“No, it wasn’t.” His eyes narrowed.
“It was afterward, wasn’t it, Shane? Afterward when you’d shut me out?”
“Shut you out? I’d say it was prudent, given the fact you didn’t take your vows seriously. Till death do us part—or until Daddy’s money shone in your eyes.”
“Money meant nothing to me. You knew that.”
“Did I?”
“I never wanted gold and diamonds. The only thing I ever wanted was this—” she touched her necklace “—and your belief in me and our love.”
“I loved you, Angie.”
“I’m going to get dressed.” She tipped her chin. “If you want to talk, and if you can do it like a rational adult, we can do it in the living room. Otherwise, I have nothing to say to you.”
Neutral ground. But he wouldn’t promise to be civilized. The churning in his gut was primitive, not polite. “Your clothes are on the shelf, not in a box.”
Breaking eye contact, she turned away.
Her body brushed his as she went into the bathroom. Reacting instinctively, he snagged her wrist, stopping her.
Her eyes flashed, and she pulled her wrist away, going into the bathroom.
When she closed the door, he slammed a fist against his open palm.
He had always been a gentleman before. No woman had ever gotten to him the way she did.
Energy churning in his gut, he left the room and lit a fire, stabbing the wood with a metal poker.
He filled the coffeepot, then walked away from it. He didn’t need the jolt of caffeine. Hardhat carried his food dish across the room and dropped it at Shane’s feet. Distractedly he filled it, then grabbed his coat and gloves, heading outside to shovel the eighteen inches of heavy, wet snow from the flagstone pathway.
Within ten minutes, Hardhat had pushed open the front door and was barking excitedly as he played, once or twice nearly disappearing as he sunk up to his whiskers in the piles Shane had created.
Shane took off his jacket. He was warm, nearly hot from the exertion. Wasn’t complaining, though. As long as he concentrated on what he was doing, he wasn’t filled with thoughts of Angie and their rediscovery.
Much.
He shoveled snow from behind his four-wheel drive. Now, as soon as he heard a plow on the main road, he could take Angie back to town.
He wondered why that thought bothered him. He should be glad to see her go.
Shane and Hardhat returned to the quiet house. Hardhat shook snow from his fur, then took up his usual place in front of the fireplace.
“Did you see a snowplow?” Angie asked.
He blinked, trying to clear sunspots from his eyes and focus. She stood near the window, hands wrapped around a steaming cup of coffee. How long had she been there, watching him?
“Not yet. It could be a while.”
“I don’t suppose you have a snowmobile?”
“Afraid I’ll bite?”
He dropped his wet gloves near the coatrack and shoved his fingers through his wet hair. After taking off his boots, he moved toward the fire, standing with his back to it, his arms folded across his chest.
When they’d first married, he’d enjoyed coming home to her at night, tired and sexually hungry. Then, though, she’d met him with a smile and the offer of a back rub.
Now he barely recognized her.
Her long-sleeved button-down shirt was crisply tucked into the waistband of her jeans. Her spine was tight and straight, and her shoulders were pulled back. She’d swept her glorious hair into a no-nonsense twist, and not even a tendril escaped.
While he’d been outside, she’d undergone a transformation, and she wore self-assurance as casually as she did her designer shoes. He could easily imagine her in a boardroom. He had to look deeply for a resemblance between her and the woman who’d trustingly pitched herself into his arms. There was no trace of the shy college graduate who’d come to Colorado to work at her aunt’s coffee shop and flex her wings for the summer.
Of course, he wasn’t the same man, either.
Five years ago, he’d been distrusting. He’d learned a lot at the hands of his mother, and then his fiancée. Women only stuck around as long as there was something in it for them. When things got rough, they took off.
If he’d been distrustful back then, experience had made him what he was now: hard and cynical, capable of taking what a woman offered physically, then turning his back when they asked for more.
The fireplace sizzled.
“You want answers,” she said. “You deserve them.” She set her coffee on the windowsill. “I’m not back in town permanently, only for a few weeks. I’ve got a lot of work to do for my Valentine’s Day gala in Chicago. I need to get back to it.”
That was a small-enough blessing. But a few weeks was still too many.
“Aunt Emma called me a few months ago to let me know that the town needed a recreation center for kids. She’s in Florida right now, so she offered to let me stay in her house. She left the car she sometimes drives—the one you and I bought in Durango—at the airport so I’d have my own transportation.”
She started to say something, but then stopped herself, and then added, “I was on my way to her house when I hit a patch of ice and slid into a tree. That’s how I ended up at your house.”
He had more questions than answers. “What do you have to do with the community center?”
“My organization, Dreams and Wishes, is paying for the new center.”
“Your organization? Meaning the one you work for?”
“No, I mean the organization I funded with my own money. When my father died—”
“Your father is dead?”
She took a deep breath, then swallowed. “He and Jack were killed in the same plane accident, two years ago.”
This time, Shane did offer his condolences. He despised Edward Burton, but the man was Angie’s father. And after the death of her mother when she was young, she’d been very close to her father, even if he was over-bearing and over-protective.
