Page 125 of Outside The Wire

“What do you want me to say? What the hell am I supposed to do here? I can’t go home with her. I can’t play the doting husband when I’m in love with someone else.”

“You have a wife,” Chase pointed out.

“Who I thought was dead,” I stressed. “You remember that, don’t you? You remember me nearly putting a bullet in my skull, right? Because I remember that night. I remember being so drunk off my ass that all I wanted was to do the same fucking thing she did to me. But I left that all behind, and now you want me to go down that road with her again?”

He sighed, shaking his head. “I don’t know, man. What do you want me to say?”

I didn’t know. I wanted to go back in time when I didn’t know she was alive. I wished she had died in that accident. I’d already mourned her and moved on. Now…now it was just fucked upand painful all over again. All those old wounds were being torn open, and I didn’t know how to get a handle on them.

Patrick cleared his throat, sitting up. “Incoming.”

Jade came back with a forced smile on her face, pretending everything was alright, but I could see the red stains on her cheeks from where she’d been crying. I didn’t want any of this for her. I wanted her to be happy, but that couldn’t be with me.

“Well, thank you for lunch, but I think it’s time to go back to the hotel,” Jade smiled. “Asher, could you bring me back?”

“Of course.”

I glared at the two fuckers sitting at the table and stood, waiting for Jade to join me. When she slid her hand through my arm, I did my best to extricate myself without being too much of an ass. No matter what I did, I was going to hurt her. But leading her on would be worse.

It felt wrong helping her up into my truck and driving her to the hotel. Only one woman belonged in my truck, and that was Holly. Noelle, on occasion, but she never tried to replace Holly. But Jade very much wanted to wiggle her way back into my life, and I had to find a way to get through to her that we were never going to happen. I needed a divorce, and the sooner, the better.

As soon as we were back to the hotel, I planned to drop her off and leave. I couldn’t hang around here with her. It wouldn’t work out well for either of us. I was so distracted by my own thoughts that I ignored her the entire drive over and most of the way up to her floor. It wasn’t until the elevator dinged that I finally acknowledged she was in the same space with me.

“Is there anything you need?”

“Oh, you care now?” she laughed.

“Jade…you have to understand how hard this is for me.”

She nodded, stepping off. “I do. It must be quite the shock to think your wife was dead and then have her show up out of the blue. You looked like you were about to pass out,” she smiled.

“The world did spin a little,” I grinned.

“Can we just…go in and talk about where we go from here?”

Going inside was dangerous, but we needed to hash this out. I couldn’t just ignore her and hope this would go away. “Sure.”

“Maybe you could tell me a little about your life since I’ve been gone,” she said as she opened the door. “I feel like I’ve missed so much.”

The last thing I wanted to do was chat with her about what my life had been like since she drove herself into a tree.

“Water?”

“Sure,” I said, taking a seat.

She grabbed one out of the mini fridge and handed it to me, curling up on the sofa across from me. “You know, I figured you’d move on, but I never considered you’d leave your job.”

“What did the guys tell you?”

“Not much of anything. Just…things like we’ll take you to him soon. I had no idea you had left your job.”

“Yeah, well…when I lost you, it felt like the job had taken pretty much everything from me.”

“But I’m back now. You could get your job back, and we could?—”

I shook my head, stopping her before she went too far. “Jade, there is no we. I can’t go back there. I need you to understand that.”

“Because of her.”

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