settled on her as she took a sudden interest in the loose edge of the label on her Coors. “What about you, Lisa?”
“Me?” She glanced up and collided with his intense stare. “What about me?”
“I heard you got married a few years back.”
“Four years ago.” It felt like a hundred had passed since then. Especially tonight, in this moment, discussing it with John Duarte over dinner in his cabin while her brother’s life might be hanging in the balance.
John grunted, the sensual line of his mouth pressed flat for a brief second. “Kyle mentioned it to me around that time. Some kind of doctor up there in Cincinnati?”
“Pediatric heart surgeon.” Lisa went back to picking at her bottle’s label. “Parker and I met when I organized a charity event for the hospital. We got married six weeks later at his parents’ estate.”
“Sounds fancy.” And John sounded thoroughly unimpressed.
“Yeah, it was. The divorce two months later was fancy, too. Lots of lawyers and engraved letterhead to sign. Lots of fancy legal agreements to ensure I didn’t profit off our brief farce of a marriage.”
“What happened?”
“He cheated on me.”
John bit off a low curse, his dark brow furrowing. “Idiot.”
Lisa shook her head. “In hindsight, I probably should’ve seen it coming. We were too different. From different worlds. I never should’ve married him.”
John studied her now. “So, why did you?”
“Good question. I was asking myself that very thing a month after walking down the aisle. That’s when my newlywed husband came home from a five-day seminar in Boston with another woman’s panties in his pocket. I guess he forgot to check his suits before he left them for me to send out to the dry cleaner. He didn’t even try to deny what he’d done. Maybe infidelity was acceptable in his world, but it sure as hell wasn’t in mine.”
Why had she married him? All she’d ever really wanted was to belong somewhere, to belong to someone. She wanted to feel she mattered, and that her life counted for something.
That was why she’d gotten involved in charity work. The need to feel that she was contributing to something important, while giving others less fortunate some of the care and benefits they needed.
She was still searching for that sense of purpose. That sense of belonging. Maybe she always would be.
Lisa lifted her shoulder in a shrug and went back to peeling the label off her beer. “I suppose if anyone was an idiot in my brief marriage, it was me. Like a fool, I bought into the whole knight-in-shining-armor, white-picket-fence, country-club illusion that I thought a man like Parker represented. None of it was real. You’d think I’d know not to believe in that kind of fairy tale, given how Kyle and I grew up, bouncing from one foster home to another as kids.”
John grunted as he set down his freshly drained bottle. “Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the picket fence and the whole nine yards. Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve all that and more.”
He was trying to make her feel better, and his soft-spoken sympathy rubbed her like sandpaper. The last thing she meant to do was sit there whining about her pathetic childhood and equally messed up adult life, even though he already knew the basics, and from what she understood from her brother, John’s early life hadn’t been a bed of roses either.
She stripped off the last piece of curling foil label and crushed it into a tiny ball. “Well, I’ve given up looking for the fairy tale. Apparently, when it comes to men, I’m the queen of bad life choices, because the guys I date always turn out to be losers.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, she winced. Glancing up, she met John’s unflinching stare. “Don’t think I mean you...What I mean is, you and I never dated, so...”
One of his dark brows rose. “Technically, it was a date.”
“Okay, true,” she hedged. “But I’m not sure it counts, since you only did it as a favor to Kyle.”
John grunted. “Some favor. He’d have my balls—and rightly so—if he ever found out I let things get so far out of hand that night.”
He had let things get out of hand? If that’s how he preferred to remember it, fine by her. What Lisa recalled was a far more even-handed slip from platonic stand-in wedding date to off-the-charts one-night stand.
The details of their time together five years ago swarmed her uninvited now. John showing up unexpectedly at her apartment a