Текст книги "Playing with Fire "

Автор книги: Kate Meader

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Fifteen hours later, a considerably less spry version of Eli finally made it home. His muscles protested every move, blunted from what felt like years on the campaign trail. The alarm didn’t beep to tell him it was armed, but he knew John, one of his security detail, was here with Shadow.

He walked into the living room and his heart lifted clear through the roof.

Alexandra.

She lay sleeping, sprawled on his sofa, not in the least bit ladylike. Jackie O she ain’t. The dog bed had been pulled up to the end cushion and Shadow was curled up with the eye not covered by a patch trained on his sofa mate. Watching her, keeping her safe.

Shadow loved Alexandra Dempsey, and Eli knew exactly what that felt like. He sat down beside her, and the motion was enough to turn her in to him. She nuzzled into his neck.

“You’re back,” she whispered, sleep-husky. “How did the debate go?”

For fuck’s sake. “You didn’t even watch it?”

She smoothed away his indignation with a kiss. “Politics bores me. Wiped the floor with the opposition, I assume.”

“Sure did. I thought one of the security guys would still be here. Didn’t you have a shift at the bar?”

She breathed deep from his skin, like she was storing his scent for another day. It made him think about a time when he might not have her—some horrible, apocalyptic future ruled by love-destroying zombies when he would have to live on memory fumes.

“Beck covered for me. I couldn’t bear to leave my brave little guy.” She rubbed behind Shadow’s ears. “I think he likes me a little.”

“He’s crazy about you.”

The TV was on, but muted. A very tanned, very naked man sporting a spare tire that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Mack truck was walking around a nice house with a clipboard in his hands. “What are we watching?”

“Buying Naked. Nudists trying to find real estate and society’s acceptance. It’s stop, drop, and watch television.”

“It is?”

“Everything on TLC is. They have the best shows. I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant!, Sister Wives, Alaskan Women Looking for Love, Sex Sent Me to the ER—”

“That’s not a real show.”

“It is, and it’s as awesome as it sounds. Skydiving accidents midcoitus. Ball gags used in a manner that’s off label. You know, the usual.” She stroked his jaw. “Poor Eli, look at all you’ve been missing while achieving world domination. I didn’t make banana bread, by the way.”

“Okaaay.”

“I wanted to take care of you when you came home,” she explained. “I was going to make banana bread. That’s what my mom used to make as a special treat, especially when something big was happening for one of us.”

His heart left his body right then and wandered around in a state of confusion. “Honey, that’s so sweet. But if you think that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach you’re aiming too high.”

She laughed. “I fell asleep, which is probably for the best because I can’t cook anyway. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not the homemaker type. ”

Perhaps not, but she made his house a home, just by her presence here. He kissed her eyelids, her nose, each of her cheeks, her lips. Shadow turned on those sad brown eyes, seeking attention, so Eli stroked the rough patchwork of fur on his head and spent a moment soothing him. Soon his heavy head dropped and his drug daze sent him to doggy dreamland, where Eli hoped there were cats to chase and bacon to eat.

If this were any more perfect, he would think it was a setup. He had been a beast in the debate, answering on his strongest areas with authority, deflecting on the issues where he was weak. At home, Shadow was on the mend and Alexandra was here in his arms where she belonged. Eli Cooper was winning at fucking everything, and it couldn’t get better.

But it could get a whole lot worse. He was a liar and a master manipulator. She knew some of it and seemed to accept it as the day-in, day-out of politics. Part of the game and his need to dominate every aspect of his life. But the things she didn’t know—what his father had done, what Eli had done—would send her packing, for sure. No more cozying up on the sofa to watch dumb TV shows. No more coming home to this.

To his heart.

“I had this weird call last night,” she mumbled sleepily.

“Hmm,” he hummed in her hair. Sleep was overtaking him at a rapid pace.

“From a film production company. Molly Cade wants to play me in a movie.”

“Who?”

“Molly Cade? Oscar-nominated actress? America’s sweetheart? Well, she used to be before her husband dumped her and took her to the cleaners. Apparently she’s making a firefighter movie this summer in Chicago and they want to rework the script to include episodes from the life of yours truly.”

He chuckled. “There’ll be no living with you once your life is immortalized on the silver screen.”

