day complete. It had been like that for a long, long time, too. She just hadn’t fully understood it.
She’d been falling for her best friend, all right.
Falling . . . already fallen. Flat-out in love with him. She’d gone to tell him. Confront him and demand he tell her how he felt, although she thought she already knew.
Yet if he was in love with her, then what in the hell had she seen when she walked into the office back at Steel Ink?
And damn it, that hurt. Thinking about it hurt so much, she wanted to pull off the side of the road and just curl up into a ball. She didn’t want to think about crying, though. If she started to cry, she’d never stop and she knew it. So the answer, really, was to just stop thinking.
The phone rang and she had to sniffle, had to grip the steering wheel in an iron grip just to keep from snatching it up and answering it. “Rebel Yell.” Zach’s ringtone. She ought to reprogram it to something like “Your Cheating Heart.”
“Fuck!”
Focusing on the road, she realized she was almost at the state line. She’d been driving for hours and New Mexico loomed up ahead of her.
She had absolutely no idea where she was going. Sighing, she grabbed her phone. Holding the button down, she waited for the beep and then said, “Find a hotel close to me.” She was not going back home. There was no way she could even think about it and never mind the fact that it was almost eleven p.m.
If she went home, she’d find Zach waiting there. She knew that. And she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet.
She had to wait until she was up to talking to him without wanting to punch him. Kick him in the balls.
Rip Keelie’s two-toned hair out. Actually, that idea held a lot of merit and she wasn’t completely brushing that aside.
But she needed to pull over, get some sleep, and reevaluate. Look at things again in the morning. She didn’t know. The only thing she did know was that she wasn’t ready to go back and talk to Zach.
With something to distract her, the next few minutes passed with a little more ease. The nearest town with any decent hotel offerings was Lordsburg, New Mexico.
Sighing, she flicked another glance at the phone and grimaced. A Hampton Inn. She brought it up on her GPS and rubbed at her tired eyes.
Okay, she was going to Lordsburg. She could check into the hotel, collapse on a bed. Maybe find a liquor store and have a drink or two and rage about what she’d seen.
Try to understand what she’d seen . . .
The phone rang again.
“What the . . .”
As the strains of “I Will Remember You” by Sarah McLachlan filled the air, she was torn between disgust and fury. There was absolutely no justice in life. On the night when she really just wanted to be left alone to wallow in her rage and misery, Roger decided he was going to call.
She almost ignored it, but then she remembered. With almost savage glee, she thought about goal number two on her list. It involved Roger. Up until a few hours ago, she hadn’t been too concerned about it, but just then, the idea of venting some of that fury inside her sounded really, really good.
“Item number two . . . Tell Roger off.”
Snatching up the phone, she took the call and flipped it over to speaker before dropping it back down in the cup holder.
“What in the hell do you want?” she demanded as she checked the rearview mirror. Shooting over into the fast lane, she edged around a semi and checked the upcoming exits. She had about another twenty minutes before she’d be at the hotel.
Twenty minutes, then she could collapse and cry. In between now and then, she had the welcome distraction of giving her ex an earful.
“Hello, Abigale.”
“I asked you what you wanted,” she said flatly. “I didn’t ask for conversation.”
“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” Roger said, his voice cool and detached. Modulated, even.
She wondered then if she had ever really talked to anybody who could be described as speaking in modulated tones. She was pretty certain she hadn’t.
“I’m so delighted you’re concerned about me,” she said, sounding like a bitch and not giving a damn.
“Zach Barnes called . . . he . . . well.” Roger paused, and when he spoke again,