He closed his eyes, then looked back over the water, breaking the spell pulling her under. “So, what do we do now?”
“I…I don’t know. Wait, I guess.”
“We already know the answer. I know it. You know it too, or else you wouldn’t be sitting here with me right now.”
A lump clogged in her throat, the realization hitting her that he was right. She shook her head. “I need to know for sure. Julia’s not going to want to have anything to do with me until we can prove it one way or the other.”
“She’s probably not going to want to have anything to do with you regardless of the outcome. She’s been through hell and back.”
A dull ache settled in her chest. She didn’t want that. She only wanted to make things better. For all of them. “I don’t want to hurt her, or you.”
“No matter what you do, it’s going to hurt us.” He stood and slipped his sunglasses back on. The glint of gold caught her attention as he moved, and for the first time, she noticed the ring on his left hand.
“We’ll deal with it when we know for sure.” His voice was no longer soft but hard and cold. “Until then, don’t try to go see her. She needs time to get used to this whole thing. Your hanging around would just confuse her more.”
Kate nodded, unable to make sense of the changes that came over him. She’d never experienced anything like it. One moment his voice was tugging on her heartstrings, and the next it was slicing through her, straight to the bone, sending chills up and down her spine. “Okay. I can understand that. Are you going to be okay?”
“Me? Yeah, I’m pretty much used to hell. I’ll get by.”
She watched as he walked away. But she didn’t feel any better than she had before. If anything, she felt worse. Talking with him had only proved he’d loved his wife a great deal more than she’d anticipated.
***
No file found.
Kate glared at the computer screen, the blinking cursor only accentuating the tension headache behind her eyes. Waves crashed outside on the beach. A gray drizzle slapped at the second-floor window outside her home office.
She should be keying in edits on an article that was supposed to be finished two days ago. Instead, she was running another search on Ryan Harrison.
So far, she’d found pictures of him cozied up to a black-haired vixen at some charity function. Another hit showed him with a blonde on his arm at a baseball game. And the National Star had a whole file of pictures of him with that voluptuous, redheaded model.
The man obviously got around.
“Mama?”
“Hmm?”
Why did she care? Just because he may have been her husband? That was stupid. She’d been married to Jake, after all. It wasn’t like she had a reason to be jealous.
But what did surprise her was that from all her research, his life had apparently changed after his wife had died. Before, he’d been vice president of a small pharmaceutical company. After, he’d branched out on his own, expanded, and made a killing in the field. Was it just a stronger work ethic since becoming single? Or had he used his wife’s life insurance money to expand his company?
Either way, he’d benefited immensely from Annie Harrison’s death.
Kate typed in AmCorp Pharmaceuticals and came up with their home page. She scanned the technical information. Mostly cancer drugs. Specialized cancer drugs that often were pushed through the FDA because of need and a promise of significant benefit.
“Mama,” Reed said from her feet where he lay on his belly on the floor next to her, playing with his Power Rangers, “I asked you something.”
She tore her eyes from the computer. “What, baby?”
“Where do you go when you die?”
Her fingers paused on the keyboard. Reed hadn’t once asked about death in the weeks since Jake’s passing. “To heaven.”
He rammed a red motorcycle into a black one, his gaze intent on the destruction he was causing. “You don’t come back?”
Oh, man. Of all the topics to bring up, he had to go for this one. Easing off her chair, she settled onto the rug next to him. “Who said you come back?”
“Michael at preschool says when starfish die, they come back to life.”
A smile tugged at her mouth. “Starfish can reproduce by something called regeneration. When an arm is cut off, a whole new starfish can grow out of it. It doesn’t mean