A shadow flitted like a dark-winged bird across her face, perhaps because his words implied a future together. After all they’d been through, surely she saw the inevitable. Jackie O she ain’t, but Alexandra Dempsey would very soon be Chicago’s First Lady.

The brass ring was within his grasp, the victory so sweet he could taste it.

“I actually had two odd calls.”

“Let me guess, you’re to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

She giggled. “Not this year. But that’s okay because a girl needs something to strive for.” Concern replaced playfulness in those sink-into-me green eyes. “A reporter called asking about your father. Something about an investigation into him by the U.S. Attorney’s Office before he died.”

Every muscle in Eli’s body locked up as if superglue was hardening in his veins. Madison had mentioned a call to her office earlier and he had dismissed it as a desperate dig by the opposition.

“They wanted a comment and I told them to call the mayor’s office. You must get so sick of all these hits against you. They’ll try anything to bring you down now that you’re so close.”

Unavoidably, his gaze attached to the bookshelf display, the one with his University of Chicago graduation photo, the shot of his team in the Marines, Eli shaking hands with the president of the United States a month after he took office at city hall. His proudest moments. And beside them was the Weston Cooper Justice Award.

He’d left it behind at the gala, his only concern that night convincing this woman to let him worship her in his bed. One of his security team had retrieved it. On discovering it thrown haphazardly on his kitchen counter, Alexandra had marveled that it wasn’t taking pride of place in his home, so she’d put it there. And now it shone malevolently, those scales of justice mocking every single one of Eli’s achievements.

“Eli, what’s wrong?

A line separating his old life from his new was about to be drawn. The past was another country, and if they had a chance of making it, he had to leave it behind. Eli the liar. Eli the manipulator.

Eli, the son of a Chicago hero.

He stroked her thigh, taking strength from her heat and goodness, and said the one thing he’d prayed would never need saying.

“We need to talk.”

We need to talk. The four most terrifying words in the English language.

She sat up straight and looked into the eyes of this man she had foolishly and irrevocably fallen in love with. “Should I not have spoken to that reporter? I don’t know how she got my number and . . .” Heart thudding, she trailed off at his stark expression and painted on a wobbly smile.

“No, it’s not that.” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Weston Cooper wasn’t the saint everyone made him out to be, Alexandra. He was just a man.”

She blinked, not understanding how this was the lead-in to getting dumped. Maybe she was going to hear that his dad wouldn’t have approved or . . . She thought back to the missing photos, the thousand-mile stares, the clues her brain refused to compute. Had Weston Cooper been a different man behind closed doors?

“They’re all just men, Eli. But some men do great things, even if they’re not the best in other areas.” A flutter in her chest started up, thinking about what areas Eli’s father had failed in. As sister to foster brothers who had all endured fucked-up parental situations before finding a safe harbor with the Dempseys, she understood that the roses often came sporting big-ass thorns.

“When I was a kid, I adored him.” His gaze traveled to the family portrait hung up in the living room for the public to see. “I didn’t even realize that what he was doing was all that special until later. After. He was just Dad. He put on a suit and went to work at seven every morning and came home and played with the dog and me every night at six. I thought he was perfect, but he wasn’t.”

Those last three words were grated out.

“No one is,” she whispered.

“Sean was. His legacy is forged in fire. No one can take that away from you. What he did, laying his life on the line for his job, his city, his family, for total strangers—that made him a true hero. Logan, too.”

Confusion tore at her brain. “Your father was a hero of a different kind.”

“Stop calling him that.” He spat out the words, his eyes flat discs of fury. “Because he wasn’t. He was a liar and a fraud and he’s the reason my mother is dead.”

“Eli, what are you talking about?”

What she saw in the harsh cut of his mouth terrified her. “A week after I was elected four years ago, Sam Cochrane came to see me. He wanted to make sure I was ready to scratch his back now that he’d bankrolled me to the top. I was happy to ease up on him for a few things, minor shit—it’s quid pro quo, after all—but I wasn’t going to give him any significant preferential treatment. That’s when he played his ace.”

“What, Eli? What did he tell you?”

“My father was a crook. He was actually working with Ronan Cutler, the mob boss who killed him. ”

The chill in her heart spread to every part of her. “Th-that can’t be right. How would Cochrane know that?” Perhaps not the right question, but there were so many and she had to start somewhere. What he had said was mind-boggling.

