Fixing Justice (38 page)

Winking mischievously at Carmen, Tori lowered her voice to a whisper, “Find, feel, fuck, and forget. Some things never change.” And with that she calmly walked out of the kitchen like nothing unusual at all had just happened. By the time she reached the door of her apartment, her heart was well and truly shattered. Stepping inside her comfy hideaway she quietly shut out the world and sank slowly to the floor, tremendous sobs bursting from her chest as an unending torrent of pain and loss ripped apart her soul.

TO: Draegyn St. John

FROM: Ted Collins

RE:Legal Advice

Drae,

I’ve put together some information for you and your wife to look at. As I explained in our last conversation, the most prudent way forward will be not to make any changes to the status quo for a minimum of six months so we can establish the hard facts necessary to move for a divorce based on irreconcilable differences. During this period it is imperative that two separate households be maintained and neither of the parties involved make any effort to solidify the union in question.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. If anything changes, please inform me immediately.

Ted

Humph
.
So much for checking email when you’re in a lousy mood
, Drae griped. He’d been home for less than an hour, after a God awful plane flight and had managed in that time to neatly avoid seeing or talking to anyone. The message from his lawyer was the icing on his cake of annoyance.

He considered heading over to the cabin to welcome the newlyweds home and see how they liked the theater room he’d designed but something about facing the happy couple left him cold. Right now, he had no interest in seeing his old friend basking in some sappy romantic glow. Not while he was all tied up in knots.

The only visit he knew should be on his agenda was to Victoria. And not because he had news from his lawyer. It had taken him awhile to get there but eventually he’d been forced to admit that he missed his little spitfire and the messy havoc her appearance in his life had caused. Behaving badly wasn’t something he was comfortable with, especially not when he had in fact behaved like a king-size dick.

Maybe it was the chat he’d had with his sister last night that helped clear his head. Desirée grew up in the same cold, loveless environment he had. She knew the bitter truth about their parents’ marriage and how it had more or less been a business deal with payment for each healthy offspring. But she hadn’t let any of that steal her ability to develop into a beautiful, accomplished woman who found not just love but a life that was fulfilling, with a husband and children she adored.

She said something that kept repeating in his head; that instead of letting their parents damage her life beyond repair, she’d felt challenged to prove them wrong. By not giving in to the forces of money, greed, power, and social standing, she had gone out and fought tooth and nail for a different life. Even after a day when the kids had been off the wall and her husband a boob, she still looked around and gave thanks for her sometimes-messy life. If she’d wanted surface perfection, then she would have gone down the same path as their mother and father.

Hearing Desi say all that had made him feel like a coward. Instead of being brave and fearless as she had been, he’d let the twisted life of their family follow him like a tracking device. He was a thirty-five-year-old man who had never been in an actual relationship. Protecting his emotions at all cost had left him no real future to look forward to. Even the big house he built with its empty bedrooms was a constant reminder that he was alone and probably always would be.

Victoria had managed to squeak by all his defenses. She was the first woman who had ever stepped foot in his home. How fucking sad was that? While he could pretty much have any woman he desired, he hadn’t counted on meeting a witch with a smart-ass mouth who was
so
not interested in falling at his feet. Served him right.

Maybe I should text her
, Drae thought, reaching for his phone.
Coward
, whispered his overworked inner voice.
Fucking moron
, came the response of his conscience. The grimace that followed felt glued on his face.

Tearing off for weeks, even if it had been under cover of an assignment, without contacting her, wasn’t something he could easily explain in a few hastily typed words. Hell, he could barely justify the behavior. No, this was one time when he was just going to have to take whatever happened on the chin and grow a set if he had any chance of making things right. Trouble was, for all his worldly experience, he hadn’t a clue how to go about doing that. With a cold bottle of water in his hand, Drae headed outside to think only to quickly retreat back inside after an overload of sensory input from what had happened last time he’d been on the patio came screaming into his head.
Fuck.
At that moment he sincerely doubted he’d ever be able to erase from his brain the vivid image of Victoria and her provocative mouth taking him on an erotic no-holds barred journey to heaven and back.

Realizing all the time in the world to think wasn’t going to give him any more clarity, he threw in the towel and decided to get on with it. He was pretty good at thinking on his feet. Hadn’t survived being shot at by some very, very bad guys on luck alone. It was time to jump in headfirst and see which way the winds were blowing. He’d know what to do then.

“She’s not here, man.” Alex told him in a strained monotone that let Drae know he had some damage control to do on that front too. “Doubt she’ll be back before nightfall. She and Carmen went to the mall. Something about a sale or whatever.”

Wandering with no real direction, Drae strolled around the great room of Alex’s Spanish Villa while his friend clicked through channels on the satellite TV system. Resting his hips against the back of a sofa, he searched for inspiration about what to say next. Alex beat him to the punch.

