Garrison stood frozen in the middle of his living room, wondering what the hell just happened. One moment, he was planning one of the most romantic nights of his life, arranging for his favorite restaurant in the city to send them dessert along with a bottle of wine, and the next...the next, Reyna was raving at him about something he had no idea about. A stupid coincidence. Then she had thrown that accusation at him. And it hurt.
When Barbieri said it at the restaurant, Garrison had been furious. That piece of nothing didn’t know him, yet he dared hint that Reyna was some piece of castoff Garrison had gotten from another man’s trash. She was much more than that. And Garrison was, too.
His business was his life. He had built it from the ground up with no capital invested from a wealthy parent, no business connections except the ones he’d forged in New York on his own. Nothing. Garrison Richards and Associates was something he’d built with his two hands and his reputation.
His law firm supported his mother, helped her to leave the workforce and live the life she’d always dreamed of. This was what paid for every morsel of food that went into Garrison’s mouth. He would never, ever think of endangering it just to find someone to warm his bed.
But Reyna thought he would. What had he ever done to make her believe he was a conscienceless opportunist who preyed on vulnerable women?
He breathed through the tightness in his chest. She was gone.
Garrison shook himself and grabbed his keys, his coat. He couldn’t let her leave. And the high heels she wore didn’t seem suited for the slush that sat in haphazard piles all over the city. He ran downstairs to look for her, thought he saw her fleeing down into the subway, but by the time he crossed the street and ran down the steps, the train to Brooklyn was only a howling sound and brace of wind blowing back at him in the tunnel.
Garrison cursed. His coat flapped around his legs in the wake of the southbound train. He glanced at his watch, mentally calculating how long it would take her to get home. He got his car and drove toward her Brooklyn apartment as fast as the streets would let him.
He parked on the street across from the subway exit closest to her building and waited. Barely ten minutes later, he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw her familiar figure emerge from the subway station. She was huddled in her coat, the long material covering her from throat to calves. She walked quickly from the station, a slim and dark figure, checking her surroundings as she made her way from the well-lit entrance. Even covered as she was, the swaying walk of hers managed to attract quite a few admirers. Garrison got out of his car.
“Reyna.”
She stopped when she saw him. Her hands were stuffed in her pockets, and she looked as if she was freezing. “What are you doing here?”
“I was worried about you.”
“I’m obviously fine.” She began to walk again, her heels stabbing into the sidewalk with each deliberate step. She stopped at the red-lit pedestrian crossing. “You can go back home now.”
Garrison gently took her arm, his gloved hand against her black sleeve. “Let me drive you home.”
She looked down at his hand as if it was something loathsome. “I walk these streets every day. I am fine. I don’t need your fake chivalry, and I definitely don’t need you to tell me when I’m safe and when I’m not.” Reyna yanked her arm from his. “The only time I wasn’t safe was when you took advantage of my friend and used me to get to her.”
Garrison flinched, but he tried not to show how deeply her words pierced him, a shocking arrow of pain in his chest that he’d never felt before. He drew back. “All right.”
The light changed, and she quickly crossed the street, nearly lost in the swarm of pedestrians. She didn’t look back. But Garrison followed her the whole way home to make sure she was as safe as she thought she was. At her building, she walked inside and slammed the door in his face without once looking in his direction. Garrison went back to his car. He cursed when he saw the parking ticket on the windshield. Of course this would happen.
But when he got into the Jag and started the engine, he couldn’t find the energy to be angry about the fine. He had parked where he shouldn’t. Fair enough. What wasn’t fair were her accusations of duplicity.
But life isn’t quite fair, is it?
Garrison wanted to kick his inner sardonic voice in the throat. He tightened his fists around the steering wheel. His leather gloves creaked.
At Halcyon, he thought he’d shown Reyna the kind of man he was. The oblivious and morally blind man from five years ago had been burned away by his own deliberate fires of change. Now he was more conscious of the people who could be hurt by his actions. And he changed lives for the better when he could. Garrison thought that was the man she’d responded to and made love with in the mountains.
The person she had allowed to touch her would have never done those things she so freely accused him of. Why, then, did she think it was possible for him, now that they were back in the city, to do those despicable things? Garrison shook his head. It was not a question he could answer.
Resigned, he pulled the car into traffic and headed for the bridge.
* * *
At home, he poured himself another whiskey then carefully checked his notes on the Keller divorce. As he read the details, he remembered what he had seen of the young Haitian woman at the resort. She was beautiful and gentle, but with an air of sadness about her, as if depression was only a breath away. She looked like someone who had lost at love and lost badly.
The man who wanted to be her ex-husband was doing much better. Although Daniel Keller often talked about how he missed his wife and wished things would go back to how they once were, he did not wear anguish the way Marceline did. But that wasn’t surprising.
For the men who came to him—“the shark lawyer”—for an effective and incisive divorce, all the soft feelings and tenderness for the women who had shared their lives were long gone. All that was left was a desire for self-and asset preservation.
It was a depressing scenario, one that Garrison told himself he had been lucky to escape. Nothing ended in happiness. And those who were fools to forget that were the ones who suffered the most.