“You shouldn’t have had to live like that at all.”
God, he loved those words. Soaked them right up. And knew that, as she’d said, she wasn’t impartial where he was concerned.
“Tressa admitted to what she’d done, admitted that I’d never been unfaithful to her. In writing. She sent a letter to my clients, taking full accountability for her inappropriate behavior.”
“And she told you she’d never do anything like it again.”
“That’s right.”
“Has she?”
He hesitated. She’d come close. But... “No.”
“So last night, saying you whore around, when she knew you had a date in the backyard, you don’t think that was similar behavior?”
He could see how she’d think so. “She was just having a rough night. She’s fine now.” Tressa was a pain in his ass, but he could handle her.
Lacey stopped to pick up a shell and show it to him. A perfect, unchipped half clam with a beautiful rainbow of colors inside and beige swirls outside.
She put it in the pocket of her dress. A memento of their date, he hoped. The first of many keepsakes they’d collect together.
“Has she ever been violent with you?”
“Of course not.” He was a six-foot-tall one-hundred-and-ninety-pound male in excellent shape. He could carry his weight and then some. Tressa weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds and couldn’t lift even half that.
“She’s never thrown anything at you?”
Not at him. There’d been the time she’d taken toast out of the toaster and thrown it across the room. A wineglass she’d thrown against the wall once.
“No.”
“Never slapped you?”
He’d stopped her arm midswing, holding on for the brief second it took for her to collapse against him, sobbing, begging him to love her.
“She’s never physically harmed me in any way,” he said quite succinctly. He wanted Tressa out of his life, but he wouldn’t throw her under the bus. She had enough problems, enough people who’d trampled her heart and who’d been disloyal.
He wasn’t going to have her pay for something that wasn’t on her. He couldn’t live with himself if he did that.
“I don’t go for Tressa’s drama,” he said slowly. Double-checking the honesty in his words. “But Amelia, she can handle it better than I can. And she’s an attorney. She’d know if there was something in Tressa that pushed the boundaries of legal or not.”
“Have you talked to her about it?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She says that Tressa’s her friend and she’s not going to talk behind her back.”
The lawyer was loyal. He respected her for that. And trusted her to care enough about Tressa to have done something if Tressa was in real trouble.
“I have no desire, whatsoever, to spend any more time than I absolutely have to with my ex-wife. At the same time, I don’t want her paying for my issues.”
“Your issues?”
“I’m not good with drama, with emotional outbursts.” Of the female variety. Give him a guy’s anger twenty times a day.
“Jem, I’m sorry, but I just have to say. What I heard last night...those things Tressa said to you...they were abusive. It’s not your issue. People don’t talk to each other that way.”