Undeniably Asher (The Colloway Brothers Book 2)(110)

“I know.” I can’t say I would, because then I wouldn’t have Alyse. I’m not sure even if she confronted me about this back then that I’d have tried to pursue Alyse. I would have tried to smooth things over with Natalie. Make it work with Natalie, all the while never knowing my true destiny was waiting elsewhere for me.

I swallow hard before asking my next question, but I’m tired of wondering if everything she said was a lie. “Tell me one more thing. Was it mine?”

She’s silent for so long I don’t think she’ll answer. When she does, I’m gutted anew. “I was never unfaithful to you before that night, Asher. And I didn’t sleep with Rick until two months after we broke up. I’m…God, I’m so sorry.”

“Good-bye, Natalie,” I croak, blinking the sting from my eyes.

“Asher, wait. Are you with someone now? Happy?”

“Yes.” I don’t tell her it’s Alyse, because for some reason that doesn’t feel right, even though she deserves to have the knife twisted a bit. She’ll think I was lying to her, and it turns out the only person I was lying to all along was me.

“I’m glad.”

“Good-bye, Nat.”

“Bye, Asher.”

I hang up with mixed emotions, anger and relief fighting for dominance, but knowing forgiveness is somewhere deep within me. It will take a while for it to trump everything else, but at least I’ve taken the first step.

______________





Later that night, after one fan-fucking-tastic bj and a round of toe-curling sex against the shower tile, I lay entwined with Alyse in comfortable silence. It feels right to finally tell her about Natalie.

“I know I get irrational sometimes about other men looking at you or talking to you, Alyse, but…I can’t stand the thought of losing you to anyone else. It makes me fucking crazy. It’s not that I don’t trust you. I do. It’s my own insecurities. I’ll try to work on it.”

“Okay,” she says, lightly running her fingernails over my flank.

“You were right, you know.”

I feel her smile against my pecs. “I usually am,” she replies saucily. I grasp her side, making her giggle.

“Her name was Natalie.” Now I feel her smile fall and her hands grip me a little tighter. “I started dating her when I was twenty-three. We met at the gym when she was trying to figure out how to use some piece of equipment, I forget even what it was now. Anyway, I had just graduated with my MBA and started working at my father’s company. In the early days as VP of client management, I had to travel a lot, so I was sometimes gone all week for weeks at a time.

“Natalie was an editor at a small publishing house and she struck up a close friendship with a fellow colleague. A male colleague. I knew they spent a lot of time together when I was out of town, but she swore nothing inappropriate was going on. Only it was, and I was young and naïve and ignored all the signs. She knew how much it bothered me that she spent time with this guy, who was clearly after her, yet she did it anyway. She talked about marriage all the time, as if that would solve our relationship issues and change the scope of my job so I was home more.

“So I decided I would ask her to marry me. In retrospect, I don’t know why, because I have no doubt we’d be divorced by now. I had been out of town all week and she was expecting me on Sunday morning, but I ended my meetings early and caught a late flight home on Saturday night instead. I had the ring in my pocket. I had the words memorized that I would say when I got down on one knee. Instead, I caught them in bed together. In my house. In my bed.”

“God, Asher.”

The final piece of my confession sits like arsenic in my veins, slowly corroding me from the inside out. Saying it out loud is harder than I ever imagined.

“And the worst part of it was,” I choke on the vile words that I’ve never told anyone else before. “Two months later she sent me a text. A fucking text. Told me she was pregnant, that it was mine but she’d aborted it because she knew I would never forgive her and she couldn’t raise my baby without me. I now know just how manipulative Natalie was.”

This whole time, I wasn’t even sure if she had ever been pregnant. And if so, I had no clue if it was mine or someone else’s. To get through the wrenching pain I’d felt at the remote possibility it was true, I told myself it was a lie. But now I know she was telling the truth. She made a life-altering decision without even discussing it with me first.

“Oh, my God, Asher. That’s horrible,” she breathes, and I know she understands. While different circumstances, she’s suffered the same loss that I have. Then she rolls onto her back, encouraging us to change positions, so I am now lying on top of her.