Whispering Rock (Virgin River #3)(36)

“Maybe you should think about going back to work,” he said.

“I’ve thought about it, but I’ve lost interest in prosecuting felons. I haven’t lost interest in the law, but I don’t know in what field. My experience is all criminal, and I just don’t feel like going back into any kind of criminal law.”

“How about working with rape victims?”

She sighed deeply. “I’m trying not to be a rape victim anymore. I’m trying to move on from that, even though I realize some of it will be with me forever.” She shook her head and said, “I’ve been prepping rape victims for years, and now I am one. I just don’t want to stay in that cycle. God, I want to move past that if I can!”

“That’s reasonable. Maybe there’s some way you can use your prosecutorial expertise on the defense side.”

Her expression was shocked. “I can never defend a criminal against prosecution. Especially now.”

“There has to be something,” he said. “Human rights? Discrimination cases? EEOC? Women’s rights? ACLU?”

She shrugged.

“You’re used to having a mission, some injustice that needs you. You’ve always worked hard. I’m not sure all this time to think is such a good thing.”

She stretched out her legs and put her feet on the coffee table to warm them from the glowing fire, and he put his up as well, not touching. And she found herself wondering, not for the first time, if all the women he had so greatly wronged had been his friend like this at first. Had he spent long hours, months, talking to them in sensitive, nonthreatening ways before ha**ng s*x with them, marrying them and then betraying them? It would have taken such a lot of time. Such an investment. She further wondered if she could be tricked the way they were. She took a pull on her beer.

“After Mel and Jack return, if you’re not in a hurry to get back to Sacramento, how about if we take a day and go over to the coast. I don’t know if we’ll catch the whales, but there’s a lot of stuff over there. Art galleries, wine-tasting rooms, trails to the headlands and beach, nice restaurants. We could just be tourists for a day.”

“Would you be thinking of that as a…date?”

He grinned. “I would,” he admitted.

A smile tilted her lips. “I could do that,” she said. “Were you good friends with your wives before you married them?”

“I shouldn’t really answer any more questions about that. About them,” he said.

She sat up a little. “Why not?”

“It could give you an unfair advantage in staging my heartbreak. I want to level the playing field.”

It made her laugh. Or the beer made her laugh. But this was one of the things that was working on her—he didn’t take her too seriously, and yet he took her very seriously. And she trusted him, which both reassured and worried her. She pulled her feet back, tucking them under her, and turned toward him. “Were you?” she demanded.

“Nah. I told you—I was always hunting.”

“There’s more to the story,” she said.

“Not very much more,” he said.

“I’m trying to figure out some things,” she said. “The rape—that’s not hard. Impossible to believe, but completely understandable. It was revenge.”

“An ambush,” he supplied.

“Ambush,” she repeated thoughtfully.

“That’s what happened to me,” he added. “The one thing you really can’t protect yourself against.”

“Of course,” she said, leaning back. “Of course.”

“That was the hardest part of the equation for me to reason out—that there wasn’t really anything I could have done differently. Or smarter. Have you struggled with that?”

She thought for a moment, holding her bottom lip between her teeth. “I’ve struggled with every part of that. But the thing that still gnaws at me is how I screwed up with Brad. For some reason, since the rape, it’s like the pain of the divorce is fresh.”

“What makes you think you screwed up?”

“I had no idea he was the kind of man who could do what he did. I never saw it coming. I’ve thought back to the beginning—to the first date. To every day of the marriage. Maybe I worked too hard—my hours were so long. I could have paid closer attention. Maybe my commitment to my career was stronger than my commitment to Brad. I never—”

Mike took his feet off the trunk, planted them on the floor and said, “Brie, it might’ve been his screwup, not yours. When I met you for the first time, years ago, what I saw shining in your eyes was trust and commitment. And love. God, you were so in love with him. And on top of that you were a brilliant achiever, a woman of strength and power and courage. And you couldn’t get close enough to him, giving him all your attention. If that wasn’t enough for Brad, you can’t blame yourself.”

“Tell me about them. Tell me why you married them, why your marriages failed.”

He cautiously reached out a hand to gently touch her hair. “Honey, it’s not that interesting. It won’t help you understand Brad. The only thing I have in common with Brad is we were both idiots.”

“Tell me,” she demanded softly.

He took a breath. “Carmel was nineteen years old when she went to work for my father as a novice bookkeeper and secretary, and we met while I was on leave. We wrote letters—lonely, sweet letters that became more romantic. Six months later when I was again on leave, we made love, and after that she needed to be married. So that’s what we did—married, and then I was sent to Iraq. When I came home, she was ready to move on. She broke my heart and saved my life all at the same time, because I wouldn’t have left her, and I would have continued to be a terrible husband to her. I lived in the moment. I was too easily distracted. Always thinking of myself.”