God knew, Shane’s father had had his share of problems and finally decided that facing a bottle of alcohol was easier than facing life. Despite that, Shane had loved the man. Blood was blood, no matter the faults.
“I was the designated beneficiary on both of their insurance policies, and I inherited the business.”
“You run Burton Enterprises, as well?”
“I sold it,” she corrected him.
“I tried to tell you.” She wrapped her arms around her middle. “I sent you a letter.”
He remembered.
Softly she said, “I wanted you to know everything, that I’d loved you. That I hadn’t betrayed you.”
He’d returned the letter unopened. He and Sarah had gotten on with their lives. Even though it had been three years since Angie had left, he’d decided that he and Sarah didn’t need anything from the past interfering with their future. “Your actions spoke loud enough. You proved you weren’t different from any other woman. Wasn’t interested in your excuses or lies.”
She pressed her fingers to her throbbing temple. “I have never lied to you.”
“Then why didn’t you wait until the ink was dry on our divorce papers to marry Jack?”
“You really believe I wanted to marry him?”
“Looked that way to me, when I showed up at your nuptials, uninvited. He was proposing a toast and you were lifting your glass to him.”
“You saw a small portion of my life, and you took it out of context,” she said. “I never wanted to be a pawn, never cared about my father’s business, or that it would be one of the world’s largest computer networking firms if he merged with Jack’s company. I was never happier than when I was here in Colorado, working for a living and being responsible for myself.”
“So you used me as a pawn instead. You married me so that you’d have an excuse not to go back to Chicago.”
“You’re a fool if you believe that, Shane Masters.” Her voice shook. “A hardheaded, stu
bborn fool. I married you because I fell in love with you.”
He sneered. “That’s why our two month marriage was the shortest in the county’s history.”
“Believe what you want.”
“Okay. Assuming I believe you, why did you walk out?”
“To save you.”
“To save me?” he echoed. “What are you, some kind of avenging angel? And I’m a man who needs your protection?”
Her blue eyes fired anger as she strode across the room and poked him in the chest.
He caught her wrist and held it.
“Whether you want to believe me or not, everything I did, I did for you.”
She tipped back her head so she could look him square in the eye and said, “When my father learned of our marriage, he was enraged. He called me at the coffee shop and told me I had twenty-four hours to be back in Chicago. For the first time in my life, I defied him. I told him I was in love, and that I was staying here. Then I hung up on him.”
“You never told me.”
“It didn’t matter.”
“Maybe it did.”
Tension hissed and crackled between them. Her self-composure never faltered. In the past, it would have. He realized he didn’t know her half as well as he’d thought he did.
She pulled her wrist free of his grip and moved away from him, crossing the room to look out the window for a few seconds.
“That wasn’t the end of it.” She faced him again. “My dad showed up the next week. It was that morning, after you’d nearly called in sick to work. I was at the coffee shop and my father stormed in. He started yelling at my aunt, calling her irresponsible, telling her he’d trusted her to take care of me, and look what she’d allowed to happen. He should have known better than to believe anything she’d said—after all, she wasn’t really family, she was my mother’s sister.”
Shane softly swore.
“I defended her, told him to leave Emma out of it. Emma hadn’t known about my marriage, so there was no way she could have stopped it. Dad said it didn’t matter, she’d never get to see me again. She was my godmother, did you know that?
“I guess my mom brought me out to see Auntie Em a few times when I was a child. But Dad was so over-protective after Mom died that he stopped me from going anywhere. Emma said she loved me like the daughter she never had, so when he threatened that she’d never see me again, she cried. I only ever saw her cry twice, once at my mom’s funeral, then again that day.”
“You took on that guilt.”
“Wouldn’t you?” she asked quietly. “Then he turned to me, but without anger. He took out a file folder from his briefcase. He’d bought the note on your business loan.”
“Hell.”
“And on your mortgage. He owned you, Shane.”
He furiously drummed his fingers on the bare mantel.
“Everything you’d worked for, everything you’d struggled and fought for, he owned. You didn’t know it. He hid behind one of his corporations. He didn’t have to be angry with me, because he knew I’d do exactly what he said. He intended to call the note due. He was in control. He had you. And in owning you, he had me.”
“I had a right to know.”
“I knew you’d see it that way. That’s why I couldn’t tell you.”
“Damn it.” He pounded the heel of his palm on the pine mantel. Hardhat looked up and cocked his head. “A partnership, Angie. Wasn’t that what you were always insisting on, our marriage being a partnership? Or was that only when it suited you?”
“Would you have let me go?” she asked very quietly.
“Hell, no. You were my wife.”
“And that’s why I couldn’t tell you.”
“I would have told your father to shove his threats and thrown him out of the state myself.”
“I know. You would have forced me to stay.”
“Where you belonged.”
“And you wouldn’t have given me a choice.”
He was being backed into a corner. To him, this was black and white, right and wrong. And she was wrong. “We could have weathered the storm together. Unless you didn’t want to.”
