I was just about to sit when Dane strolled inside, his eyes hard, his mouth tight.
I lifted my brows. “Something wrong?”
He halted a few feet away and casually slipped his hands into his pockets, but he looked far from at ease. “I just received an email from Heather.”
Uh-oh. I should have figured she’d send him another. Or maybe she’d just re-sent the first. “Heather?” I echoed. “What did she want?”
“Firstly, to apologize for that scene she caused at the barbecue. She claims to be ashamed of her behavior and is mortified that she let her family down so badly. She went on to tell me how it saddens her that you two have never been close, and that she regrets never forming a sisterly bond with you.”
She’d typed all that in the other email.
“She also apparently feels the need to warn me that you’ve never gotten over Owen, and she worries that you might just be using me to get his attention, now that he’s divorcing his wife. She’s quite sure you’d leave me for him if he gave you the slightest indication that he’d be willing to give things with you another try, and apparently her conscience wouldn’t let her keep quiet about it.”
Yep, she’d said that lump of shit in the original email, too, so it was looking like she had indeed simply re-sent it. The woman didn’t know when to stop, did she? “I can see you’re pissed, but just ignore her. I’ll deal with it, Dane.”
He slowly stalked toward me. “Will you? Funny. Because she prefaced the email with how she was sorry to bother me ‘again,’ but she worried her first email went astray.”
Hell.
“I checked my email account, but there was nothing else from Heather—not even among the spam or the deleted emails. Which means either there was no other email, or you erased it so thoroughly you even wiped it from the deleted folder. The look on your face is making me lean toward the latter theory.”
I shrugged. “Getting rid of your shit-mail is part of my job.”
Impatience flickered across his face. “This is something I would have wanted to know about, which you’re well aware of. But you deleted it without telling me about it. Why?”
“You can’t guess?”
His nostrils flared. “She’s not getting away with this.”
My stomach sank. “Dane—”
“No, I made it clear to you that if she made another move, I wouldn’t let it go. It’s not just about the emails, Vienna. Simon hinted that she’d made life hard for you when you were a child. A traumatized child. She should have been dealt with a long time ago.”
“She was handled. Melinda and Wyatt put a stop to it.”
“A stop to what exactly?”
I pressed my lips tight together. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to talk about it, it was that I knew hearing the details would only piss him off more.
“She’s going to pay, Vienna.”
Panic fluttered through me as he turned and headed for the door. “She’s quite capable of fucking up her own life, Dane—she doesn’t need help with that. Just leave it.”
“Not a chance.”
“Seriously, it would bother her more if you just ignored her.”
“I intend to do a lot more than ‘bother’ her.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Dane, I’m asking you to leave it. Please.”
“Not happening, Vienna.”
I took a panicked step toward him. “You retaliate, Dane, and I’ll walk.”
He halted, and his body went rigid. Absolutely rigid. Then, finally, he very slowly turned to face me. His gaze was darker than I’d ever seen it. His eyebrow flicked up. “You’ll walk?” he echoed, his tone daring me to repeat it.
Refusing to be intimidated, I lifted my chin. “I owe you. I know that. And I don’t want to go back on my word. But I can’t lose Melinda and Wyatt.”
“That’s not a reason to let Heather walk all over you. She does these things because you let her get away with it. People will only treat you how you allow them to treat you.”
“I don’t care if she feels the need to act like a bitch toward me.”
“I care.”
“No, you care that she dared to cross you. That’s different. Heather has been a bitch to me since the day I met her. She’s never going to change. Nothing you do or I do will make a damn bit of difference. If you acted on this, it would only hurt Melinda and Wyatt. She’d use it to hurt them; to make them choose her over me. And they would. I know