lie. Even when he tried it, everyone could always guess the truth. “Yep.”
“That’s it? ‘Yep.’ That’s the only answer I get? Sometimes you can be so difficult.”
“I don’t mean to be.”
Corinne tried again. “Would you mind telling me why you followed me?”
“Well…”
“Never mind. I think I know,” she stopped him. She tilted her head in his direction and gave him her, oh-you-poor-boy smile—which was only slightly different than her oh-you-silly-boy chuckle. “It’s really no big secret. The truth is you have a little crush on me. Don’t you?”
“I…”
“I don’t mind,” she offered gallantly. “Truly, it’s not surprising. After all, it’s only natural that someone like you would be attracted to someone like me. For one thing, we are complete opposites. That alone can be enough to stir someone’s interest in another person. You see the qualities that you lack in the other and you want them for yourself.”
He didn’t think so, but rather than try to correct her assumptions only to be cut off again, he let her continue.
“The important thing is not to let it get out of hand. You know that I love Brendan and you know he’s the only man I’ll ever love.”
“Why?” Matthew managed to toss into the conversation.
The question brought her up short for a second, but she recovered and quickly stepped up onto her Brendan soapbox.
“He’s really a very sensitive man. I know sometimes he doesn’t show it, but that’s because of his insecurities. He feels he has to hide his true self. There’s that and he’s a talented salesman. Of course he has excellent fashion sense. And we’re very much alike. We both enjoy the spotlight. We both play to the crowd. We understand each other.”
“If he understood you,” Matthew argued, “he would know that you’re not the type of woman who would tolerate cheating.”
“He’s going to stop cheating. He knows he has to or he will lose me forever.” There was a catch in her voice even as she said the confident words. “Would you want to lose me forever?” she asked him a bit frantically.
Gently, he shook his head, and said, “No. I wouldn’t want to lose you forever. I guess I’m worried about you. What if he doesn’t stop cheating? You’re not going to stick around for that, are you?”
He would have to kill Golden Boy if he ever caught him with his pants down around his ankles with some other woman while he was married to his Rinny. And Matthew would hate like hell to have to go to jail.
Back to huffy in the blink of an eye, Corinne whipped off her sunglasses in a fluid movement and he could see how indignant she was. “Do I look like one of those pathetic women who would let her husband cheat on her?”
“No,” he answered thoughtfully. “There’s nothing pathetic about you, Rinny.”
“Certainly not,” she affirmed. “I promise you, I have no intention of sitting by and watching his roaming eye for the rest of my life. If he can’t settle down, then we’re through. Unfortunately, that means I will have to spend the rest of my life alone, and I would really rather it not come to that.”
“Why alone? Why can’t there be someone else?” he challenged.
Thoughts of her sister and all of her fiancés, and of her brother and his two—soon to be three—wives and her parents with all of their paramours came rushing to the forefront of her mind. “Because it’s not supposed to be like that,” she stated adamantly. “There’s not supposed to be scores of lovers in a person’s life. Maybe there are multiple relationships, some that work and others that don’t. But there is only one true love. The one that you’re meant to be with. The one that makes your world complete. Sometimes that love only lasts for a day. Sometimes people never find it. Sometimes they find it but they let their day-to-day worries mess it up. Sometimes it lasts forever. You never know how it’s going to end up. I’m lucky enough to have found my true love. If I’m not lucky enough to keep him…well, then I’ll just have to live with the consequences. But it wouldn’t be fair to anyone else who might want to be with me when I would know the whole time that they were just a substitute.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
“What do you know about love anyway?” she asked impatiently.
“I know plenty,” he said as he stared at the calm water. “I was engaged once.”
Matthew had been engaged? This was news to her. Most people who met him automatically came to the conclusion that he was single. It was because there was something very solitary about him. When Corinne defended him to their co-workers, which she often did, she called him an independent spirit. Her colleagues said she was simply being kind.
They believed he was odd. Too staid. Too regimented. Too private. He ate the same thing for lunch every day—a bologna and cheese sandwich and a green apple. He wore a tie and suit every day, even on dress-down days when everybody else wore jeans. He always had a tissue and a pencil on hand and ready to lend. The man was as predictable as the turning of the earth. The girls in the office joked that being married to Matthew would be like being married to one of the presidents on Mt. Rushmore. In other words, not too exciting. No, no one ever seemed to question why he was single. And everyone took it for granted that he always would be.
Only come to find out that he was engaged. To be married. “Who was she?” Despite her best efforts, Corinne couldn’t quite keep the incredulity from her voice.
“Her name was Debbie.”
Wow, he thought. It had been too long since he thought of her. There was a time when Matthew used to think about her every second and what his life would have been like had she lived. But time had passed. His heart had healed. The memories would always be precious, but they weren’t as keen as they used to be. And he had learned to love again.
“What happened?”
Corinne’s curiosity was like a hungry animal that simply had to be satisfied, Matthew knew. She wouldn’t stop until she had all the answers. “She died in a car accident two months before the wedding. Debbie was a schoolteacher, and there was a bad snowstorm and she wanted to make sure all the children got home safely, so she drove them herself rather than put them on the bus. They all got home, but she didn’t.”
It was tragic. A lump the size of a fist formed in her throat. “I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged and sat up to take the pressure off his elbows. “It was seven years ago. I miss her, but I’ve moved on. And I believe that she would want me to find someone else. Someone who I could love as deeply as I loved her. She was generous like that.”
The lump wasn’t going away. Around it, Corinne choked out, “She sounds wonderful.”
“She was. But after she was gone I never once thought that my life was over. I never believed that she was my only chance at happiness. Instead, I felt the opposite. I was reminded how dear life is and how I should always try to seize every moment. Somewhere along the way I forgot that lesson. I guess I’ve never been too good at seizing. It took a two-bit crook with a .38 Smith and Wesson and a craving for slushies to remind me.” Reactively, Matthew reached up to rub his heart where he could still feel the residual pain from the bullet that had just missed that vital organ.
The scar was invisible behind the white cotton T-shirt he wore. But Corinne knew it was there. Odd, because he didn’t seem like the type to be prudish about such things, but Matthew refused to let anyone see the mark that the bullet had left. He said it was a private matter between him and the man who put it there.
Corinne remembered that awful day as clearly as if it happened yesterday rather than several months ago. A police officer had shown up at the office with the news that Matthew had been shot during a holdup at a convenience store. Foolishly,