Free Seeing Red by Holley Trent Page B

going to fucking break me,” she panted as he lay on his back, taking her down with him.
    And there it went. That thing they all feared. “I’m sorry…I can—”
    “Shush.” She pressed an index finger over his lips briefly and let it fall to the side of his face as she relaxed on top of him, seeming unable to catch her breath. “I don’t think you get it.”
    “That’s nothing new.”
    He listened to her breaths as they steadied, then quieted to mere whispers over the course of minutes. Rubbing his hand up her spine, he said, “Megan?”
    No response came from her beyond an involuntary sigh.
    He decided to let the cat sleep. She was sure to race away soon enough.
     

 
    Chapter 7
     
    “So, let me get this straight.” Carla topped off Meg’s Dr Pepper and returned the bottle to the nearly empty refrigerator. The Fennells were still unpacking, and the moment Meg’s plane touched down in Raleigh, she’d parted ways with Seth and made a beeline for her friends’ new home.
    Carla stole a peek into the restored Victorian house’s living room to see what Meg stared at from her position at the end of the paper-strewn dining room table. The children were playing raucously, hiding in boxes and scattering packing peanuts all over the floor.
    Meg had already tried to mitigate the mess once, striding into the room with a giant trash bag, but Carla drew her back, scolding, “Coping strategy, my dear. Clean up once, not fifteen times while the destruction ensues.”
    Now the maternal brunette leaned against the closed refrigerator door, arms crossed over her small breasts, studying Meg.
    “The same woman,” she began, “who practically crucified me for making a snap decision and traipsing off to Ireland with a man I barely knew is now okay with the idea of letting one of that same man’s best friends move into her house…with her son?”
    Meg swirled the ice in her soda and watched the bubbles in the dark liquid rise and pop. “He’ll be in the guest room. It’s just for show.”
    “Uh-huh. For how long? What are you going to do? Annul the thing? Or will you hold out a little longer and have another divorce?”
    “I don’t like your tone.”
    “And I don’t like you stringing Seth along.”
    Meg snapped her gaze toward her friend and did a quick reading of Carla’s face, hoping perhaps the woman was pulling her leg.
    Didn’t look like it.
    “I thought you were my friend. And if I recall, you were on-board with this scheme. You flew to Bermuda, remember? You were one of our witnesses.”
    “That’s right.” Carla eased off the fridge door and strode to the table. She pulled out the chair to Meg’s right and folded onto it. “Look, I guess we all thought this would be a convenient sort of thing,” she said softly. “We figured the two of you would just lay low and wait for the drama to go away on its own.”
    “That’s a reasonable expectation, but you know almost as well as I do that Spike isn’t a reasonable man. I thought the same thing you did: that I’d marry Seth and people would leave me alone because he’s not famous. I’d fall off the radar and could have a normal sort of life after a while, but Carla…” Meg lowered her voice to a whisper as one of the children streaked past the open double door. “You should hear some of the messages he’s been leaving in my voice mail. He’s gone ape-shit. When everyone was feeling sorry for me for getting dumped, it made him look like a bad boy and somehow all the more desirable.” That made her scoff. She took a long sip of her soda and gathered her thoughts.
    It wasn’t necessary. Carla could more or less read them. “And now that you’ve appeared to have moved on, he’s taken it personally. Probably pissed he didn’t do more to screw you up.”
    And that’s precisely why they were best friends. Even if they didn’t always immediately warm to each other’s choices, they generally came around to understanding why they made