are, and you’ll learn to live with yours better.”
“I’m not ashamed of anything.” But his mouth ran dry. Who was this guy? What did he think he knew?
Because there was no doubt.
Evan West knew. He could see into Brent’s soul, and Brent didn’t like that. Not one bit. Evan dropped his voice to a silky whisper. “I’m glad you aren’t ashamed that you wanted to fuck me right before you got the key to the city. You had nothing to be ashamed about. You didn’t know I was there with your wife.”
No, he hadn’t.
And the ground had fallen out from under him when he’d realized who the stranger was there with that night.
But he hadn’t done anything.
He hadn’t touched another person. He’d just let himself, for a moment, gobble up a good-looking man with his eyes.
The universe wasn’t so cruel that he would be punished for that weakness, was it?
Yes, it fucking was.
“You just pointed out that she’s not my wife.” That fucking hurt. But it was the truth. It had been the truth when Evan had thrown it at him, and now he was grabbing onto it for the life preserver it was. “You can’t have it both ways. And what’s your fucking game in all of this, eh? Does she know that you liked the way I looked at you? Did you tell her that part of it?”
Evan snarled. A warning that the door was still open, a warning not to push him too far, maybe. Brent didn’t need a fucking warning. He was feeling pretty reckless now. He’d stormed this man’s workplace and thrown down the gauntlet. Might as well see it all the way through.
They both went for the door at the same time.
“I’m not fucking ashamed of anything,” Brent bit out as he got there first. He shoved the door closed. “But I also haven’t done anything to be ashamed of, either. You’ve made some messy assumptions about me, and hurt Jess in the process.”
Evan was right in front of him. The suit didn’t hide the fact that the other man had easily twenty-five pounds on Brent. “Fucking men isn’t something to be ashamed of.”
He was seeing red now. “That’s not what I fucking meant.”
“No?” Evan crowded closer, bumping Brent up against the door.
Jesus, his head was swimming.
Is this what another man smelled like up close? Hot and fresh and crisp and mouthwatering?
“You don’t understand,” Brent whispered. I love Jess more life itself, he wanted to say.
But he couldn’t, because Evan had closed the gap between them and now he could feel the other man’s cock.
Hard. Thick.
Dress pants didn’t disguise anything.
Even through Brent’s heavy denim jeans, he knew he was betrayed.
Anger and lust were twisted up hard together, and there was no denying that somehow in the accusations tossed back and forth, they’d both missed the fact that they were aroused.
Evan ground their hips together.
No, it was only Brent who had missed that fact. Evan knew, and was using it like a weapon against him. Fuck. Stop, he should say. You don’t understand, he should repeat.
But before he could say either of those things, Evan’s mouth crashed down on his own, and for the first time in his life, Brent was kissing another man.
It took his breath away. The rough slide of stubble right next to the softest lips. It slashed his nerve endings to pieces and blazed a brutal path of destruction straight to his groin.
Evan tasted good. Felt good. Felt bad, too, in the best kind of way. Like he might be willing to be rough. Hold Brent down and fuck him at an awards night, damn fucking straight that was his fantasy.
And up until this moment, it had only been that, a fantasy he couldn’t act on because he still loved his wife.
It wouldn’t go that far now, would it?
Evan shoved away from him, stepping back with force. The space suddenly between them felt like a terrifying chasm that Brent was teetering on the edge of.
Confused and turned on, he glared at Evan. “What the fuck?”
“I could
ask you the same thing.”
“Why did you kiss me?”
“Because you wanted me to.” Evan’s lip curled in a hostile snarl, daring him to challenge that truth.
Brent wouldn’t deny it. He shrugged. “So why did you stop?”
“Because I don’t want to hurt Jessica.”
Cold fear slithered through his belly. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing with her, but—”
“I’m not playing any games with her. I’m her friend, nothing more. Her choice—not mine. And she knows I don’t have a gender preference for dating.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Brent paced forward, getting in Evan’s face. “When you let slip that I… Did you tell her that when I was looking at you, you were looking right back?”
“I couldn’t very well tell her that without outing you, could I?”
Those two words—outing you—felt like a slap across the face. “You did that anyway.”
“She guessed, you asshole. I told her nothing, and it ruined our night together. Are you fucking happy?”
Well, yeah. And he had no right to be, which wasn’t fair to Jess. But he was stubbornly fucking thrilled that Evan hadn’t successfully gotten into her bed. Unless the night was ruined after they slept together—and now his brain was torturing him with that possibility.
“Do you have any idea how much you’ve hurt her?”
Of course he did. “You made it worse by—”
“I told her that I saw you check someone out at the bar. It didn’t take her long to ask me if I was that person. You hurt her. Not me.”
“You kissed me,” Brent said dumbly.
“We all make mistakes.” Evan gave him a cold, hard stare. “And I’ll own up to mine, unless you want to go first.”
“What do you mean?”
The other man jabbed his finger at his phone. “It means I’m going to do the right fucking thing and give her a call. If you want me to wait a few hours so you can tell her first, I’ll give you that chance.”