"I guess that makes it easier if you're both on the same page."
"There's nothing about it that’s easy, Alexa. I messed up. Kinley did, too. We didn't bring out the best in each other. We brought out the worst. I don't think marriage is supposed to work that way."
"Do you still love her?" The question came out before she could stop it, but once spoken, she really wanted to know the answer.
He didn't reply right away, and then he finally said, "No."
She waited for more of an explanation, but as Braden lifted his coffee cup to his lips, it was obvious he'd said all he intended to say.
"But…" she pressed.
"Alexa, leave it alone."
"I will leave it alone -- in a second. One thing I've always known about you, Braden, is that you're intensely loyal to your friends. You don't walk away from people. So if you're walking away from your marriage, then it had to be bad."
"She walked away first," he said.
"That doesn't sound mutual."
"In the end, it was. She just said the words first. And that's all I'm going to say on the subject."
Alexa sat back in her seat, pondering her next conversational move, when a young woman approached the table.
"Sorry to interrupt," she said, "But I want to invite you to the big fundraiser we're holding for Daniel Stone, candidate for state senator." She handed them a flyer. "We really hope you can come. Mr. Stone is an incredible man. He grew up here in Sand Harbor. Anyway, it's an Open House from 3:00-6:00 on Saturday at the Stone's house on Harbor View. There will be great food, music, and of course a Q&A session, so you can really get to know Mr. Stone. I hope we'll see you there."
"Thanks," Alexa said.
As the volunteer moved on, Alexa glanced down at the photo of the candidate. Daniel Stone was a very attractive man. He appeared to be his late thirties. He had light brown hair and brown eyes and had the look of a man who'd been thoroughly styled for the photo shoot. He also looked familiar. "I think I've seen this guy before."
"Of course you did. We used to call him Harvard and his friend, Yale," Braden said.
She met Braden's gaze. "This is the preppy college guy who had all the parties on his father's boat?"
"That's the one."
"I guess he wound up having more ambition than just seeing how many beers he could guzzle in an hour."
"Apparently. I find his fundraiser amusing though."
"Why?"
"Because he was always above everyone. Now, he wants to mingle with the little people?"
"Well, now he's trying to get votes."
"Exactly. You know, Daniel Stone is probably the same age as Jack Wellbourne's sons," Braden added, his expression thoughtful. "I think they used to run around together."
"Back to Wellbourne again. All roads seem to lead us back to him."
"It's a small town. There aren't that many roads."
"True." She set the flyer aside. "Shall we go see if the film is ready?"
He nodded and got to his feet, wincing as he did so. He was obviously still in some pain, not that he'd admit that to her.
As they moved toward the exit, the door opened and a woman walked in. She was tall and slender with short, straight brown hair, and was dressed in black leggings, a leather jacket and a pair of stylish boots.
Braden stopped abruptly. So did the woman. A tense look passed between them.
"Braden," the woman said in a voice that seemed both angry and uncertain, as if she wasn't quite sure about her reception.
"Kinley," Braden acknowledged tightly.
Kinley's gaze turned to hers. "Who's your friend?" she asked.
"Does it matter?" he countered.
"Just trying to be polite. This is a small town, Braden. We're going to run into each other."
Braden remained silent.
"I'm Alexa Parker," she said, as the woman's gaze turned back to her. "My aunt owns the antique shop."
"You're Alexa?" the woman said, as if the name meant something to her. "Well, I didn't think you could surprise me any more, Braden."
"We were just leaving," Braden said. He pushed past Kinley and out the door, leaving Alexa to follow.
She nodded at Kinley and walked out of the coffee house. Braden didn't say anything as they headed across the street, but she could feel the anger in every inch of his long, lean body. The divorce might have been mutual, but they seemed to have some unfinished business.
When they reached the opposite sidewalk, she grabbed his arm. "Wait."
"What?" he snapped.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. Let's get the photos."
"You don't seem fine, Braden. Obviously, running into Kinley upset you."
He pulled his arm free. "I told you I don't want to talk about her, Alexa."
"If you don’t want to talk about her, maybe you should talk to her," she said pointedly. "You're both really angry."
"That's usually what happens in a divorce."
"You don't have to tell me that. I was right in the middle of one." And as she said the words, Alexa realized the last thing she needed to be was in the middle of another one. Whatever was going on between Kinley and Braden was between them.
"Kinley and I have nothing left to say to each other, Alexa. Stay out of it. It's not your business." He opened the door of the drugstore and waved her in.
He was right. It wasn't her business, and she had no reason to butt in. Without another word, she headed inside to the photo counter.
* **
After paying for the pictures, they took the envelope outside and took a seat on a nearby bench. "I feel kind of nervous," Alexa said, as she pulled out the photos.
"I doubt we're going to find some big clue," Braden said.
The first few photos were shadows, blurry shots of a bedroom and what appeared to be a woman on the bed.
"Shayla?" Alexa questioned.
"It's really hard to tell," Braden murmured.