“Cochrane and my father might have been friends, but that never stopped the bastard from investigating people. If he thinks he can get an edge, he’ll put people on it. Go to any length to find it. He got a tip, found out something, who knows? He was probably blackmailing my father with it. After my parents died, Sam held on to it because he suspected it would be more useful to him if he bided his time. He would use it to catch me.”

“You make it sound like he’s been planning to back you for office for years.”

He didn’t respond, which was an answer in itself. And his eyes . . . those eyes were filled with something she had never seen: hopelessness.

“Two days after my parents died, the cops raided Cutler’s compound, killed him and his top people. There were only low-level peons left, none of whom knew about my father’s involvement with the mob. He had been giving Cutler a heads-up on raids, advance moves of law enforcement. According to Sam, my father wanted out. The guy Cutler sent was only supposed to threaten our family, a message to my father to continue to play ball. But the assassin overstepped his bounds. Killed them both.”

“And no one else knows?”

“There were suspicions. After Sam told me, I contacted someone I knew who had worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the time. They’d been investigating my father, but he was killed before they could indict him. With all the major players out of the way, it seemed fruitless and a waste of taxpayer money to bring it out in the open. My father’s legacy would have been destroyed. Every case he ever prosecuted would come under scrutiny.”

“And you,” she said slowly, the full impact of what he was saying creeping up on her like an icy wave. “You would come under scrutiny.”

“This city loves him, Alexandra,” he said, passing over her observation. “It needs heroes, men who stand tall, and even if he made this mistake, he was still a decent man in other ways. A good husband. The best father.”

And a criminal. She thought back to all those interviews Eli had given before the last election on local and national TV. His obvious pride in his father and his accomplishments—it had all been genuine, she knew that. Now he had to poker up whenever the sainted Coop was mentioned and pretend that he was still the great man, not responsible for his wife’s death or for orphaning a twelve-year-old boy.

All terrible, but still her mind kept circling back to the present.

“But it helped you get into office. What he did, what people think he did.”

Standing up to a mobster. That heroic act. That lie. She drew back, needing the space to comb through and untangle what she was hearing. The only sure ground was quicksand.

He noticed her withdrawal, frowned. “My father’s legacy might be the reason I got into office, but I’ve proved myself. I know I have. I love this city.”

She didn’t doubt that. She’d seen it in the hours he put in, the dedication, but. . .

“People voted for you because of what your father did, because of what he stood for. I—I voted for you.” Because she saw her own pain reflected in his. Because of Sean and Logan.

On his face was frustration that she was choosing to see it in this way. But he’d had years to parse this; she was still reeling.

“I didn’t know then what he had done.”

“But when you found out, you kept quiet. You let people think he was this great man. A hero.”

His look condemned her naïveté. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Thanks for your vote and oh, by the way, my father wasn’t quite the hero after all’? How would that help? Who would that serve?”

Eli’s raised voice drew Shadow out of his drug-induced slumber. He looked up, concerned that Mommy and Daddy were fighting.

“My father was a hero, Eli,” she gritted out. “My brother was a hero. They died doing their jobs for this city. How can you not see that supporting this false image of your father compromises their memories, people who truly died honorably?”

The pain that wracked his expression cut her to the marrow, but it had nothing on the hurt in the space around her heart.

“I know that,” he said quietly. “Do you think I don’t know that?”

But Eli’s father hadn’t died honorably. His father had worked with a killer to ensure his continued freedom to terrorize. His father had pretended bravery when he had no right to do so. People still talked about him with reverence and awe.

In the same conversation as her father and brother.

Gaze blurred with tears, Alex walked over to the bookshelf where she had placed the Weston Cooper Justice Award a week ago. With a quivering hand, she picked up the piece of glass, shaped like a scale, and walked into the kitchen, where she dropped it into the trash.

Eli followed, but didn’t acknowledge what she had done with a word or glance. “Alexandra, I am not my father.”

Yes, but right now it was so hard to separate them. “I know you’re not. I know I can’t hold you responsible for the sins of your father, Eli, but you’re responsible for your sins. Your actions. You’ve used this to win votes.” Her vote. “You’re still using it to win votes.”

She’d known what he was like from the beginning. Eli Cooper had more moves than a roach in a bowl of cereal. Every decision was calculated to the infinitesimal detail. Nothing was left to chance. He wanted to win the election.

