Midnight Kiss (Virgin River #12)(6)

What Sunny wanted to tell Annie was that the pain and humiliation wasn’t the worst part—it was that her friends and family pitied her for being left. What was wrong with her, that he would do that?

She knew what was wrong, when she thought about it. Her nose was too long, her forehead too high, her chest small and feet big, her h*ps too wide, she hadn’t finished college and she took pictures for a living. That they were good pictures didn’t seem to matter—it wasn’t all that impressive. She sometimes veered into that territory of “if I had been a super model with a great body, he’d never have left me.” Intellectually she knew that was nonsense, but emotionally she felt lacking in too many ways.

Instead she said to Annie, “Did you know? Did you ever have a hint that something was wrong?”

She shook her head. “Only when it was over, when I looked back and realized he never spent a weekend with me, and I was too trusting to wonder why he hadn’t ever asked me to join him on a business trip to one of the other towns where he stayed overnight on business. Oh, after it was all over, I had lots of questions. But at the time?” She shook her head. “I didn’t know anything was wrong.”

“Me either,” Sunny said.

“I probably didn’t want to know anything was wrong,” Annie added. “I don’t like conflict.”

Sunny didn’t say anything. She was pretty well acquainted with her own denial and that hurt just about as much as the hard truth.

“Well, there was one thing,” Annie corrected. “After it was all over I wondered if I shouldn’t have been more desperate to spend every moment with him, if I loved him so much. You know—Nate gets called out in the middle of the night pretty often, and I never make a fuss about it. But we both complain if we haven’t had enough time together. We need each other a lot. That never happened with Ed. I was perfectly fine when he wasn’t around. Should have tipped me off, I guess.”

No help there, Sunny thought. Glen had complained constantly of her Fridays through Sundays always being booked with shoots. There were times she worked a sixteen-hour day on the weekends, covering three weddings and receptions and a baptism. Slip in some engagement slide shows, photos of babies, whatever had to be done for people who worked Monday through Friday and who only had weekends available. Then from Monday through Thursday she’d work like a dog editing and setting up proofs.

Glen was a California Highway Patrolman who worked swing shifts to have weekends off and she was always unavailable then.

She revisited that old argument—wait a minute! Here was a clue she hadn’t figured out at the time. Glen had a few years seniority with CHP, so why would he work swings just to have those weekends off when he knew she would be tied up with her clients the entire time? She’d been rather proud of the fact that it hadn’t taken her long to develop a strong clientele, to make incredibly good money for a woman her age—weddings were especially profitable. But she’d had to sacrifice her weekends to get and keep that success.

So why? It would have been easy for him to get a schedule with a Tuesday through Thursday, her lightest days, off. In fact, if he had been willing to take those days off, and work the day shift regularly, they could have gone to bed together every night. He said at the time that it suited his body clock, that he wasn’t a morning person. And he liked to go out on the weekends. He went out with “the boys.” The boys? Not bloody likely….

After being left at the church a couple of his groomsmen had admitted he’d been having his doubts about the big, legal, forever commitment. Apparently he’d worried aloud to them, but all he ever did was argue with her about it. We don’t need all that! We could fly to Aruba, get married there, take a week of sailing, scuba diving… He hadn’t said the commitment was an issue, just the wedding—something Sunny and her mom were having a real party putting together. So she had said, “Try not to worry so much, Glen—you’ll get your week in Aruba on the honeymoon. Just be at the church on time, say your lines and we’ll be diving and sunning and sailing before you know it.”

Sunny shook her head in frustration. What was the point in figuring it out now? She grabbed her coat, her camera and headed out the door. The snow was still gently falling and she backed away from the town Christmas tree, snapping photos as she went. She zoomed in on some of the military unit patches used as decorations, caught snowflakes glistening against gold balls and white lights, captured angles of the tree until, finally, far enough away, she got the whole tree. If these came out the way she hoped, she might use them for something next Christmas—ads or cards or something.

Then she turned and caught a couple of good shots of the bar porch, the snow drifting on the rails and steps and roof. Then of the street with all the houses lit for holiday cheer. Then the bar porch with a man leaning against the rail, arms crossed over his chest—a very handsome man.

She lowered the camera and walked toward Drew. There was no getting around the fact that he was handsome—tall and built, light brown hair, twinkling brown eyes, and if she remembered right, a very sexy smile. He stood on the porch and she looked up at him.

“Okay, look, I apologize,” she said. “It’s not like me to be so rude, so ‘unapproachable’ as you call it. I got dumped, okay? I’m still licking my wounds, as my uncle Nathaniel puts it. Not a good time for me to respond to a come-on from a guy. I’m scared to death to meet a guy and end up actually liking him, so I avoid all males. That’s it in a nutshell,” she added with a shrug. “I used to be very friendly and outgoing—now I’m on guard a lot.”