It couldn’t be good.
His expression never changed. It stayed a careful blank. He took a long drag off the Scotch. “I can’t make her leave. She’s in my head. I can’t get her fucking out. Never met anyone with skills like Charlotte. She could make me run in circles and I liked it. Do you know what’s it like to not be able to get a woman out of your head?”
So he’d been in love. God, Ian in love was probably a sight to see. “Why don’t you call her?”
There was a long pause. She couldn’t imagine that a woman wouldn’t fall madly in love with Ian Taggart. He was gorgeous and had that crazy, impossible wall up that seemed to call to most women.
He took a long breath before answering. “No point. If you and Alex can’t make it, there’s no hope for a dumb shit like me. You two had it all. You were what I was aiming for.”
She felt tears blur her eyes. Ian never talked like this. Just looking at him, she wouldn’t really guess he was plastered. His hands were steady and his voice was perfectly controlled, but the words coming from his mouth proved it. When Ian was sober, he would very likely never admit he wanted more than sex from a woman. “Well, we’re just human, Ian.”
“Nah. You were more. You were happy, and then shit happened and it all died.”
It was a little more than shit. She’d been brutalized, and Alex couldn’t handle it. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find a good relationship.”
He laughed a little, but there was nothing humorous about it. “Good? You think I can find a healthy relationship with some nice woman out there? Maybe raise a few kids? Hey, we could find a four bedroom with a white picket fence and a dog named Cuddles. Who the fuck do you think I am, Eve?”
It was then that she noticed the envelope on the floor next to him. She recognized it from this morning. It had been delivered along with the flowers. “I think you’re one of my oldest friends and you deserve some peace.”
His eyes darkened. “That’s only because there’s so much you don’t know about me, honey.” His mouth flattened, and he let his head drift back. “I really do care about you, Eve. And not simply because you were Alex’s wife.” He took a long breath and looked back down at her. “Are you sure you’re done with him?”
She could answer that honestly. “No. I don’t know that I’ll ever be done with him, but I also don’t know that we can live together again. I’ve changed since we got married.”
“You got stronger. I actually thought you weren’t a good match for Alex. You were too submissive in the beginning. Alex needed a challenge. It’s one thing to have a sub in the bedroom, quite another when your partner, the woman you rely on, is utterly dependent on you for every decision.”
She felt her eyes narrow. “I certainly was not.”
“He picked out your clothes every morning, Eve.”
It had started out as a game. He would pick out her clothes for their dates and he always selected her lingerie. Somewhere along the way, they had fallen into the habit of him laying out her clothes and admiring her. “It was just for fun.”
“Was it?”
“I wasn’t completely dependent on him.” She said the words and she meant them to some extent, but looking back, she knew she had been far more dependent on him than she was really comfortable with. And yet those were some of the sweetest times of her life. “I can’t be that girl again. I don’t know that Alex will accept anything less.”
“Alex has accepted the crumbs you’ve given him for years. He’ll take anything. If I met you today, I would say you’re too cold for him. Back then you were too submissive.”
Ian didn’t pull punches. Damn, hearing that hurt. “So you think I should let him go.”
Let him go to the likes of the Amandas of this world? Younger women or subs who weren’t damaged and set in their ways? Women he could settle down with into a happy, congenial partnership where he made most of the decisions?
“I think you need to take all the sweetness of the woman you were and merge it with the strength you have now. I think you should stop fucking lying down and fight. We’re all fucked up, Eve, but at least the rest of us are walking wounded. At least we’re trying to get somewhere.”
A little kernel of anger lit inside her. “Oh, really? Just where are you going, Ian? Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve been in one place for a really long time, or are you trying to tell me that you go through a sub a night because you’re looking for ‘the one’?”
He snorted, a sound sure to be ridiculous on a lesser man, but Ian made it sound elegant. “Yeah, that’s my story. No. I already found ‘the one’ and she’s dead and I think Eli Nelson had something to do with it.”
She felt her mouth drop open. She’d known Ian and Nelson had a history, but how far back did it go? “What?”
“Fucker sent me a card. I already tossed the flowers out. I nearly hit Phoebe in the head. She’s going to quit one of these days.” He nodded toward the envelope at his feet.
Eve pulled the card out. It was all hearts and flowers, sappy and sentimental, and it announced Happy Anniversary. It was unsigned, but the mailing address was London, England, Eli Nelson’s last known whereabouts. The rogue CIA agent had been causing trouble for the entire group since he’d attempted to use them to steal industrial secrets for his Chinese handlers. A few months ago, they’d all learned that their ties with Nelson went back much further than they had known. He’d ruined the operation that cost Liam years of his life and then tried to kill both him and Avery after running off with the information he’d been willing to kill for.
And Ian had struck back, rendering that information useless. They were two titans taking massive swings at each other.
“Why would he send this to you?”
Ian shrugged. “He wants me emotional. He wants me off my game. And he definitely wants me to think he killed my wife.”
Eve felt her eyes go wide and her heart drop into her stomach. His wife? Ian had been married? “How long has she been gone?”
Maybe he’d been right when he’d said there was a lot she didn’t know.
“Years. Minutes. Sometimes I think I still see her. What am I doing? She played me. She was working for Nelson all along, and she got burned. This is stupid. I need to be working on a case and I’m sitting here like some fucking teenager listening to music and crying over a girl.”