Her silence spurred him on. “He had no business coming down on you for something he’d already done.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Agreed, but two wrongs should cancel each other out.”
“What he did—it didn’t hurt me nearly as much as what I did to him.”
Sound alarms went off all over his head. He stared at her. “How can you say that? I know how devastated you were! He betrayed your trust in him in the most elemental way.”
“He had sex, yes, but for him it was emotionally meaningless—and at the time I slept with you I still thought I didn’t know the woman. That she was the perp…” Her voice broke, but she drew a breath and continued. “I didn’t have any kind of relationship with her.” She paused for a moment, then stated the bigger betrayal. “And Gwen… I didn’t know about her, about what they did, until you told me. Even though we were friends, I’m sure they slept together out of…expedience, after too much booze at the bachelor party.” She took another deep breath. “For me…the night…with you…you were…you…”
She broke off again, as though she’d said too much—at a time when he needed more. Desperately needed more.
In true Harper style, she looked him in the eye. “I couldn’t tell him you meant nothing. That the night meant nothing. Add to that, the fact that I slept with his brother, knowing he idolized you, knowing that if I wanted to get back at him, that was the way that would hurt more than any other.”
Whoa. Hold on. “Are you telling me that you came on to me that night, that you kept coming on to me…because you knew how much it would hurt him?” The idea had never occurred to him. And stopped him in his tracks. Maybe with some other woman, he’d have caught on. But… Harper?
“Of course not!” Dropping her arms to her sides, her feet to the floor, she sat up straight. “I would never, ever. Something like that wouldn’t even occur to me. My brain doesn’t work that way and—”
The hurt in her voice pierced him. Mason reached out to her before thinking about what he was doing. He touched her arm. Lightly. With the backs of his fingers. Once there, they rubbed softly, just taking in the feel of her. And how she felt moved him to the point that he didn’t draw back as quickly as he should.
“The thought never even entered my mind until you mentioned it. I was… Well, let’s just say I’m glad I wasn’t wrong.” She hadn’t come on to him to hurt Bruce.
He pulled back. There were places they absolutely could not go. They’d go where they had to…but stay away from the rest.
Like touching. Not again. Period.
To force them back on track, he focused and came up with, “Bruce said it, though, didn’t he? He placed guilt on you for hurting him in the worst possible way, making your indiscretion seem much worse than his.”
Once more, Harper shook her head, her eyes filled with pain. “I don’t remember him saying that specifically. It’s been five years and that talk wasn’t something I wanted to replay on a regular basis.”
“But you did, didn’t you?” He knew how it worked. He’d been living with it all his life. He’d just been stronger than Bruce’s attempts to get at him. Immune to the disease. He’d somehow understood that his job was to love Bruce, to be there for him, waiting for the day he finally grew up.
That day had never come.
But the love hadn’t disappeared.
“You didn’t see him that night, Mason, but I saw a Bruce I’ll never forget. He was crying. Crying. Not pretending. It was like…all his confidence, the bravado, just…left. He begged me not to give up on our lifetime of happiness because he’d messed up and gotten carried away by his need to bring in the bad guys.”
“Sleeping with his partner after his bachelor party makes him a bad guy.”
“The point is, he was really scared of losing what mattered most to him. And profoundly shaken because of what we’d done. We were the two people in his life he revered. And we’d let him down. Both of us.”