The Best Next Thing ((Un)Professionally Yours 1)

He grinned and then began to chuckle and before long he, too, was laughing helplessly. His rich, deep guffaws a masculine counterpart to her girlish, carefree giggles.

And in that moment of sheer unbridled joy…Charity fell hopelessly, helplessly, head over heels in love with him.

And that terrified her because she didn’t want to love anyone. Not now. Possibly not ever.

Not while she was still the wrecked woman of Blaine’s creation.

“Can you tell me about the day he died?”

The words were quiet and fell like unwelcome stones into the cold, silent darkness of night. Charity and Miles were cuddled up on the love seat on the patio, warm and toasty beneath the patio heater. Stormy was curled up on Miles’s lap, and they were all bundled beneath a blanket and staring out at the dark, still lake.

They were sipping hot chocolate and after a lively debate about the potential direction of the Terra Arbor Chronicles, talk had drifted to Miles’s telephone conversations with Vicki and his mother that afternoon. After which they had lapsed into a comfortable silence.

Until now.

Her brow furrowed as she watched the lights from the dock ripple on the surface of the black water. She didn’t want to think about that night. Not while she was warm and safe and happy.

“Why do you want to know?”

She felt his throat move beneath her head as he swallowed heavily.

“I looked him up. I’m sorry. I know it was an unforgivable intrusion but I wanted to find out more and I know it was wrong but…” His voice tapered off, and Charity silently mulled over his disjointed confession. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him prying into her private business, but he already knew more about her than anybody else, and she found that she didn’t mind as much as she thought she would.

Instead, she was curious about what he had found. She had never read any of the news articles, or the sympathy posts on social me

dia, not even the cards that a few—very few—of his parishioners had sent to her. “Looked him up how?”

“The Internet. It wasn’t easy. I thought his last name was Cole.”

“I didn’t want his name. I reverted to my maiden name when I took this job.”

“He killed himself? I was surprised by that. Everything you told me about him indicated toward some type of narcissist. A man who valued his own life above all else.”

“He was…he did.”

Tonight’s the night you die, Charity.

She shuddered violently, and Miles’s arm tightened around her shoulders.

“You don’t have to tell me about it. Okay? I’m so sorry for snooping. I just wanted to understand you better.”

“I think…” Her voice was hoarse, and she paused to clear her throat before continuing. “He thought I was dead. He thought he’d killed me. He nearly did. He meant to, he told me I was going to die. And then he held me down and covered my face with a pillow. But I passed out, and he stopped before the job was fully done. I can only speculate as to what happened after that. I think he panicked. He wrote a bullshit note about not wanting to live without me, lay down beside me and blew his brains out.”

She woke up covered in blood. So much blood! Was she bleeding? He didn’t usually make her bleed…

“There was so much blood,” she recalled distantly. The memory still had the power to make her shudder. “At first I thought it was mine. I believed he had cut me while I was unconscious. And I was terrified, I thought I was bleeding to death.”

Miles was shaking, she could feel the violent trembling of his body beside hers and patted his knee reassuringly. This wasn’t easy to talk about, and for a decent, kind man like Miles, it couldn’t be very easy to hear either.

But he had wanted to know. And this was the bitter unvarnished truth. The ugliness that simmered beneath her surface.

She could hear his breath stuttering in and out of his chest. It sounded painful and uneven. Like sobs, and she lifted her gaze to his face. The heater provided dim illumination, and she could see the gleam of his eyes as he met her stare.

He hugged her closer. “I wish I’d met you sooner. Before you’d met him. I would have swept you off your feet. I would have loved and cherished you and kept you away from that fucking monster.”

She lifted her free hand to his cheek, warmed that he cared enough to be so deeply affected by something that had happened to her so very long ago.

“That would have been difficult. I grew up with him, you see? Went to school with him. And in my twenties, I fell in love with the kind and generous man he had pretended to be. But, thank you. For saying that. It means a lot.”