Page 68 of I'm Not Yours
“With sunshine and sparkles thrown in.”
Sunshine and sparkles. “Are you a poet?”
He laughed. “Not quite. I say what I think.”
“So, you’re a flirt.” I ignored a stab in my heart. Darn it. Flirts were dangerous. Teasingly, attractively dangerous. Light and fluffy and you are one of a harem . . .
“Not at all. You’re the first one in many years.”
He said it sincerely, so straight on. Could it possibly be true? I took a deep breath so I could spit out the truth. This was not gonna be fun. “Reece, I need to be completely honest with you.”
“Please do.”
I gathered my strength by studying the cliffs in the distance and the tide pools below it, then turned back to him. “I’m in the middle of a divorce.”
Reece’s eyes widened slightly and his expression froze, that hard jaw not moving.
“Or, I should say, I’m at what I hope will be the end of my divorce. It’s a mess. I’m a mess. I left him two years ago. He doesn’t want a divorce and he is fighting it with all he has, every loophole, every delay tactic.”
I hoped the sun, bright and bold in a deep blue sky, would warm up my scared-stiff and frozen body. “I should have told you at lunch, but I didn’t want to.”
“Why didn’t you want to tell me then?”
“Why?” I heard no judgment in his tone, only a question. “Because I wanted . . .”
“You wanted what?”
“I wanted to go to lunch with you, to talk and laugh, and I didn’t want to discuss the black, frothing muck in my life, this constant sadness, this fight, this disaster.” For once I was not awash in lust while looking at him. My sadness was squashing the lust. “I didn’t even know if we would see each other again, and I wanted to take a break out of my life and just be with you.”
He thought for a while, watching the ocean.Maybe I should leave now?
“Within ten minutes of talking to you,” he said, “I knew we’d see each other again.”
“Because you knew we were living next door to each other?”
“No. Because I wanted to be with you again.”
I wanted to cry. I had so wanted to be with him, too.
“As far as your soon-to-be-ex-husband. Do you still love him? Do you hate him? Is the marriage over in your mind, or are there a whole bunch of things that are still upsetting you?”
“I have been through a mind-numbing range of emotions with this divorce, with the ending of my marriage, and I feel nothing for my ex-husband except this anger and frustration that he’s holding things up. There are no other emotions left from the marriage itself. I don’t love him, I don’t hate him, I don’t like him. I want him out of my life. He’s controlling this situation, as he did our marriage, because he can. I can’t stand that anyone is controlling me at all, especially him.”
“He’s on a power trip, then.”
“Always has been. But am I over him? Yes. Long ago I was over him.”
“Why did the marriage break up?”
“Definitely at least half my fault. I never should have married him. I was acting as someone I wasn’t, reaching for things I didn’t value, and I worked incessantly to build my career. I was part of an image that I thought, for years, I wanted. Grayson fit into the image. He was the perfect fiancé, and the perfect husband for about three months. We wanted the same things. We had the same interest in work. My mistake.”
“What did you used to do?”
“I was a lawyer in a law firm on a partnership track. He was a partner in another high-powered firm.”
“How’d that go?”
“I was unutterably miserable.”