He wanted to win her.

But now those niggling doubts about her usefulness to him and his campaign nipped at the edges of her querulous mind. Knowing all those things he was capable of, the lengths he’d go to ensure victory—it was all mixed up in her head and her heart that hurt so much.

“I trusted you—” Her voice broke, and what came out next was a rusty whisper. “I—I defended you to my family. Took hits for you. I let you inside my body with no protection because I trusted you would protect me. We all trust you to protect this city, Eli.”

He cupped her face with those weapons of pleasure that had taken her to heaven so many times. “I have protected you, Alexandra. From day one, from moment fucking zero when I saw you in Smith & Jones last summer, that’s all I’ve wanted to do. That’s why I’m telling you everything now, so there are no lies between us. This . . . this thing with my father. It’s not pleasant, but I’ve been trying to distance myself from it. From him. Forge my own path.”

She jerked from his grasp. “How can you ever do that? You’ve lived with secrets and lies for so long that you don’t know what it’s like to be open. Would you have even told me if that reporter hadn’t called?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

Well, at least he was honest about that.

“Alexandra, listen to me—”

“So you can needle and debate and convince me with that smooth patter of yours? When can you tell a politician is lying? When his lips are moving. And your lips are always moving, Eli. You’re always talking and kissing and making me feel amazing, but those lips of yours are just broadcasting your lies.”

“I love you,” he husked out. Strong hands pushed her back against the kitchen island. Pinned by his hard body, hearing those desperately uttered words, she felt herself sinking under his thrall again. “That’s not a lie. That’s the God’s honest truth. And I know you feel the same way.”

She shut her eyes against what should have been a dream come true. This man she loved telling her exactly what she wanted to hear. But that was the problem—he was playing her again. It was like Cubbies fans thinking this year would be different when they’d been screwed over time and again. Still, they returned to Wrigley, bought more shitty hot dogs and overpriced beer, because they were at the ball game. They were on hallowed ground and getting screwed was part of the experience.

Well, screwing wasn’t enough to rose-color this experience. The Eli goggles had to come off.

“The truth, Eli? Since when have you been on even the barest speaking terms with the truth? Everything out of your mouth is said with one goal in mind: how will this help me win? Whether it’s sabotaging a rival during a date or inventing a lawsuit when you don’t get your way.”

She had almost been fooled, sensually bludgeoned by these plays of a man used to getting everything he wanted. To have someone want her badly enough to employ such black-ops tactics—how flattered she had been. Her friends thought the stunts he had pulled were romantic. For God’s sake, Kinsey had fallen for it. Even if Alex could get past this deception, how could she continue looking into those eyes and not see the gaze of the consummate liar?

He held her face, leaned his forehead to hers. “Honey, we can get through this. Look how far we’ve come already. All the obstacles we’ve smashed to get here.”

“You mean the rivals you’ve crushed and the pieces you’ve moved around the board?” She pushed him away. Her heart felt like it was shredding inside her, layers stripping off one at a time. “You got the firefighters’ union endorsement because I made you look good. But not just me. My family of heroes made you look good. You appropriated the legacy of my dead father and brother because your own is corrupted. Soiled.”

She struck her breast where the memory of Sean and Logan lived. The men she honored every day. All along, she’d worried that Eli was using her to win over her tribe of fire, but it was worse than she could ever have suspected.

“You haven’t just used me, Eli. You’ve used them. And I’ll never forgive you for that.”

She had no idea what impact her words made because she was already running toward the door, swiping at her leaking emotion, pushing away her pain with every step.

He didn’t try to stop her.

Eli Cooper had finally given up.

 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It wasn’t every day that someone managed to get a jump on the mayor of Chicago’s security team, or the mayor himself, but then Eli supposed that after the last few weeks, nothing should surprise him.

That Eli had been sucker punched by a Dempsey? Not shocking in the least.

What did surprise him was that (a) this particular Dempsey made an appointment to hit the mayor soundly on the jaw and (b) the strike did not come at the hands of Luke or Beck, who were generally acknowledged as the ones with homicidal tendencies.

Eli rubbed his sore jaw and marveled at how his ten o’clock—one Wyatt Fox—could stand before him with such calm. He would have loved to have this man in his Marine unit.

“Huh. So, would you like to sit?” Eli asked his attacker, one hand still holding his jaw as the other gestured to the chairs in his office on the fifth floor of city hall.

