“I saw them on my way up.” His voice gentled. “How was that?”
“It was how I expected it to be. The Kensingtons remain divided.” My mouth twisted into a sardonic smile. “What’d you think of my sister and her husband? Charming, aren’t they?”
“That’s not the first c word that came to mind.”
A small laugh sliced through my turmoil. I didn’t know how he did it, but Xavier had a talent for making horrible situations tolerable.
“There seemed to be some tension between you and Bentley,” he said. “Beyond your antagonism with your sister.”
If he ever gave up the nightclub gig, he should join the FBI. Xavier was terrifyingly observant.
“There would be,” I said. “Considering he was my fiancé before he married my sister.”
His shocked eyes snapped up to meet mine, and my smile grew more bitter.
“Not a lot of people knew about us,” I said. “At least not in New York.”
I’d never told anyone the full story, not even my friends. They knew bits and pieces, but rehashing the memories was too painful. I’d rather lock them in a box and pretend they didn’t exist.
However, seeing Bentley again had ripped the lock right off, and I needed to share them with someone before I drowned in them.
“We met when we were both studying abroad in London,” I said. “I was a junior; he was a senior. He stayed there for a job after graduation, and we dated long-distance for a bit. He worked in investment banking at the time, and because he was always so busy, I often visited him instead of the other way around. Then they transferred him to the New York office, and he proposed a month before I started Kensington PR.”
My father had been thrilled when we started dating. Bentley had a good job, knew all the right things to say, and came from a rich, “acceptable” family. He was George Kensington’s dream son-in-law. Honestly, my father was probably happier now that the perfect son-in-law was paired with the perfect daughter instead of with me.
“My plans for starting the company had already been underway, so it wasn’t like I could push them back to plan my wedding. Even if I could, I wouldn’t have wanted to. But those first months after the opening were…stressful, and our relationship became strained. He accused me of prioritizing work over him; I accused him of wanting me to fail. We were both so busy we barely saw each other, and when we did see each other, we fought. But I loved him, and I thought the bumps would pass after I got the firm off the ground and we were married.”
There was no one except Xavier within earshot, but that didn’t stop red, itchy embarrassment from crawling over my skin. I’d been such an idiot. I should’ve known, if Bentley had been that unsupportive at the beginning of my career, that his resentment would only grow the more success I achieved.
“A few months after he proposed, I flew to London for work. Of course, we fought about it since it was over the holidays, but it was a crisis surrounding my biggest client at the time. I resolved it faster than expected and came home early. When I walked into our apartment, I found him having sex in the living room with my sister. On New Year’s Eve.”
The scene was imprinted on my brain no matter how hard I tried to scrub it. Her bent over the couch I’d picked out, him behind her, their moans and gasps as I stood frozen, trying to process what the fuck was happening. They’d been so caught up in each other, they didn’t notice me until after they’d finished.
A fresh wave of humiliation flooded me. Getting cheated on was one thing. Getting cheated on by your fiancé and sister was a new level of betrayal.
Even though Georgia and I weren’t close, I hadn’t expected her to be so callous. She’d never even apologized.
“Jesus.” Xavier let out a string of Spanish curses. “I’m so fucking sorry, Luna.”
“It’s okay. It was an important lesson,” I said flatly. Don’t trust people, and don’t let them in. I couldn’t get hurt if I didn’t care. “They barely showed remorse. I kicked Georgia out, but not before she blamed my overworking for why he strayed. After she left, Bentley and I got into a huge fight, and he…” My knuckles whitened around the edge of my chair. “He said I was too frigid. That I’d always been an ice queen and that I got worse after I started my PR company. He said I couldn’t blame him for hooking up with Georgia when she was so passionate and I couldn’t even show proper emotion. Needless to say, we broke up that night. He and Georgia started dating officially a week later.”
If you weren’t such an ice queen all the time, maybe I wouldn’t have gone looking elsewhere.
My throat and nose burned. “The worst part was my father took Georgia’s side. There was no way his precious perfect daughter would’ve done that without good reason. He blamed me using the same reasons they did, and when I refused to let it go, he gave me an ultimatum. Get over it or get out. So I got out.”
Recounting the story out loud carried the sting of fresh wounds, but as my words dissolved in the sterile air, the initial pain gradually transformed into a therapeutic numbness.
By locking away those memories, I’d given them power. They’d festered over the years, sprouting horns and claws and morphing into a nightmare I constantly ran from, whether I knew it or not. By sharing them out loud, I’d stripped them of that power.
They were nothing but a small man behind a big curtain, trying to convince me they could hurt me.
They couldn’t.
It wasn’t my fault that Georgia was a terrible sister or that Bentley was an insecure, cheating bastard. Nor was it my fault my father was too blinded by his biases to see what was right in front of him. They were the ones who should be ashamed, not me.
“Sloane. Listen to me.” Xavier grasped my shoulders and turned me so I faced him. His eyes glittered like dark coals of anger. “You are not fucking frigid. You’re one of the most driven, passionate people I know, even if you may show it differently than others, and you built one of the best PR firms in the world in five years. You think someone without passion can do that? And even if you were quote unquote ‘cold’ to your asshole ex, he deserved it. If he doesn’t appreciate you for who you are, then he damn well doesn’t deserve your time or energy.”
His expression was fierce, and his touch seared like it was trying to impress his conviction onto my soul.
It happened so suddenly, I would’ve stumbled had I been standing.
A whoosh swept through my stomach, followed by the dizzying, disorienting, but not totally unpleasant sensation of tumbling over an edge. Pieces of me floated alongside his words, little champagne bubbles that shouldn’t exist after such a shitty day but did anyway.
Xavier Castillo. Only you.
“You should be a motivational coach.” I managed a wobbly smile. “You would kill on the speaker circuit.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” For once, he didn’t match my smile. “Tell me you understand, Luna. None of what happened was your fault. Fuck Bentley, fuck Georgia, and fuck your family.” He paused. “Except Pen.”
Another laugh burbled, elbowing unshed tears out of the way. “I understand.”
I truly did.
I’d come to the same conclusion seconds before Xavier’s speech, but thinking it and hearing someone else affirm it were two different things.
An anchor unhooked from my shoulders, and for the first time in years, I breathed easier.
Running into my family had started as a disaster and ended up being therapeutic. Go figure. Nothing in my life had worked the way it should’ve since Xavier entered it, though I wasn’t complaining.
