The Other Man (25 page)

My mind shot immediately to the time we’d cooked a meal together, to how he’d known every inch of my kitchen, every ingredient in my spice cupboard.
 

Then it shot to the first time I’d had him over.
 
He’d known exactly where I kept my vibrator, but I’d been too distracted by him to wonder or care at the time.
   

Considering all of that, I was certain then that she wasn’t lying.

Still, it confused the hell out of me.
 
“
Why
?
 
Why on earth would he do that?”

“It was all for Iris.
 
All of it.
 
The reason he spied on you, approached you, seduced you.
 
It was all done
only
to protect her.”
 

And that confused me even more.
 
“His sister?
 
You’re saying he seduced me for
his sister?
”
 

She laughed, and it gave me the chills.
 
She was a scary woman, and she was clearly enjoying herself at my expense.
   

“It all goes back to your friend Alasdair Masters.”
 

What the fuck?
 
Why did it keep coming back to Dair?
 

I was more lost than ever.
 
“Dair?”
 

“Yes, Dair.
 
Dair and Iris.”
 

“Dair and Iris?” I repeated back dumbly.
 

“Yes.
 
Iris is obsessed with Dair, and she was worried that he was interested in you.
 
Heath knew she was worried, and Heath would do
anything
for his sister.
 
What his sister wants, Heath makes sure she gets.
 
First, he needed to check you out because that’s what he does.
 
And then he needed to eliminate you as a threat to his sister.”

“How would I be a threat to his sister?”
 

“A threat to her not getting what she wanted.”
 

I just stared at her.
 

“Dair.
 
She wanted Dair, so Heath made sure, firsthand, that you wouldn’t be in her way.”

“That’s ridiculous.
 
I don’t believe you.”
 

Only that was a lie.
 
What I meant was,
I don’t want to believe you.
 

But I did.
 
She had a confidence about her that left so little room for personal insecurity that I just believed her.
 
Why would this woman come here and lie to me about a man that had already declared himself out of my life?
 
I couldn’t find a good reason, and so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.
 

Because it all made sense somehow.
 
With what I’d known, and what she’d told me, things started to connect about the way he was, the way he operated.

I saw it so clearly now.
 
How everything about him was a weapon.
 

Engineered to get what he wanted.
 

Calculated to yield the proper results.

And he’d wanted something from me.
 
Pushed all of my buttons to be sure he’d gotten it.
 

And he had.
 
Above and beyond.
   

“And where do you fit into this?” I asked her, but again, I knew.
 
She had the scorned lover role down pat.

Only I was wrong.
 
It was worse even than that.

“That night you went out on a date with Dair, and you came home to find Heath waiting for you.
 
I was sent to follow Dair, to track him down with orders to interfere if he so much as touched you.

“This is sick.
 
He had
you
spying on me?” I asked slowly.

“Yes.
 
And even now, he’s got me keeping an eye on you, making sure no one traced him to your place.”

“He
still
has
you
spying on me?”
 
I was disgusted and appalled.
 
At him, at her.

At myself.
 

“Yes.”
 

“Let me get this straight,” I began, my rare but memorable temper coming to the surface.
 
“Your lover tells you to spy on the other woman he’s been sleeping with, and you do it?
 
What the hell is wrong with you?”
 

I’d scored a hit; it was clear by her flashing eyes and the malevolent twist to her mouth.
   

I got the distinct impression that her temper was even more memorable than mine, and I had a brief feeling of regret that I’d provoked it on purpose.
 
This was not some normal woman.
 
If I pushed just the wrong button, she’d have no qualms about taking my life.
 
I knew it instinctively.
 

Luckily, I hadn’t pushed her quite that far.
     

“I’m his partner,” she said through gritted teeth.
 
“He and I have a history you couldn’t understand.
 
You’re
nothing
to him.
 
Part of a job.
 
I just thought you should know that’s all you
ever
were.
 
He never broke character with you.
 
Not for a second.
 
I just wanted you to know that.”

And then she left, because she’d accomplished what she came for.
 

CHAPTER
 

TWENTY-FIVE

And so began the next stage of my Heath withdrawals.
 
This one was much less pretty than the first and lasted quite a bit longer.
 

I’ll confess, I had a few bitter moments there, a few man-hating days, where I cursed him as a bastard, and vented, ad nauseam, about what a deceitful son of a bitch he was to my girlfriends.
 

A brief moment in time where I swore off men for good.

I felt so foolish.
 
How had I fallen so easily for his act?
 

How had I made him out to be something that he wasn’t?
 

Had I always been a chronic romanticizer?

It was a serious question I asked myself, and the answer was not long in coming.
 

Yes, of course I was.
 
How else had I stayed married for so long, in ignorance, to a man whose main characteristic had to be, above all things, narcissism?

I put things, ideas,
people
on pedestals.
 
I made little poems in my mind about my loved ones, and though they didn’t rhyme, they were beautiful poetry, poetry that shaped the better things in my life.
 