“And what about Sarah?” Angie extended a hand toward him. “Don’t you see? It wasn’t just about us. It was about Sarah, too. I would have lived anywhere with you, would have eaten canned beans and noodles for the rest of my life, but it wasn’t just about us.
“My dad had a dossier on you. He knew about Sarah, knew she was a minor and that she was living with us. If he called your loan due, you’d lose everything. His next step was to go to social services. He had connections there. With you having no job, no home, and with his influence, the state would have taken Sarah from you. If I stayed, you would have lost Sarah. You would have been emotionally destroyed, Shane. You would have felt as though you’d failed in your responsibilities to Sarah, and it would have been my fault. I couldn’t do that to you. I couldn’t force you to choose between your love for me and your love for Sarah.”
“It wasn’t your decision to make.”
“It was at the time.”
“Damn you, Angie, it was my life, my decision.”
“And what if I had come to you? What would you have done?” she challenged. “You couldn’t afford a lawyer. Even if you could, there was no way to fight my dad and win. I made the only decision I could for you, for us.”
“Better that I hate you than resent you?” he said, words dripping with bitterness.
“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s easier.”
“So you took the coward’s way out and left.”
“Put yourself in my position, Shane.”
“I wouldn’t have walked out on you.”
“I didn’t walk out, you hardheaded mule. Saying I walked out implies I had a choice. Because I loved you, I had no choice.
“I’m not your mother. I’m not Delilah. I was a woman who left you because I loved you. Whether you agree or not, it was my decision, and I did the best I could. I wanted you to have a chance at the dreams that drove you. Not that you would have ever appreciated my sacrifice for you and Sarah.” She shook her head. “I’m not surprised by any of this, that you didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt, that you still won’t listen to me. Why should you be any different from any other man?”
“I wasn’t any other man. I was your husband.”
“So I should have let you make the decision and ruin your life, is that it?”
Frustrated, he kissed her, and the depth of his emotion stunned Shane.
Slowly he ended the angry kiss. No woman, ever, had dragged this kind of reaction from him. He’d kept his feelings locked away, and she continually unlocked them. Damn it, if he didn’t still care, this wouldn’t matter.
“At least that was honest,” she said, turning away.
Shane told himself that exorcizing the passion was a good thing, that it would help him get over her.
But as she went away, leaving her own special scent lingering behind in the crackling atmosphere, Shane instinctively recognized his own lie.
Having her back in his life hadn’t snuffed the emotional flame.
It had only fed it.
Seven
Angie collapsed against the bedroom door, fingers pressed to her mouth and tears flooding her eyes.
She told herself she wouldn’t cry. When she left him, she thought she’d cried all the tears she’d ever cry. Now she knew differently.
He hadn’t physically hurt her, but emotionally she ached all the way to her soul.
She wished she could turn back time, wished she hadn’t stopped beneath that tree, wished she hadn’t lost her memory, wished she hadn’t made love with him, reminding herself she’d never stopped caring….
A tear escaped and trickled down her cheek.
The weight of the aspen leaf around her neck now felt like an anchor. She’d kept it as a talisman, a reminder of her time with Shane, of the fun times they’d shared. It was as if that part of her wouldn’t die, as lon
g as she had a token of the past.
Jack had hated the cheap piece of jewelry and tried to yank it off her neck. But in her first act of defiance, she’d knocked his hand away and told him if he touched it, there wouldn’t be a marriage. He’d have to find another pawn to use in the chess game he and her father were playing. Their merger could go to hell and him along with it.
His eyes had narrowed, and he’d backed down, and Angie realized that any hope for a happy future had vanished in that instant. She’d set the rules, and he’d agreed to them. Back then, though, she hadn’t realized the emotional cost she’d have to pay or the way he’d use the promise of a child to get her to do what he wanted.
When Jack died and she realized how much he had actually controlled her, she swore she’d live her own life under her own terms. The fight with Shane just now affirmed that she’d made the right choice. She didn’t need or want a man, any man.
She had a life, friends and a job she adored. What more could she need?
Her hands shaking, she unfastened the clasp and let the necklace fall into the box near her discarded rings.
Sheriff Spencer McCall pounded on the door. Belatedly Hardhat roused himself and galloped to the door to bark out a warning.
Spencer skipped the greetings. “Found Emma Kelsey’s car abandoned down off the county road,” he said, shaking snow off his lawman’s hat. “And Doc Johnson said he got a call from you about Angie.”
“She’s here.”
Spencer raised a questioning brow.
“Safe and sound.” He and Spencer went way back, and Spencer had been there the day Angie left. He and Slade Birmingham had refused to leave Shane alone. The two men even stayed the night, sleeping on the floor, not believing Shane’s promise that he was fine, that an end of a marriage meant nothing, that he wasn’t going to do something crazy and hit the bottle like his old man used to.
But Shane had been lying to himself. It mattered, a hell of a lot. After he got back from Chicago, he had bought a bottle of whiskey and toasted his determination to get on with his life.
“Doc said she’d been in an accident, has amnesia.”
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