“My grandfather knew?”
“Yes.”
“He never said.?…”
“He didn’t want to hurt you.”
“So he lied to me too?”
“To protect you,” he muttered and wished he could call this whole conversation back. He’d been feeling tension mount all day and that last-minute fight with Rafe hadn’t helped anything.
But time was passing. The crews would be arriving soon. Melinda had her trust fund, it had been wired into her account on St. Thomas. Soon, he’d be leaving, and that knowledge had been eating at him for too long.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” he muttered, disgusted with himself, the situation, but mostly, with Steven.
“You’re sorry you told me.”
“Yeah.”
“Because I need protecting?”
“Well, yeah.”
“That is the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, words tumbling together. A cold wind shot over the property, buffeted them both, then swept across the island. Waves crashed like a frenzied heartbeat and Melinda looked…pissed.
This was going well.
“I don’t need to be protected, Sean. I’m an adult whether you and my grandfather choose to see it or not. I can take hearing the truth no matter how hard it gets.” She moved in on him, eyes narrowed, mouth grim.
Being a sensible man, Sean took a step back.
She kept coming and poked her index finger into his chest as if she could drill through to the other side. “What you’re telling me is that everyone in my life has been lying to me. My grandfather. Steven. You.”
Fine, she had a right to be mad. But damned if he’d stand for being compared to that dead jackass one more time. “Don’t lump us in with that dirtbag,” Sean argued hotly. “That SOB was scamming you. We were—”
“Lying to me,” she finished for him. “It doesn’t matter why, Sean. My God, you don’t even see it, do you? How could I have thought I was in love with you?”
“What?” Had he heard that right? The open black hole in his chest filled with hope, but a moment later, that hope drained away.
“At least I loved the man I thought you were,” she corrected. “But if you’ve been lying about this, then how do I know you haven’t lied about other things?”
“I haven’t.” He grabbed her shoulders, pulled her close. “Melinda, nothing that happened between us was a lie.”
“And I should take your word for that, I suppose?” She looked up into his eyes, and Sean saw not only fury, but pain in those blue depths. Pain that he had caused by dumping all of this on her. Lucas was right. Sean was an idiot. He was about to lose the woman he loved, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. He’d blown this so badly he couldn’t see a way out.
“I won’t be lied to anymore,” she told him, and though her voice was soft the determination in it was unmistakable. “This temporary marriage is over, Sean. We both got what we wanted out of the deal. Now it’s done.”
A cold fist squeezed his heart. “Melinda…”
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” she said and turned to walk to the car. “Just please take me back to the hotel.”
Sean watched her go, and a big piece of his heart went with her.
Sean moved out of their suite as soon as they returned to the hotel. Melinda didn’t watch him leave. She didn’t think she could stand it. Instead, she went to her grandfather. Her fury with him wasn’t as deep as what she felt for Sean. Because her grandfather’s actions she could understand. He would always see her as a child. As that small girl she had been when her world dissolved and only he had been able to protect her.
But Sean, Melinda told herself for three days, should have known better. He should have told her the truth as soon as he learned it. She had had a right to know that the man she had mourned so deeply wasn’t who she thought he was.
Now, she stood at Steven’s grave as a cold wind tossed her hair into her eyes. She’d come here to say goodbye, and now she knew it hadn’t even been necessary. Steven was the past and she’d already wasted too much time on a man who hadn’t deserved it.
Silly to be talking to a headstone, but Melinda needed to say a few things and this was the only way to get it done. “I’m not even mad at you anymore. I’m angrier with myself. See, what I felt for you is nothing compared to what I feel for Sean. But I was in such a hurry to love and be loved, that I let you convince me that what I felt was real. The truth was, we were both lying.”
She sighed and looked out over the cemetery with its trees, neatly clipped grass and sprinkling of monuments. “You didn’t love me, and, as it turns out, I didn’t really love you, either.”
Melinda knew now what love was. It was the overwhelming emptiness in her heart where Sean used to be. It was knowing that nothing in her world would ever be right again because the most important person in it was gone.
Nodding to herself, she looked back down at Steven’s grave and said, “I just had to face you before I can do what I have to do. I’m going to California. I’m going to find Sean and tell him I love him. I’m going to tell him that I was angry, but that I never stopped loving him. And then I’m going to drag him back to Tesoro. Where he belongs. With me.”
Then she walked away and didn’t look back.
She had one last piece to finish for James’s shop before she could leave the island to face Sean. Melinda bent her head to her task, carefully using the wire wrapping tool to ease the fine gold wire around a flat topaz. She fought for concentration, forcing her mind away from the man she loved to the pendant in front of her. But it wasn’t easy.
“And interruptions won’t help,” she muttered when a knock sounded on her workroom door.
Disgusted, she got up to answer it and found a small man in an elegant suit smiling at her. “Melinda King?”
“Yes,” she said, praying that she would be keeping that name.
“Excellent,” he said, stepping into the room and sending his gaze darting over everything. “Ah…” He spotted the glass case and walked to it.
It was only half full, since Rose and Katie had purchased so many pieces. But what was there clearly had the little man captivated.
“Beautiful. Even lovelier than the pieces I saw in town.”
“Excuse me,” Melinda said, leaving the door open—just in case he was crazy—“who are you?”