The Fixed Trilogy: Forever With You(86)

I didn’t turn to face him again until he’d shut the door behind us in the office. When I did, I almost wished I hadn’t. The forlorn look I’d seen downstairs was even worse than I’d remembered. Was there really anything I could say to erase that?

With feeble words, I tried. “He kissed me, Hudson. I didn’t kiss him. And when he did, I pushed him away.” It was the truth. If he’d been there long enough, he’d have seen it.

“Why were you in his arms in the first place?” His tone was low and gravelly. It was more emotion than he generally displayed, and it killed me.

A tear trickled down my face. “We were dancing. It was a party.”

His eyes flared. “You were in his arms, Alayna. In the arms of someone who has made no secret of his feelings for you. What did you think he’d do?”

He was right on many counts. I’d known it was dangerous, felt the wrongness of the embrace from the minute David put his arms around me.

But my intentions had not been to lead him on. It was a goodbye dance. My thoughts had been focused on Hudson the whole time. “It was innocent,” I insisted. “I needed someone. He was here. And you weren’t.”

The memory of the anxiousness that had driven me to David’s arms in the first place turned my tears bitter. “Where were you today, anyway? When I needed you?”

He matched my bitterness plus some. “What was it you needed, Alayna? Someone to keep you warm?”

I pressed my lips together, hoping to squelch the sob threatening to escape. “That hurts.”

“What I just witnessed hurts.”

That wasn’t news, but hearing him say it twisted my heart all the same. I’d experienced that same hurt—when I’d seen him kissing Celia on the video, then again earlier today, when she’d suggested they’d had an affair. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to compare her probable lies with what he’d witnessed in person, but he had to see where I was coming from. “Yeah, I know how it feels.”

“Do you?” Even that tiny phrase was filled with enough venom to smart.

It triggered more of my own snark. “Yeah, I do. Let me see if I can explain it. It feels like your gut has been wrenched out of your body. At least that’s what it felt like when Celia told me that you’d been f*cking her for most of the time we’ve been together.”

“What?” He seemed truly surprised, and not in the I’ve-been-caught way, but in the what-the-eff-is-she-talking-about way. It was the same expression he’d had when I’d mentioned him having more of an involvement with Stacy. “When did she say that?”

“Today,” I grumbled, already regretting bringing Celia up this way.

“You saw her today?” His eyes narrowed. “Does this have something to do with the phone message she left me?”

“I knew she’d call you!” And if she had, why hadn’t he called me? “What did she say?”

He shook his head dismissively. “She was raving nonsense. Something about you and her lawyer. I figured it was more of her shit from before so I deleted it.”

Hudson took a step toward me, and I noticed his eyes had softened, that instead of pain the predominant feature was now worry. “What happened with her? Was she following you again? What did she do? And why didn’t Reynold call me?”

I leaned on the desk behind me. “He didn’t know.” Guilt pressed on my chest, not only for ditching my bodyguard, but for Hudson’s willingness to set aside his ache out of concern for me.

The expression on his face magnified my shame. “Please don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry. I was stir-crazy so I grabbed my computer and went for coffee. I thought when I set the alarm to away that Reynold might notice, but I guess it didn’t inform him.”

Hudson’s mouth tightened. “It only texts when you set it for home.”

I was a little surprised that he hadn’t set the system to monitor all my comings and goings. It wasn’t like him. At a more appropriate time, I’d try to remember to be impressed. “Anyway, I just went to the bakery down the street. And Celia showed up. And I was sick of it. So I approached her.”

“You approached her?” Not only was his eye twitching and his jaw tense, but his hand was shaking as well. I hadn’t seen that from him before. Was he that angry?

“I did. It was stupid. I know it was stupid. But Stacy had sent me one of the emails that you had supposedly sent her, and I was reading it, and I could tell it wasn’t from you. I recognized one of the quotes used from one of the books Celia highlighted, and I knew the email was from her. So I confronted her about it. About writing the email.” The story spilled out in babble that I wasn’t even sure he could comprehend.

Apparently he did. “And she told you then that I was with her? Just out of the blue?”

I cringed. He wouldn’t like what I had to say next, but it was best to get it all out. “First, I showed her Stacy’s video.” After checking for his reaction, which I couldn’t read, I went on. “Then she said that you were together. That you were a couple. That you f*cked her that night and it wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t the last.”

If Hudson’s face grew any redder, steam would come out of his ears. “And you believed her?”

I squared my shoulders. “It pissed me off enough that I punched her.” Yeah, I admit it, I sounded proud.