And I knew she’d be a strong student.
And I knew Weston would sleep with her—if he noticed her.
And I knew that I’d go out of my way to be sure he didn’t.
And I knew, with the kind of conviction talked about in biblical tales, that, if there was anyone who could, she’d be the one to save me.
ONE
Present
I wait until Weston and I are in my office, the door shut behind us before I voice my suspicion. “She knows.”
“Who knows?” He glances back at the closed door, as if the answer is waiting in the threshold. “Sabrina? Why wouldn’t she know? She doesn’t know?”
“Since I just said that I think she does know—”
He cuts me off with a wave of his hand, correcting himself. “I mean, why wouldn’t you have already told her? Elizabeth knows.”
I’m stunned until it occurs to me we might not be talking about the same thing. “I’m talking about the drive with—”
“Yeah, yeah. So am I. Otherwise you would have invited Nate to come up with us.”
Actually, I had invited Nate, but he was afraid of leaving Trish alone with the wolves known as our wives and had passed on the offer. Weston isn’t always as clued into our business partners’ lives as I am.
No one is, to be fair.
But since it is just the two of us, I took the opportunity to bring up my suspicions, and now that I know we’re talking about the same thing, I’m stunned again. “Elizabeth knows?”
“We’re married. We don’t keep secrets from each other.”
I don’t like his implication. “I only keep secrets that Sabrina doesn’t care I keep.”
His laugh says he’s dubious. “Like, she doesn’t care because she doesn’t know? ‘Cause that’s the definition of a secret. And if my wife found out I was hiding things from her purposefully—”
I’m not in the mood for his self-righteous bullshit, so I interrupt to clarify. “I mean I don’t flood my wife with information that doesn’t pertain to her everyday life and/or that she isn’t interested in knowing. Not secrets, exactly.”
“Well, if you haven’t told her, and you’re worried about her reaction, then it’s a secret.”
I don’t know why I thought that I could talk about this with the Boy Scout King. His ideals tend to get in the way of reality. Sometimes there are reasons to keep things mum, especially if those things might be dangerous. The only reason I’ve included Weston on this at all is because of the nature of the information. It didn’t seem fair not to.
I’m beginning to regret that decision.
Running a frustrated hand over my face, I consider dropping the subject. The cigar box offers a suitable distraction. “You pick,” I say, opening it toward him.
He takes one without examining the options. I match my choice with his—a Prensado with peppery, coffee, and bittersweet chocolate notes—and we spend the next few minutes with the business of lighting up. This was the excuse I’d used to lure him upstairs, after all, while our wives ignored Nate and Trish and mapped out strategies for our companies like it was a Monday morning at the office instead of a Sunday night in the living room with friends.
That’s what we get for marrying modern women. I dare say neither of us are complaining.
It’s Weston who, after occupying my favorite armchair and kicking his feet up on the ottoman, returns to the previous topic. “What makes you think she knows, anyway?”
I sit in the leather chair behind the desk and think about my response. It’s not like she’s said anything. That’s perhaps the problem—how little she’s said the past few months, like she’s working out a puzzle in her head. At first, I thought it was just jet lag. She’s been back and forth to London a few times to help her sister with her newborns. The twins’ odd schedules and trouble latching were enough to mess with Sabrina’s circadian rhythm, add to it the flying and time distance, and what did I expect?
But when I really think about it, I realize she may have been distant before that too. We’d both been so slammed with work, trying to manage Dylan’s load as well as our own so he could take time off for the births, that I may have missed her pulling away.
Or maybe it was even before that. Maybe it started all the way back at Christmas, when I asked her to have a baby, and she’d said not now, and I’d let that be the end of it.
Except, I hadn’t really let that be the end of it because I’ve wondered over and over what it was that could make Sabrina—a woman who is normally quite content to let me dominate her life and decisions—decide to put her foot down. The simple answer is that she really isn’t ready for a baby. Fair enough. We’re only just now coming up on two years married. It’s too soon.
But I’m not a man who can settle on simple answers until all other possibilities have been ruled out, and I’m niggled by the chance that her wariness might be because of what I have hidden in the safe behind me.
Explaining all of that to Weston would be an exercise in futility. “Just a feeling,” I say, instead.
He stares at me, as if he stares hard enough he can peel back my layers with his eyes. Though he’s my best friend, I don’t usually tend to share anything deep with him. He doesn’t usually seem to want to know, to be fair. But right now, he looks as though he truly cares, and for the span of a few seconds, I consider what I’d tell him. That I’ve never been happier? That I’m relieved that all my friends have found women to love them? That watching him and Cade and Dylan proceed to bring children into their families makes me jealous as fucking hell?
When I say nothing, he prods me with words. “Are you keeping it here?”
“In the wall safe.”
“Sabrina doesn’t have the combo?”
“Sure, she does. Even if she looked in there, she wouldn’t know what she was looking at.”
“And you know without a doubt that she hasn’t looked in there.” It’s not a question, and there’s a hint of disgust in his tone, because he knows without me saying that I’ve examined the digital logs that report every time the safe is opened and closed and even watched the home security cameras that are focused on this room. It’s the kind of action expected from men who distrust their wives. In my case, that’s just another Tuesday, and it’s something Weston will never understand. “Maybe that feeling you’re having is guilt.”
I lift my cigar and then adjust my hand to give him the bird.
“Ooo, Sally Sensitive.” His grin goes full wide before he drops it. “If she really knows about it, why wouldn’t she just tell you? Sabrina’s not really the docile, keep-the-peace kind of chick.”
“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just refer to a grown woman as a farm animal.” The fact that the grown woman was my grown woman is making it hard not to thwack him across the head instead.
“I’m just saying I think she’d confront you about it, especially if she was bothered by it.”
Normally, I consider myself an expert at knowing how Sabrina feels about things, even when she doesn’t understand herself, so it’s irksome to not have any idea how she’d react to this—okay, I’ll say it—this particular secret.