on the side to put it on silent mode. The carefree man of two minutes ago was gone.
“Who was it?”
Crosby glanced up, giving his head a small shake. “No one important.”
I simply met his gaze. “If the amount of tension that just ran through your shoulders is any clue, it was someone important.” Crosby broke our stare and looked out at the ocean, at Shelter Island getting smaller in the distance. “You don’t get to have it both ways, Crosby.”
He flicked a quick glance in my direction. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t poke and prod and want to know things about my life and then not answer a simple question like who’s calling your phone.”
A muscle in his cheek ticked. “Fair point.”
I gripped the railing, leaning into the wind. “You get to choose which way this plays out. We either talk, or we don’t. We can keep the physical and leave the rest behind.” That’s what I should’ve wanted. To get the high of sex with Crosby without the complication of him knowing things that I didn’t want to divulge. But, somehow, the idea made me incredibly sad.
Crosby’s eyes flared with a heat that seemed to make them almost glow. “Poking at you is too fun to let it go. You’re the most fascinating woman I’ve met in a long time. Maybe ever.” He sighed, rubbing at the scruff along his jaw. “It was my ex-fiancée.”
My body gave a swift jolt. Crosby had been engaged. It didn’t match up with the man I’d thought him to be. He was too reckless, never thought about the future, lived only in the moment. But I’d realized over the past couple of days that what I truly knew about Crosby would fit in my pinky finger. “Do you know why she’s calling?”
Crosby returned his gaze to the ocean. “My closest friend, the one she cheated on me with, dumped her. She expects me to come crawling back.”
I let out a low whistle. “Do you want her back?”
“I’d rather take a header off the back of this boat and aim for the propellers.”
Now there was a hint of the Crosby I knew. “She’s not taking ‘no’ too well?”
“I don’t think she’s ever heard the word before.”
My mouth curved. “Maybe we should set her and Grant up, they seem to have that in common.”
Crosby turned towards me. “He cheated on you?”
“He did.” Once word got around that Grant and I were done, the lovely Lacey Hotchkiss had shared that they’d been sleeping together off and on since the ninth grade. I knew there were others, but the fact that he’d been intimate with someone who had been so cruel to me had almost been more than I could take. But things only got worse from there. “I can’t really bring myself to care about the cheating. But he was my first love—what I thought was love, anyway. Those relationships always carry their own special brand of scars.” Mine were just deeper and uglier than most.
“I guess Alicia was my first love. We met while I was in law school at some charity gala. That should’ve been my first clue to run for the hills. But she was beautiful, charming, fragile. I liked being the one she leaned on. But I never had enough of what she needed.”
“And what was that?”
“Money, success, power. Those were her drugs of choice. She has this pathological need to be at the top of the food chain. I just didn’t see it until it was too late. Have you ever had one of those moments that changes the entire way you view the world?”
“I’ve had two of them.” When Grant left me. And when I lost my girl. I thought I’d never hurt worse than when Grant walked away without a care in the world. But the Universe had a funny way of showing you just what was important. I’d never known what true pain was until the day I lost my daughter.
“I’m sorry.” Crosby had gotten close without me even noticing it, that vital heat seeping out around him. “I’m sorry so many people have let you down. Hurt you.”
“I’m not.” I slipped my hands into the pockets of Crosby’s fleece, bringing us even closer. “It showed me what was truly important in life. Who I could really trust.”
“That’s a high price to pay for those gifts.”
But Crosby was wrong. My mother being a crap mom, disappearing and never even bothering to send a birthday card, Grant breaking my