Free Holly Lane by Toni Blake Page A

worst of times, times he’d never told anyone about . . . until now. “Okay, this is kind of embarrassing, but . . . she said I was terrible in bed.”
    At this, Sue Ann simply gaped at him a moment, jaw slack, then replied, “Um, she was lying.”
    “How do you know?”
    In response, she just blinked pointedly, then reminded him, “Personal experience.”
    Which brought a small smile to his face and made his chest go warm. “Oh. Well . . . thanks for that, too,” he said. “Because, you know, I was pretty sure I knew how to please a woman, but . . . ”
    That’s when Sue Ann’s eyebrows rose higher. “Arrogant much?”
    He gave his head a sharp tilt. “What do you mean, arrogant? I’m admitting she had me doubting myself a little.”
    “Okay, good point. And . . . actually, I guess you can be arrogant if you want. You’ve . . . earned arrogant. Trust me on that.” She looked a little sheepish as she said it, though, and he kind of wanted to kiss her some more, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t the right time.
    So instead he just tipped his head back slightly, feeling a little arrogant now, and said, “Good to know.”
    “So back to what happened,” she prodded.
    Oh yeah, that. He blew out another long, tired breath. “I guess you could say things reached a boiling point. We went to the wedding of an old friend of hers in Cleveland, where she was a bridesmaid, and besides ignoring me at the rehearsal dinner, she started openly flirting with other men, especially the one she was walking with in the wedding. And by the time the reception rolled around, she was hanging all over the guy.
    “And it wasn’t that I felt jealous exactly,” he said, thinking back to decipher the unsavory memories. “What stung was that she was working so hard to humiliate me and hurt me. It was that I couldn’t figure out how my marriage had turned into something like that.”
    Beside him, Sue Ann murmured, “Wow, that’s awful. I’m sorry.”
    He just looked at her then—and felt his throat growing so thick it was tough to swallow. Because she wouldn’t feel so sorry for him after he told her the next part, the hard part. Strange, at the time, it had seemed . . . too easy. Because it had made him feel human again—masculine. But trying to tell Sue Ann about it now . . . made him feel small.
    “I didn’t know anybody there,” he went on, “and I was seated next to a pretty woman who was nice enough to make conversation with me. Watching Sheila embarrass us both all night got hard to take, and I guess I had too much to drink. And I was just fed up. And it felt . . . hell, it felt good to have a woman show some interest in me and make me laugh. And . . . ” He stopped then, because, damn it, no matter how he explained it or how he’d felt in that moment, it still didn’t justify what came next.
    “And one thing led to another?” Sue Ann supplied.
    He sighed. That was pretty much the size of it. “I ended up kissing her in the little room where the wedding party had stashed all their belongings.”
    “Kissing,” Sue Ann repeated.
    “Making out,” he clarified—but he still didn’t go into further detail. “And that’s when Sheila walked in on us.”
    “So you didn’t actually . . . have sex.”
    He shook his head, sighed, and wished that simple fact actually made it better. “No. But it’s still cheating,” he concluded. “And despite what Sheila had been doing all night, she saw it as the proof that her accusations were true all along, that I was a womanizer out to seduce every female who crossed my path.”
    “Wow,” Sue Ann said again, but he couldn’t quite tell what she was wowing this time—Sheila’s reaction, the whole distasteful story, or some other aspect of it all. “So, did you love Sheila?”
    “Once upon a time, definitely,” he said—yet then he paused, sighed. “I can’t say I really loved her by the time we got divorced, but . . . I’m still not