before she’d said, “Gage, I want a divorce.”
He muttered an oath, kicked the afghan blanket from his legs, and sat up.
“Ouch.”
So much for spending the night on the leather couch in the den. Gage groaned, pressed his hands to the small of his back, and rose to his feet.
Leather couches were not made for sleeping. Neither was this room. It was too big, too impersonal, too filled with stuff. What man would want to share his sleeping quarters with a pool table?
Not him, that was for sure. But Natalie had stalked off to the guest suite, leaving the bedroom to him.
“You can have it,” she’d said with dramatic flair.
Gage groaned again as he hobbled across the hall to the downstairs lavatory. He could have it, but he hadn’t wanted it. That huge room, with its enormous bed, all to himself? With Natalie’s perfume and a thousand memories lingering in the air?
“No way,” he muttered as he splashed cold water on his face.
A man didn’t want to spend the first night of the rest of his life surrounded by reminders of what he was leaving behind.
Gage took a towel from the rack and scrubbed it over his face. Towel? That was a laugh. These puny things were more like handkerchiefs. But Natalie liked them. Natalie and that fruity designer, the one who’d hand-picked the leather couch Gage had thought, until last night, was only uncomfortable to sit on.
He looked into the mirror. A guy in a dress shirt and rumpled black trousers with a satin stripe down the side looked back at him. Hell, he was a mess. Hair uncombed, face unshaven…he looked like Chewbacca after a bad night, but what could you expect after six hours on a cowhide-covered rack?
A smile. Damn, yes. A smile, at the very least. Because now, if nothing else, he’d had his life handed back to him.
Gage stomped down the hall and up the curving staircase to the master bedroom.
Okay, maybe he hadn’t seen it that way, at first. Natalie’s announcement had been…upsetting.
Upsetting?
He shot an unforgiving glance down the corridor, towards the guest room and its closed door, where Natalie was still sleeping the sleep of what he supposed she thought of as the innocent and martyred.
“Let’s be honest here,” he muttered as he marched through the master bedroom and into the bathroom.
I want a divorce weren’t exactly the words a man expected to hear from his wife, especially after they’d been going at each other like two teenagers in hormonal overdrive…
Like the two teenagers they’d once been.
Pictures flashed through his head. He and Natalie, parked in his car on Superstition Butte. Natalie, her beautiful face pink and glowing after their first kiss. Natalie, crying out in passion in his arms.
Gage swallowed hard, slammed the bathroom door shut, and pulled off what remained of his rumpled monkey suit.
Sex. That was all it had been, all it had ever been. His father had tried to tell him that. His brothers, too. Well, no. Not Travis. By then, Travis had already taken off for parts unknown. But Slade had tried to make him listen to reason, and Gage had waved off his kid brother’s warnings, laughed them off, really, telling Slade he was too young to understand love, telling his father he was too jaded to understand it.
And now, it was over.
Oh, the heat was still there. For all he knew, it always would be. Natalie was a beautiful, sexy woman. Why pretend otherwise? And he was a man who had an eye for beauty.
Gage glanced at the ornate gold and platinum faucets jutting from the marble sink. Well, for some kinds of beauty. Not stuff like this. He shuddered. This was ugly. But Natalie liked it, the same as she liked the Spanish Inquisition couch.
“All to madam’s tastes, Mr. Baron,” the obsequious little interior decorator had explained any time he’d questioned a purchase.
All of which proved, Gage thought glumly as he stepped into the shower, all of which most definitely proved how little he and Natalie suited each other.
That was why her announcement last night really hadn’t come as such a shock. Well, it had, at first. He’d felt as if the ground were dissolving under his feet when she’d looked at him, her eyes cold, and said, “Gage, I want a divorce.”
“A divorce?” he’d repeated dumbly, as if saying the word might give it some real meaning, turn it into one he could understand.
“Yes,” she’d said. “A divorce.”
And then a bunch of the Holcombs’s guests had come traipsing through the garden, talking and laughing.
What’s the matter with you people? he’d wanted to shout. Don’t you realize that the whole world just stopped?
But he hadn’t said anything, partly because his brain seemed to have gone numb, partly because Natalie had swung away from him and was hurrying towards the gate that led to the beach. He’d gone after her, following as she made her way not to the sea but around the side of the mansion, up the walkway, to the front of the house.
She’d taken the long way. Evidently, she hadn’t been any more interested in pasting on a smile and saying good-night to a bunch of people than he was.
She was already heading for the street by the time he got to the driveway.
“My car,” he said to the kid with the pimples, pulling out the first bill from his pocket. “And make it quick.”
It must have been a hefty tip because the kid took off like a rocket and delivered the car thirty seconds later.
“Thank you, sir,” he said, but Gage was already in the Vette, pulling away, tires screaming as he raced after Natalie.
He slowed when he caught up to her and put down his window.
“Get in the car.”
She ignored him.
“Get in the damn car,” he said, and something in his voice must have warned her that he was in no mood for games because she’d stopped, wrenched open the door and climbed in.
“What does ‘I want a divorce’ mean?” he’d growled.
“It’s not Swahili, Gage. It means exactly what you think it means,” Natalie had replied without looking at him, and she’d sat silent as a statue all the way back to their house, where he’d roared up the driveway and come to a screeching, bone-jarring stop. She was out of the car, into the house, up the stairs in one fluid motion, with him hot on her heels.
“Natalie,” he’d said, “what’s going on here?”
But it was a pointless question. For starters, she didn’t answer it. And even a man as dumb as he could see what was going on here.
Natalie had marched towards the guest suite, not towards the
