attention on me. It was like being noticed by a rock star. It was exciting, flattering, and raised me up in the eyes of my peers.” She grimaced and then glanced up again as she added, “It was also a whirlwind. He’d be away on his undercover assignments and then blow back in once they were done and want to celebrate his win with parties and marathon sex sessions, and then be gone on the next assignment.”
CJ saw Mac wince at that, but ignored it and continued, “We dated a year before he asked me to marry him, which sounds all right, but when I look back at that period, I realize I probably only saw him the equivalent of a month or two during that time. A night or two here, a night or two there, a whole week a time or three, and then he’d be off on assignment again. He was always volunteering for extra assignments. He said he wanted to buy a house to raise a family in, and house prices in Toronto were crazy expensive even back then so I understood. I even admired him for it despite the fact that it meant not seeing him as much as I’d like. Besides, he made up for it with loads of texts and emails.”
Smiling grimly, CJ told Mac, “Billy gave really good email. They were romantic and passionate, going on about how he missed me. How I was the only thing that got him through his crazy dangerous assignments. I was beautiful and smart and he was so damned lucky to have me to come back to.” Her mouth twisted. “Basically, everything a young woman wanted to hear. Or read as the case may be.
“We were trying to arrange the wedding, picking out invitations and venues and not really settling on anything because he was there so rarely. On top of that, I had just made it to homicide detective and was working crazy hours trying to prove myself, so didn’t have a lot of free time to taste cakes and look over menus,” she said, but didn’t admit that maybe a good portion of the time she spent working was to avoid having to deal with the wedding details. It was a lot of work, and she hadn’t felt right doing such things without him anyway. It was his wedding too, after all.
“Anyway, that went on for a while and then, about six months after proposing, he whisked me away for a weekend in Vegas. And in the midst of gambling and drinking and having a desperately good time, he convinced me to forgo all the fuss and stress and marry him there.”
CJ blew her breath out and shook her head unhappily. “It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life, second only to agreeing to date him.”
She paused to take a sip of her coffee and then cleared her throat and said, “It took twenty minutes to get the license and ten minutes to find a chapel he liked, and just like that, I was Mrs. CJ Carter. After that it was twenty-four hours of celebration and consummation and then we were on a plane back home. But we’d barely landed back in Toronto before he was off on another assignment, and I mean that literally,” she added, meeting his gaze. “We landed, he turned on his phone while we were waiting for our luggage, and it immediately started to ring. He hung up two minutes later and left me to wait for our things while he ran off to the station to talk to his team. I rounded up the luggage and caught a taxi home, and he came back several hours later with the news that he was going undercover again the next day.”
CJ shook her head at the memory. “And then it was the same as it had been while we were dating. He was away more than he was there, and I was working a lot. I didn’t mind too much at first, but after the first year I . . .” She shook her head. “It was nothing like my parents’ relationship,” she said finally. “Oh, he was sweet and attentive when he was there, but he was there so rarely . . . In truth, I didn’t really feel married,” CJ admitted with some of the bewilderment she’d felt at the time.
Sighing, she waved that thought away as the self-pity it was, and continued, “Three years passed