Heartbreak Brings Mr. Right novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: A Good Door

Rafferty did not tell me I had misunderstood.

He walked to the middle of the terrace, stopped beside the stone urn and put his hands in his pockets.

"Ask," he said.

"Why were you in the Aldine bar?"

"I was meeting someone."

"Hollister."

"I'd arranged it through a man who owed him money. I wanted to sit across a table from him for ten minutes and see what he looked like." His mouth tightened. "He never came. I'd been nursing a drink for an hour when you walked in."

"So I was an accident."

"On the first night, yes."

"And the second time?"

He looked at the lawn.

"The woman who runs Plus One rang to say a client had booked a man for her engagement party," he said. "I asked who. She told me the groom's name."

"Hollister Greaves."

"I'd waited two years for a way into that man's life, Thora. Sonya made me promise not to hit him, not to sue him and not to put his name in the papers. I kept every promise. And the one thing that would hurt him more than any of that walked into the Aldine and asked me to stay."

My throat was tight.

"A door," I said.

"Yes."

"I was a door."

"You were a door for about ten minutes." He took one hand out of his pocket and dragged it down his face. "Then I sat in a diner and watched you hold a fork like it was a paintbrush, and I stopped keeping count."

"Don't make it pretty."

"I'm not. I'm telling you the order it happened in." He held my gaze. "I paid your actor to stay home. I took his place. I walked into that ballroom with a ring I'd bought the day before to wreck a man for my sister. All of that is true."

"And Monday night?"

His face changed.

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