Firefighter Fox flexed his punching hand, tweaked a knife-straight eyebrow, and took a seat in one of the comfortable leather chairs across from Eli’s desk. Endeavoring to keep it friendly, Eli sat in the other armchair a few feet away from Wyatt.

Who then crossed his arms and stared as if it was Eli’s job to make conversation with the man who had just committed a Class 2 felony. One would think he punched out public officials every day.

Eli’s jaw hurt, but better to feel something, anything, than this numbness in his chest, this lump of ice where his heart should be. The last two days without her had been a living nightmare. He had damned any chance of a future with her by going against type and making honesty the best policy.

There was irony in there, somewhere.

“How is she?”

“She’s a Dempsey,” came the gruff reply. In other words, she had her family and all their strength running through her veins. She would survive this. She would survive Eli.

Eli wasn’t entirely sure that he would survive her. Or that he wanted to. Without this woman in his life, he felt like a big fat heap of zero.

“What has she told you?”

“Nothin’. But I found her cryin’ in her cornflakes yesterday morning. Would have come sooner but this was the earliest I could get on your calendar.” He shrugged as though that was enough of an explanation, and Eli supposed it was. He’d made the woman he loved cry and she would never trust him again.

“Have you ever wanted something so badly that you’d sell your soul to have it?”

Wyatt clenched his fist, perhaps contemplating whether another punch might prevent Eli’s imminent devolution into melodrama. “Something or someone?”

“Either.”

He considered this in the manner of a man who had never thought about it before. But Eli knew better. A man like Wyatt Fox thought about things a great deal.

“I have.”

“And don’t say you’ve never lied or kept a secret,” Eli said, “because all your mysterious trips downstate say different.”

Wyatt’s eyes widened in gratifying surprise. Gotcha, Mr. Fox. “What do you know about it?”

“Enough. When I first started this thing with Alexandra, I had background checks run on the whole family. I needed to be sure there weren’t any skeletons rattling around in the Dempsey closets. I have enough of my own without taking on anyone else’s.”

What he’d found out about Wyatt Fox wasn’t exactly damning, but the fact that he was holding back from the rest of them spoke volumes. Those weekly trips to Bloomington were no doubt tied to the monthly transfers out of his bank account. So strange. It wasn’t as if the Dempseys wouldn’t welcome more strays into the fold. Neither did Wyatt seem like the kind of guy who would be ashamed of a past indiscretion, which made his motives for the subterfuge all the more puzzling.

Wyatt appeared only mildly affected by this revelation. “Are you threatening me?”

Eli waved that off. “God, no. I just think that a man in your position, a man hiding something from his family for whatever reason, might understand that sometimes people lie. With the best of intentions. I wanted your sister. I’ve wanted her from the moment I met her. That’s not to say my motives were a hundred percent pure, but there’s never been a second when she hasn’t been on my mind.”

“So you pretended Sam Cochrane was going to sue her to force her to date you.”

“Put like that it does sound . . . Shit, okay, that sounds bad. Really, I saw an opportunity to spend time with her. Get to know her—”

“But the lawsuit stunt isn’t what’s upset her. It’s something worse.”

Worse, and possibly unforgiveable. “It is and, for once in my life, it’s a situation I can’t talk my way out of. It’s a done deal and there’s nothing I can do to fix it.”

A moment of not uncomfortable silence—and, perhaps, understanding—passed. “Are you expecting me to pull for you now, Cooper?”

“Just thought you might feel a tiny bit remorseful about hitting me.”

“You deserved it.” Wyatt gave a cursory glance over his shoulder. “How long before I’m cuffed and sent to lockup?”

“Think nothing of it. I’m going to win her back, you know.” Those words came from some deep place where a fool’s hope lived. Hell, he’d been a fool for this woman from the start, and if he was going to take a header, he would make sure it was spectacular.

“And I’m gonna enjoy watching you make a complete fuckin’ idiot of yourself. Because that’s what you’ll have to do to be within a snowball’s chance of gettin’ with my sister again.” He stood, zipping up his CFD fleece as he rose. “What did you do in the corps, Cooper?”

“Ground intelligence. You?”

Wyatt’s smile was a slow burn. “Sniper.” He held out the hand he had just used to almost rearrange the mayor’s face. Eli clasped it and shook firmly enough to make the man wince.