So, of course, when I’d met a man like that, who consumed, who dominated, who was stoic to the point of unreadable, I turned him into a romantic figure, his feelings for me far too complicated to be said in words.

Foolish, I know.
 
I felt it keenly.
 

I’d taken in a wild animal.
 
How could I be surprised I’d been bitten in the process?

I rewrote the story in my mind, this time with Heath in his proper role, as more of a villain than hero.

Even after my divorce, bitter and ugly as it was, I’d never doubted in my life that I was a complete woman, with or without a man.
 
I’d never
needed
another person to complete me.
 
That just wasn’t who I was.
 

I loved myself, and my life, and being single hadn’t changed that.
 

I found joy in the simple things, a perfectly composed picture, one of my children smiling.
 

But now, unaccountably, there was a void, some hollowed out hole in me that needed filling, so much so, I found myself constantly looking for someone who could.
 

I didn’t need a man, it was true, but if I wanted one, there was nothing wrong with that, either.
 

Sometimes I felt a bit of clarity about the whole thing.
 
That’s what I was calling it: the whole thing.
 
Relationship hardly seemed an accurate description.
 
Affair felt and sounded wrong.
     

I started looking at it differently.
 
Because that’s what you did when you moved on.
 
And I needed to move on.
 

Right after that woman had confronted me, I’d taken her at her words and swallowed whole the vicious things that she’d said to me.
 

But, after a time, a bit of reason slipped back in, and it occurred to me, that, like all things, there wasn’t only one side to this story, and her bit of venom was just one piece of the equation.
 

She was bitter.
 
She felt scorned.
 
Of course she’d try to twist things and shove them down my throat.
 

I didn’t know what the full truth was.
 
I figured I probably never would with Heath so definitively out of the picture, but I knew some of it.
 

Regardless of his motives and his lies, I did believe that on some level he’d cared about me.
 
And I did believe we’d helped each other in some way.
 

He never could have been a permanent fixture in my life.
 
It was naive of me to think so.
 
But, despite feeling foolish at the end, he’d been good for me.
 

So I took that and ran with it.
 

We’d been good for each other.
 
That was a fact.
 
Regardless of what that bitter girl had said to me, something profound had happened between Heath and me.
 

I helped him heal, and he helped me move on.
 
The end of the thing didn’t negate the purpose of it.
 

His name was Kevin.
 
He was calm as still water and had the second most fascinating pair of eyes I’d ever seen.
 

They were a deep blue flecked with little bits of green, but that wasn’t what made them so unique.
 

First of all, he was an amiable guy, very go with the flow from our very first encounter, which happened to be a fender bender.
 

It was his fault.
 
I’d hit a red light in heavy traffic, which in Vegas could easily be mistaken for a yellow (we’re all color blind drivers in this town), and I’d had a brief moment of indecision, deciding whether to speed up or halt, when I’d stopped suddenly, and he rammed into my back fender.
 
It wasn’t a hard hit, but it was jarring.
 

It should have been an upsetting occurrence, but the way he handled the whole thing impressed me enough to actually cause me to give him my real number when he asked for it.
 

He was just so unfazed.
 
I was still catching my breath when I saw a lean figure emerge from the black Camry currently attached to the rear end of my Tesla.
 

He made a handsome picture, wearing a nice suit and dark shades.
 

I rolled my window down when he stood in front of it, looking at him, wondering how he’d react to the accident.
 

Men usually had two reactions when they were at fault.
 
One, which was how my ex-husband would have reacted, was to blame the other party, regardless of the facts.
 
Two was to apologize and talk about how best to proceed.
 

Kevin chose an extreme version of the latter.
 

He crouched down at my window, not close enough to be in my personal space, but making a point of not looming over me.
 

“My God.
 
I can’t believe I did that.”
 
His voice was soft and cultured and profusely apologetic.
 
“I’m
terribly
sorry.
 
I looked down for a second and didn’t realize I was right on top of you.
 
Are you okay?”

His cajoling, sincere tone had me at ease instantly.
 

I nodded, attempting to smile it off.
 
“I’m just fine.
 
Accidents happen.”
 

He took off his shades, giving me my first glimpse of his compelling eyes.
 

They were ice cold.
 
The rest of his face moved frantically into a smile meant to put me at ease, but the eyes, they were wrong, broken.
 

I was caught fast.
 

That incongruity, with him being so kind, but having those cruel eyes.

I found myself drawn him.
 

Of course I was.
 
His very expression was at odds with itself.

And needless to say, I’m a sucker for a complicated man.

At the time, particularly that first, bemusing meeting, I didn’t connect the dots of just whom he reminded me of that made him so attractive, but it was right there all along.
 

In many ways, though, he was the opposite of Heath, which was also a draw.
 

Where Heath struggled to express himself, Kevin
over
-expressed.

He smiled at me, a warm smile, to belie the cold eyes.
 
He was a tall man, but lean with an attractive, angular face.
 
He was dark in the way that I was dark, where you couldn’t have placed his race if you tried, a good mix of something Latin, I assumed.
 
With the exception of Heath, I’d always been drawn to the tall, dark, and handsome type.