I would deal with all of them later.
And that left one.
“Do you mind?” Mona asked, and I turned back to her, ready to start the apocalypse.
“Ma’am,” he began, and I stilled because there was a quality to his voice I had never heard before. “You might have been used to people who are scared of you, like some guys here are right now, or ready to fight you like Xander and Cait…but I’m neither. I have seen things and been through things that have haunted my dreams for years; some angry woman in an admittedly impressively well-fitting set of riding leathers isn’t going to strike fear into my heart.”
She scowled, but I could see she was disarmed for a moment, because he was being so calm or because he’d somehow slipped in a compliment; I couldn’t say. He wouldn’t have long, I knew full well that her recovery time when surprised was pretty damn good.
“But I’ll say this, if you came here for what I think you came here for,” he continued steadily, tilting his head back and jutting his chin out. “Then maybe remember that, and instead of having a knock-out, drag-out fight with him, keep that in mind. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
I wanted so badly to reach out to him; he looked so lonely, standing there as he faced Mona without the slightest hint of worry or anger on his face. If anything, he just looked…tired.
“Go away,” she said bitterly, but it wasn’t a command; in fact, it almost sounded like a plea.
He nodded, giving me a look I couldn’t decipher, and then he was gone before I realized I’d never reached out to touch him. I didn’t know what was going through his head, but surely he had to know that nothing was okay right then. I would deal with him later too; how, I didn’t know, but later.
Which left me with only one issue to deal with, and I turned to her. “What the hell, Mona?”
“That…that’s how you’re going to start this?” she asked in disbelief, looking around the room as if she’d never seen it before.
My thoughts whirled because I realized she hadn’t seen it before. Anytime I was at the outpost and she came to see me, she would stay in a motel, usually grumbling about how run-down the whole place was. She would rarely come to the outpost to meet my team, and I would have to go to her wherever she was staying. The only time she’d stopped grumbling about accommodation was when she realized there were a few ‘decent’, her words, Airbnbs for her to stay at.
She’d never been part of my life, not the outpost part anyway. That fact had been the source of many arguments in the past. Because how do you have a husband with a life like mine, a job like mine, and not want to be even a cursory part of it? How can you know what I do for a living, what I’ve dedicated myself to, and fight me tooth and nail because I want you to be part of it?
How strange she looked in her expensive leathers, among the worn-down clutter of the place. I couldn’t remember the last time I thought of any place other than the cabin as home. We’d shared places over the years, and while I’d fought to make sure Ispent time with her every chance I got, it had never been enough for her or for me. The cabin had become my home at some point, and perhaps that was what had really eaten away at her after so much time.
“You can be pissed at me all you want,” I said with a shake of my head.
“Oh, thank you for your permission,” she snorted.
I bit back my retort even as it clawed at my throat to be released. “But you were the one who assumed it was perfectly fine to come here and…I don’t even know what drove them to do this surprise party. They’ve never done that shit before. But for you to be a part of it? What the hell, Mona?”
“I’m your wife,” she snapped, but I knew her too well, and I could see the short-lived glimmer of doubt. I knew better than to comment, not when I knew that feeling, felt only for a moment, was a surefire way to piss her off. In fact, I could see her face contort as she doubled down. “Your goddamn wife, and what do I get when I come to see you? To make…I don’t know, make nice for once; I find you shacking up with someone else? And not just anyone, someguy? That’s how you choose to step out?”
I sucked in a breath, hearing Colin whisper in my ear to take a breath and not give in to old habits. “It’s not cheating, Mona. Don’t push it to that point; don’t do that. It’s not fair.”
“Not fair is coming to see you and finding you making out with some fucking man,” she snarled.
“We are on the brink of finalizing our divorce,” I told her with a shake of my head, not believing it was even happening. It was clearly happening, of course, but even when you were looking the evidence in the face, sometimes reality was hard to digest. “We were separated unofficially for a while and then we told the damn judge months ago that we were officially separated.”
“Your point?” she asked, but I knew she was being stubborn, partially for the sake of being stubborn because, God save me,that’s who she was, but also because she wasn’t happy with how the conversation was going. Hell, I wasn’t any happier, but well…here we were, anyway.
“You don’t get to be outraged because I’ve tried moving on,” I told her, and then raised a brow. “And don’t think I don’t know about those strings, not string,stringsof boy toys you’ve been indulging in.”
She straightened her shoulders. “So what? You’ve clearly been getting one of your own.”
“Don’t,” I told her sharply. The fragile self-control I was trying my hardest to maintain, so this didn’t turn into another verbal brawl, wavered dangerously as I shook my head. “Don’t. Don’t go for him. He did nothing wrong.”
“Did he know you were?—”
“Mona, stop harping on about our goddamn marriage,” I growled, snatching up the bags Colin had set to the side and putting them roughly on my desk as I opened the drawer. There were a couple of bottles left in there, including the god-awful sounding blueberry whiskey that I still hadn’t touched. I might be a bastard, but I wasn’t going to rob Cait of the opportunity to see me suffer from her weird-ass gifts. There was another bottle though, normal whiskey, thank fucking Christ, and I opened it, pouring some into a glass.
“I see the drinking is well under control,” she noted scathingly.
I snorted, taking a drink. “Moving on to something else? Realized you couldn’t come at me for ‘cheating’ when our relationship has been over for what, three years? Four? When you’ve been seeing other men ever since I officially moved my shit out and agreed to sign the papers? When you knew damn well I had other women, nothing long-term or important, sure, but other women. You knew that, there’s no point in harping on about that anymore, so you go for the drinking?”
She gave me a sour look. “I notice you’re harping on about my harping rather than dealing with my point.”