Just A Little Bit Married. Teresa Southwick
“I guess it would have been awkward to apply for a marriage license and find out you were still married.”
“You think?”
He detected the tiniest bit of defensiveness in her voice and decided to take a shot. “You never told him you’d been married before?”
“We were married for fifteen minutes.” Ten years ago her eyes took on shades of gray when she was annoyed and they looked that way now. “It was a long time ago. I’ve been busy. It didn’t seem important.”
“The thing is, you never checked to find out about the divorce,” he reminded her.
“Neither did you.”
“Fair enough. I will take care of it now. Mason, my new lawyer, will handle the details and send the papers to you for your signature. Then it will be behind us.” At least the paperwork part. His feelings were a lot more complicated than he’d expected.
“Okay.” She frowned. “How did you know where I was?”
“How does anyone find anyone? I looked you up on the internet.”
Also he’d checked her out, found out what she’d been doing all these years. First college, then five years working with a prestigious design firm in Dallas before opening her own business not quite two years ago. And it wasn’t doing well. If she was, she’d still be located in Dallas, not thirty-five miles away, where office and living spaces were combined and cheap.
She ran everything herself, no hired help and therefore no payroll. There were a few flooring, window-covering and paint samples in her downstairs studio, but not what you’d see in a larger, successful company.
Her reputation was good, but her business was going down with a whimper. Unless someone gave her a high-profile opportunity.
“Look, Rose, there’s another reason I came to see you.”
“What else could there possibly be? Isn’t the fact that we’re not legally divorced enough?”
“This is a good thing. Trust me.”
“Seriously? You have the nerve to ask me to trust you? Getting involved with you was the worst mistake of my life.”
“Right.” He refused to react, to let her know the arrow hit its mark. “You have no reason to trust me. And that doesn’t bode well, because I want to offer you a job.”
“Doing what?”
“Decorating.” He moved closer. “My condo in Blackwater Lake, Montana.”
“And why would I want to do that?”
“Because the town is about to be on the rich-and-famous radar when a new hotel, condo and retail project opens. The hotel is entering the last phase of construction and will need decorating. I know the developer. Use my condo for your résumé and dazzle them. I’ll put in a good word.” Linc pitched her the rest of the details, then asked, “What do you think?”
“I think I want to know what your angle is.”
“No ulterior motive.” Except giving her business a helping hand might earn him some redemption points.
“I don’t need your charity.”
“That’s not what this is.” He slid his fingertips into the pockets of his slacks. “I don’t deserve a favor, but I’m asking for one. Just think about it.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re good at what you do.” He pulled a card from his wallet and set it on the coffee table. “Call me in a few days with your decision. And before you think about not calling, you should know that I’ll contact you.”
“Okay.”
Linc was reluctant to leave but decided not to push his luck. The weird thing was he’d never planned to offer her a job. That changed when he saw her.
Accepting his proposition would mean traveling to Blackwater Lake with him and he really wanted her to do that. For old time’s sake. For her business. To make things up to her so he would feel better about what he’d done.
Ultimately the reasons were about him, which did, in fact, make him a self-centered bastard like his father.
* * *
“What do you mean you’re married? More important—why do I not know this about you? And don’t even get me started on why I wasn’t invited to the wedding.”
Rose stared at her BFF, Vicki Jeffers. After Linc left she couldn’t stop shaking. He was a ghost from the past and she’d barely held it together when he showed up out of the blue. She’d really needed to talk to someone and begged her friend to come over. Apparently her shocked and shaky tone had convinced the other woman to break a date. So Rose told her story and the other woman was now staring at her as if she had two heads.
“I’m not married so much as not quite divorced.” She took another sip of the wine Vicki had brought. It was a nice vintage, more than Rose could afford. The business she’d launched eighteen months ago wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire. Paying her bills was a challenge and left no room in the budget for an expensive bottle of cabernet.
“So you’ve been married for ten years.”
“Not technically,” Rose objected.
“Yeah, technically,” Vicki countered. “Because if you’re not divorced, you’re still married. And you just said that happened almost ten years ago.”
“It ended after a nanosecond, so not really married that long.”
“Might not feel that way but legally you’ve been his wife all these years.” Vicki sighed and held up a hand. She was sitting at the other end of the couch and tucked her legs up beside her, settling in for a marathon heart-to-heart. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
Rose blew out a long breath as the highs and lows of that emotional time tumbled through her mind. “It was the summer before I started college. I got a clerical job at Hart Industries. Lincoln Hart had just finished his master’s degree in business and was taking his place in the company his father started.” Although now she knew Hastings Hart wasn’t his biological father.
“So... What? He hit on you? Used his position of power to sexually harass you?”
“Why would you think such a thing?”
“Because I’m a lawyer,” Vicki said.
“A very cynical one.” Rose shook her head. “He was a perfect gentleman. The truth is we fell madly in love and got married.”
“And you never saw fit to say a word about it when we met at school? I thought we shared all of our secrets.” There was just a tinge of hurt in her friend’s brown eyes. Vicki wrapped a long strand of silky blond hair around her finger and stared accusingly. “But you kept the secret that you were Rose Hart.”
The name had a nice ring to it, but she’d never even had a chance to change the last name on her driver’s license. “Linc abruptly ended things and said he would handle the divorce details and a lawyer would contact me if he needed anything from me. No one did, so I thought it was done.”
“And you didn’t wonder why you never heard anything about signing the settlement papers?”
“What did I know about a divorce?” And if she was being honest, there’d been a lot of denial going on. And she’d been so hurt. The pain of not being with him was almost more than she could bear. So many awful feelings. The shock of being dumped without an explanation. Overwhelming bewilderment. Now she knew what happened but still didn’t understand why he had to leave her. She would have done anything for Lincoln Hart—or whatever his name was. “I was practically a baby.”
“You weren’t too young to get married.”
“He swept me