Most of the shots were over-exposed, and Alexa began to think there wasn't going to be anything helpful until she reached the last two photos. The setting was the deck of the Wellbourne house. It was evening. A small table was set for what appeared to be a romantic dinner. There were flowers and wine glasses. But who was sharing the dinner?
She turned to the last photo. There was now a birthday cake on the table, and a bunch of lit candles on the cake. There was the shadow of someone's shoulder, someone's red hair – Shayla probably. Her gut tightened. Frowning, she felt as if she were missing something that was right in front of her. "It looks like it's her birthday."
"We should find out when she was born. That might help us date these photos," Braden suggested. "Not that it matters. They don't tell us anything."
Her gaze moved across the photo once more. Her heart skipped a beat. Next to the cake was a shiny gold lighter with initials on the front. They were too tiny to read, and it was crazy to think that…
"Oh, my God," she whispered.
"What?" Braden asked. "What's wrong?"
She couldn't find the words, didn't want to finish the thought in her head, but she also couldn't look away from that lighter.
Her hand started to shake, and Braden grabbed the photo. "Alexa? What do you see that's so upsetting?"
She met his gaze. "The lighter."
"What about it?"
"It looks just like the one my father had."
His eyes widened with surprise. "Your father? What are you talking about? There must be a million lighters that look like that, Alexa."
"Including his," she said. "My Uncle Stan gave my dad an engraved lighter as a wedding gift. My father used to sneak cigarettes on the back deck when my mother wasn't looking. I watched him light up a hundred times."
"You're taking a big leap. How would your father's lighter have ended up in the Wellbourne's house?"
"Is it that much of a stretch? My father grew up here. He had friends here. In fact, he's only a few years younger than Jack Wellbo
urne."
"Whoa, slow down," Braden said.
His words barely registered. Her stomach turned over, as her thoughts moved from the lighter to the last few weeks they'd spent in Sand Harbor as a family. There had been so many arguments, so many times her father had walked out of the house to return hours later with no explanation of where he'd been.
"That last summer," she said aloud, "my dad would come down for three-day weekends, but something would always go wrong. My parents would fight, and then he'd take off late at night. Sometimes he didn't come back until the morning."
"You need to take a breath," Braden advised.
"What if he was seeing Shayla? Maybe he was having an affair with her." She clapped a hand to her mouth, feeling like she might be sick.
"Or maybe that lighter didn't belong to your father, and there's absolutely no connection," Braden said firmly.
"My mother accused my father of having affairs."
"Here in Sand Harbor?"
"Maybe. I'm not sure." She paused, finally taking a breath. "Do you really think I'm jumping to conclusions, Braden?"
"Yes. We can't see the initials on the lighter, nor do we know when the photo was taken, if your father was even in town that night."
"Right. We need to find out Shayla's birthdate." She pulled out her phone and opened up the Internet. It didn't take more than a minute to get the date she needed -- which was August 18th. She looked back at Braden. "Shayla would have celebrated her birthday two days before I left that summer. And my father was in town then."
He shook his head. "I can see how things are adding up in your head, Alexa. But you're still missing a lot of facts. You could probably get answers to some of your questions by talking to your parents."
The idea of talking to her mother about a possible affair her father had had while they were still married was not at all appealing. Her mother had made tremendous strides the last few years, putting her problems behind her, and Alexa didn't want to take her back to that painful place for no reason. Which left her dad. She already had a call into him, and surely he would call back to find out about her aunt's condition. In fact, it seemed odd that she hadn't heard from him yet.
"Alexa?" Braden queried.
She realized she'd been silent for a while. "I need to think about it."
"Good idea." Braden put a comforting hand on her thigh. "We could just drop this whole thing right now. Your aunt is going to be all right. And whether or not the robbery is ever solved, it's doubtful that the antique store will be a target again. If they haven't come back by now, they probably aren’t coming back. As for Shayla's death, it happened a very long time ago."
"I can't just stop, Braden. I have too many questions. And I'm not convinced that the antique store won't be a target again, because we don't know if the thieves were interrupted by my aunt and didn't get what they were looking for. Maybe they're just biding time until I go home or there's less police attention on the shop."
He frowned. "You may not like the answers you get to your questions, Alexa. Believe me, I have personal experience in that area."
His cryptic words made her tilt her head. "Are you talking about Kinley now?"
He stiffened. "Never mind."
"No, you opened the door."
"And now I'm closing it."
She ignored him. "What's Kinley like? I could see she's very pretty, but what does she do? Does she have a job? Did you ever talk about having children?"
"What part of I don't want to talk about her don't you understand?" he asked in frustration.
"You need to talk, Braden. You've already admitted to hiding out in your apartment, not going into town, not spending time with your family. You have a festering wound, and it needs air, attention."
"From you?"
"Why not me? There was a time in our lives when we talked about everything. And I'm safe, Braden. I don't know anyone but you. I'm not going to judge, and if I do judge, I'll probably be on your side. Because quite frankly, from what little I've heard about Kinley, she seems like a bitch."
