“Why do you hate me?”
He shook his head. “You know I don’t hate you.”
“You act like it.”
“Think about the way you act and then maybe you’ll know why you irritate me.”
She lowered her fork and folded her arms. “For example?”
Gunner looked around the restaurant?
??s dining room and saw that most of the tables close to them were empty. He leaned forward anyway.
“What’s this shit about you not having a place to live and demanding that your ex-husband let you live with him? Let’s start there.”
“It’s my house as much as it’s Kade’s.”
“No. It isn’t. It hasn’t been since you divorced, and that was years ago.”
She didn’t respond, so he continued.
“It’s over between the two of you; it has been since before it got started.”
“That’s not fair. I was raped.”
“Are you suggesting that was the reason your marriage failed?”
She nodded.
“Bullshit. You don’t believe that any more than anyone else does.”
“He couldn’t love me.”
That may have been true, but Gunner didn’t believe it had anything to do with the fact that she’d been raped. Lena and Doc had married far too young, and at the time, Doc was an active-duty Marine, deployed for long periods of time.
He never understood why they’d gotten married in the first place, but that really wasn’t any of his business. After the rape, Lena had been forced to live her life under protection, knowing that if the man who’d raped her found out she’d had a child, both she and that child would be in danger.
Now that the man, a Russian double agent, was dead, the threat to Lena and her daughter had gone away.
“The odds were against you,” he finally said when he realized she was waiting for him to respond.
“Now that Calder’s dead, we could try again.”
“You know he’s in love with Merrigan.”
Lena looked away, and he saw her eyes had filled with tears.
Gunner reached over and rested his hand on the table with his palm open. Lena uncrossed her arms and put her hand in his.
“Let him go.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. “I can’t,” she mouthed.
“Maybe if you did, you’d find someone else who loves you as much as he loves her.”
“That was cruel.”
“Why?” God, she irritated him sometimes.