“But then I expect you already knew that, Mr. Mayor.”

Alex landed a kick to the bag in the gym at Engine Company 6 and imagined it was Eli Cooper’s head.

No, his balls. Though according to the latest online gossip she’d definitely not read, because she was definitely not obsessing over Eli’s every move since their bust-up, she could leave the personal injury stuff to the mayor’s inability to put one foot in front of the other. Per the reports, he had tripped and bruised his jaw when stepping out of the shower. Like she believed that for a second.

Someone had hit him. Hard. She only wished she’d thought of it first.

Compounding her misery was the fact it was the worst day of the year for a singleton: Valentine’s Day. Whatever. She preferred to see it as The Day Before the 50% Off Truffles Sale at Fannie May.

Sweat rolled off her, drenching her tank. She aimed a foot at the bag. Its resounding thump should have felt good, but nothing did.

How could he use her like that?

She got it now. All that distrust he carried, the looking over his shoulder waiting for the knife in his back. Years can go by before you find out a person’s true colors, he’d said that night at DeLuca’s. People always hide things, play parts . . .

He was talking about Weston Cooper, but he could just as easily have been describing himself. His father had betrayed him and his mother in the worst possible way. He’d committed a crime, brought death on his family, then left Eli with this legacy he couldn’t abandon.

Refused to abandon.

Of course, it wasn’t Eli’s fault his father was a criminal—she knew that—but he had benefited nonetheless. He could give away his inheritance. He could refuse to take a salary. But he continued to profit where it counted. Politically. The unions had endorsed him, and no way could he pretend that the legacy of Weston Cooper didn’t play a part.

To her soul-sickening shame, Alex herself had played a part. Local 2, her own union, had come out for the mayor. Her “romance” with Eli had prompted that endorsement, and now all those old insecurities about being a traitor to her tribe—to the people of her heart—came back to haunt her.

All. Wrong. She kicked the bag again.

“Alex, you need to see this,” she heard Wy calling behind her.

“Busy.” Marinating in her disgust for a certain smooth-talking dickweasel.

“No, you’re not. Get in here now.”

So he hadn’t raised his voice, but that was about as heated a tone as she’d ever heard from her stoic brother. She followed his voice to the lounge, where the B shift was watching TV. The ten o’clock news, and from the clock on the screen, they were only a minute in.

Marissa Clark was on deck, by the looks of it on Michigan Avenue. Which was sort of strange because she was the six and ten anchor on NBC 5 and never did the field reporting.

“We’re used to seeing Chicago’s great architecture being lauded the world over, but this week it ’s getting more attention than ever. First with the city council’s move to halt the installation of an ‘architecturally tasteless’ sign on Sam Cochrane’s riverfront building. Now, on this Valentine’s Day, it would seem a certain someone would like to remind a certain someone else that our city ’s skyscrapers can send more visually impactful messages.”

The camera pulled back to show the skyline behind Marissa, and more particularly the Crain Communications Building, though most people called it the Diamond (or more crudely, the Vagina building). Traditionally used to get the city amped at the start of Bears or Hawks season, tonight its window lights had been manipulated to showcase a different dispatch.

Alex gasped.

Up high, for all the world to see, was a message for one person:

Eli

♥

Alexandra

With a big, red, flamboyant heart.

That no-good, unscrupulous pigfucker!

Her phone rang in the pocket of her sweats and she pulled it out, expecting more of the media calls she had been ignoring all afternoon. Thankfully, it was only Kinsey. “Did you see the news?”

“I’m watching it now.”

Marissa was jabbering on about how the mayor’s office had released a statement assuring citizens that no taxpayer dollars or campaign contributions had been used for the current lighting scheme.

“Neither the mayor nor Alex Dempsey could be reached for comment, though we have to wonder what woman could fail to be moved by such a romantic gesture.” Marissa’s eyes shone glossy and it wasn’t from the cold.

“I wish you’d tell us what he did,” Kinsey said, “because last we talked you were going to ask him how he felt. Now we have this gag-inducing hearts-on-buildings business, so what’s the problem here?”

“It’s not so simple.” Alex had shared with her friends and family that she and Eli were kaput because she elected to pull out before she was pushed out. She longed to confide in them, but it wasn’t her story to tell. “This is just another stunt. Like everything with him.”