He drew in a long breath and slowly let it out. "Fine, I'll tell you this much. Kinley had a lot of expectations that I couldn't fulfill. She wanted kids in the beginning, but I wasn't ready. So we put it off. According to her, we put everything off. When she wanted to buy a house, I asked her to wait until I was finished with my tour. But my deployment kept getting extended. So she bought the house by herself. When I did come home, we couldn’t stop fighting. When I left again, she was lonely. I couldn't win. And Kinley didn't really want to compromise." He paused for a moment. "Last year Kinley had an affair. She fell in love with someone else. She probably wouldn't have told me, but I couldn't stop myself from asking."
Her stomach turned over. "I'm sorry, Braden."
"She wanted to know how I could blame her when we'd spent more time apart than together. And I didn't have an answer."
"Whoa, wait a second," she interrupted. "The answer is that she was married to you, she took a vow to be faithful, not a vow to be faithful as long as she wasn't bored or lonely."
"I thought you weren't going to judge."
"I told you I'd be on your side."
"She was alone a lot, Alexa. She didn't expect that."
"She should have known that marrying a soldier would mean being on her own."
"I don't think she thought that far ahead. We were living in the moment, caught up in the fantasy of marriage. The reality wasn't what either of us expected."
"When did you find out about the affair?"
"After I was injured. I was in the hospital. She was standing out in the hall, talking to her sister, saying she didn't know what she should do, because it was going to look bad for her to leave me now that I was hurt, now that I was a hero." He said the word sneeringly.
"It didn't just look bad; it was bad," she said. "Kinley should have tried harder."
"Come on, Alexa. You saw your parents go through a divorce. If one person falls out of love, it's over."
Her heart broke for Braden. Despite his pragmatic words, she could hear the pain in his voice. "She was wrong to cheat on you. If she was unhappy, she should have left the marriage first."
"She said she didn't want to leave me when I was in a war zone. She didn't want to put that burden on me when I needed to focus on staying alive."
"That sounds like an excuse."
"It doesn't matter. We weren't right for each other and even if she hadn't cheated, we probably wouldn't have been able to stick together now."
"Why not?"
"Kinley says I'm too dark for her. She sees things in my eyes that scare her."
"That's ridiculous. I'm looking at you right now, and I'm not scared."
He met her gaze. "Kinley wasn't entirely wrong. The things I've been through – they changed me."
She didn't want to diminish what he was saying by trying to make him feel better with false platitudes. Maybe he had changed. Maybe he was still working his way through the darkness he'd been through. But she would never have turned her back on him the way Kinley had done. She would have tried to help.
"Thanks for telling me," she said. "I know you didn't want to."
"You always had a way of getting things out of me."
"You weren't so bad yourself."
They sat for a moment, looking out at the street, but she doubted either one of them was seeing anything but their thoughts.
He suddenly stood up. "I should get going. I have some things to do."
"Things that just came up because you don't want to talk to me anymore?"
He stared down at her, an odd expression in his eyes. "It's not that I don't want to talk to you, it's that I want to talk to you too much. We're falling back into old habits, Alexa, and I need to remember that you're leaving in a few days."
"I'm not gone yet," she said, as she stood up. "I like talking to you, too, Braden. I've missed our conversations. I've missed you." The words slipped out before she could stop them.
"This isn't going anywhere. I want to help you find out what happened in your aunt's shop and maybe with Shayla, but that's it. I don't have anything else to offer."
She had a feeling he was talking to himself as much as he was talking to her. "Let's just take it one day at a time."
"I don't want you to get the wrong idea."
"I'm not getting any idea."
"Of course you are. You always have ideas. When we were at the beach earlier, you looked at those kids' bikes and you remembered."
She met his gaze. "Our first and only kiss. Yes, I did remember. I didn't think you did."
"I've never forgotten."
"It was good." She paused. "Did you ever think about doing it again?"
"Only every minute of every day for about the first three years that we were apart," he admitted.
"Me, too," she admitted. "I didn't know what to do with all those feelings I had."
The tension between them turned electric. The surroundings faded into the background. All she could see was Braden, his green eyes, his strong jaw, his full lips. She didn't know who moved first, but suddenly his mouth was on hers. And this kiss wasn't the tentative caress of an unsure boy but a hot, sexy and demanding kiss from a man who knew exactly what he wanted.
She kissed him back with the same fervor, one touch leading into another and another. She could feel his heat down to the tips of her toes. And when he put his arms around her and pulled her in close, she went willingly.
His tongue slipped past her parted lips, sweeping the cavern of her mouth, making her body ache for even closer contact.
She didn't want it to end.
But it did.
Braden suddenly lifted his head and jerked back a step, his hands falling from around her body, his breath coming rough.
Her heart was pounding as if she'd sprinted a few miles in the last few seconds. She wasn't sure she could catch her breath to speak. If she could speak, what would she say?
Braden answered the question by leaving. She thought about going after him, but she couldn’t move.
She'd never had a kiss that had moved her like that. It certainly hadn't been anything like the last one they'd shared. But she had a feeling it would be just as difficult to forget.
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