Worth the Risk_ A Contemporary - Megan Hart Page 0,70

you behaved with her the way you acted with me, that’s easy to figure out. But if you’re saying I don’t understand what it’s like to lose somebody you love, then you are riding the bus down Wrong Street again. My husband died, Greg. Died. He didn’t run off, didn’t cheat on me, didn’t find someone he liked better. He died.”

Arden paused to take a breath, realized her hands were clenched, and unclenched them. She calmed herself. “My advice to you would be get over it, move on, and quit trying to play the wounded soldier to get a sympathy fuck. It’s not a pretty sight.”

And, leaving him to stand gape-mouthed on the corner, Arden got into her car and drove away.

Chapter 4

“Don’t ask,” she said later to Lida on the phone while she washed the dinner dishes. “I already talked to Heather about disaster date two. She’s promised to buy me cheesecake to make up for it.”

“That bad, huh? Hold on a minute. Henry, put that screwdriver back where you found it! Sorry, Arden. Anyway, that bad?”

Arden looked at her two angels, each ensconced in her favorite chair, doing homework. She laughed at the vision of the chaos reigning in Lida’s house. “Yes. That bad.”

“You’re laughing. It couldn’t be that bad. Henry! Cats do not like to wear underpants!”

“You’d better go.”

Lida sighed. “I’m going to beat that child.”

“You won’t, and you know it.”

“He’s a terror.”

“And you love him.”

Lida laughed. “Yes. I do. But I’d better go before he destroys something. Tell me about your date later, okay?”

“Sure.”

Arden hung up and helped Aislin and Maeve finish their assignments. They played a quick game of Clue before bed, she read a chapter of Mary Poppins, and then the lights went out, her children slept, and she went downstairs to grab a few minutes of work time before going to sleep herself.

Before a few weeks ago, she hadn’t logged in to Connex in over a year and yet here she was, once again opening her browser window and staring at status updates from a bunch of people she didn’t really care about. She even had a bunch of unanswered connection requests and some invitations to events long over...but though it had been two weeks since her last correspondence with Shane, there were no new messages. She’d been half expecting him to message her, even though she hadn’t replied to his last one. Now her fingers itched to type a reply, but she resisted.

“No game playing,” she told herself. Of course she’d told herself that about him many times in the past and had let herself get swept up with the sort of mindfuck he’d favored...but that was a long time ago. Things had changed.

She had changed.

Her computer chirped. At the bottom right corner of the Connex page, a small button blinked.

User erectorset1241 has sent you an instant message. Do you wish to accept it?

Arden hardly ever used her instant messaging program and hadn’t even known anyone could ping her through Connex. But it was him, Shane Donner, the man she didn’t want to remember and had never been able to forget. Her fingers moved the mouse to hover over the Deny button, to delete the message. Ignore it. With a twist of her wrist, she changed her answer to Accept.

erectorset1241: I hear the Come Inn has great midday rates.

She stared at the screen, pulse quickening. The words twisted her stomach, and not totally in dismay. He’d remembered, but why shouldn’t he? They’d been his words, way back when.

“We’ll end up sneaking around in hotel rooms when we’re in our thirties,” he’d told her when she said she was going to marry Jason.

“I hope not,” had been her reply. “Because that means everything I’m hoping to have in my life will have been a lie.”

She’d just turned thirty-four. He’d have turned the same age this past July. She wasn’t angry that he was trying to see if she remembered the last words they’d shared. She was furious he’d assume she’d be willing to cheat on her husband.

He didn’t know about Jason, of course. Couldn’t. Shane was being his typical self, cocky and arrogant, teasing her into a conversation she knew she shouldn’t have. If he thought she was married, he’d be testing her to see how far he could get her to go.

A full minute had passed while she processed his words and thought about deleting them. And yet, when she moved the mouse to the small red “x” at the top of