‘But what about you? Would that have been easier for you, too?’
Logan eyed her shrewdly.
‘You’re asking if I miss her? If I still love her?’
So much for subtlety.
‘No. I don’t still love my ex-wife,’
he stated simply, and it was ridiculous how much her heart soared. ‘In truth, I’m not sure that I ever really did. I think I loved the idea of her, but never really her.’
‘Oh.’ Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.
Logan shrugged, as though it wasn’t that big a deal that he was talking to her, opening up to her, but she knew that it was. She could tell.
‘I’d just left the army, not entirely by choice. I was angry, and lost, and in a bit of a grim place. I met Sophia and at first I fell for her bright, vivacious charms. Her partying lifestyle was so far removed from the world I’d inhabited that I could pretend to be someone else entirely.’
She wasn’t sure it sounded like a solution. More like trying to cover an amputation with a sticky plaster. She’d met enough former soldiers in her nursing career to know that the army had often been their lives. When they’d lost it, they’d lost their identities. And a few superficial parties weren’t going to solve that.
Not that she felt she was in any position to voice that to Logan. But then it didn’t matter, because he was continuing by himself.
‘It took me twelve months to realise that I didn’t like the person I was pretending to be. And that Sophia was avaricious, egotistical and self-centred. She used people until she’d exhausted what they could do for her, and then she cast them aside.’
‘She married you because you were a bodyguard?’ Kat guessed.
He pulled a wry face, his gorgeous eyes colouring to a hue she hadn’t seen in them before.
‘She thought it meant a glamourous lifestyle and access to lots of highly connected people. As soon as she realised my—our—life wasn’t going to be like that, she left to move on to the next guy who could give her what she wanted.’
‘But not before she’d had Jamie?’
‘I’ll never regret him,’ Logan said fiercely. ‘He’s the best thing in my life. He makes everything worth it. But the truth is that I’d told Sophia that I wasn’t ready for marriage or a family. She told me she was on the Pill, and then eight months after we started dating she got pregnant.’
Shock wound its way through Kat. Though she didn’t know why, she’d seen it enough on the wards.
‘She knew you would marry her.’
He pulled a grim face.
‘Yeah. We lived on a small island. Everyone knew everyone else, and scandalous news travelled fast. She knew I’d do the right thing.’
‘It must have hurt, though.’ Kat frowned. ‘When she left.’
‘Not for a moment. If anything, the only thing I felt was relief for myself.’
‘You don’t sound too sure.’
He paused, and something she couldn’t identify swirled around them.
‘You think I’m bitter.’ He offered a twisted smile. ‘I’m not. I didn’t love her. For pretty much two of our almost three years together, I didn’t even like her, so I don’t entirely blame her for walking out on me. But I can never understand, never forgive, how she could walk out on our son.’
Kat shook her head.
‘No, I don’t think you’re bitter. I just think you’re more like me that I realised.’
‘Indeed?’ his brow drew tight.
But she didn’t want to explain herself. Not yet. But maybe someday soon. So she did the only other she could think of. She put down her drink, dropped to her knees on the rug between them and looked him straight in the eye.