“What’s with the ‘man in black’ wardrobe? You figuring to be Johnny Cash or something, dude?” Drae looked at his reflection in a nearby mirror and considered what he was wearing. Yeah, he’d probably taken the black thing too far. Maybe the color choice had more to do with his general mood than a fashion statement.

Black jeans, boots, and t-shirt under a well-worn black leather jacket made his fair coloring a dramatic counterpoint to all the darkness. That and his obvious need for a haircut gave him a scruffy appearance that could give Cameron a run for his money. Dressed as he was, Drae who normally came off like an Armani runway model, looked completely out-of-character.

Settling on a sporting event on the big screen TV, Alex smirked at him as if he was reading his thoughts. “That dark cloud hanging over your head is your own damn fault, you know.”

Drae nodded, started to say something and then thought better of it. Alex was needling him in the way brothers did when a sibling was going off the rails. There weren’t any words to make things right and he knew it. “Alright. Go ahead and say it. I’m a dick, right?”

“Your mouth to God’s ear although I’d add fool to the laundry list.” Throwing some serious side shade his way, Alex’s look of disgust made him inwardly wince.

“How bad is it?” he asked in a cautious voice.

Shrugging, Alex turned his attention to the action on the TV. “That’s for you to figure out but you should know that Tori thinks you lied to her.”

“What?” he bellowed. Lied? He hadn’t lied to her.
What the fuck
.

“She thinks by letting me in on the situation you deceived her about keeping the matter of your marriage a state secret.”

Drae groaned out loud and hung his head. Anything else?

“Have you heard from your lawyer?”

Yeah, he’d heard from Ted all right but he was so damn conflicted and tied up in knots that he didn’t really give a shit about the man’s legal advice. “I need to see Victoria,” was all he said.

Grunting a sarcastic laugh, Alex said, “Good luck with that.”

Feeling like all the wind had been knocked out of his sails, Drae went and threw himself on the end of the sofa, earning a raised eyebrow from his friend. “Brother,” he murmured, “I could really use your help right about now. Made a mess of things.”

“Drae, I’ll remind you yet again that I really like Tori. If you’re just messing with her, well – there’s a special place in hell for you.”

“It’s not like that. I’m…,” he sighed. ”Fuck. I don’t know what I am.”

“Okay, look. This one time and this one time only, I’m gonna stick my neck out and try to give you a hand.” Drae lifted hopeful, grateful eyes to his friend. “I’ll find a way to get Tori down to your place in the morning. That’s the best I can do. What happens after that is on you, dude.”

The morning. Great. That gave him a little more time to figure out what the hell to do. It wasn’t much but knowing they’d have a chance to see each other face-to-face gave him a glimmer of hope.

It has been an awful day all around,
Tori thought. She still didn’t know if she was pregnant because the test she ordered hadn’t been delivered. Regardless of that, she’d come to a huge decision after seeing irrefutable proof that Draegyn had not been lacking for female company while on the other side of the country. In her mind, it didn’t really matter if the test came out positive or negative. Not now. Having shown his true colors she’d been forced to admit that there was no hope of a future between them.

Hitching a ride into town with Carmen under the pretense of doing a mall crawl, she’d met with a lawyer instead, while the other woman had lunch with friends. The attorney she’d found after an Internet search had listened to the implausible Vegas tale without much reaction. After Tori vehemently declared there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of her wanting to stay married to the man and stating passionately that she also wasn’t inclined to wait passively, trusting him to handle the arrangements to end their hasty union, the attorney had taken steps to initiate the dissolution without much fuss. Tori didn’t know what was worse. The lawyers or the cut and dried way these things were handled. It kind of made her recoil at the idea that marriage had become something as easily discarded as the recycling.

Having arranged a late afternoon rendezvous with Carmen at a nice little bistro near the mall, she’d run pell-mell through one of the larger department stores after her visit to the lawyer, making blind purchases just so she’d have something to show for her supposed shopping trip. To her immense relief the conversation once they’d met up centered almost entirely on the other woman’s recounting of her visit with friends, giving Tori an opportunity to dial back some of her tension. They’d grabbed something to nibble on and headed back to the Villa while all she could really focus on was the overstuffed envelope in her bag with the paperwork the lawyer had given her.

Not knowing when or if Draegyn would ever return to Arizona she had come up with several options for presenting him with the documents. Plan A was the direct approach in which she imagined a civilized meeting where they would behave like adults and calmly agree to take the steps outlined in her divorce petition with a no harm, no foul outlook. Plan B took into account the very real possibility that they’d never see each other face-to-face whereby she’d be forced to employ a cut and dried approach through the mail or with intermediaries. Plan C was a messy slash and burn affair that made her endlessly queasy stomach percolate even more.