“Doesn’t sound like it to me, either,” Mason confirmed.
I shrugged out of Mason’s hold. “I need to go find her. I’ll deal with you later,” I told Carter in a warning voice and turned around to go find Ruby.
It gutted me to think that one of my own family members had made her feel small, and may have hurt her.
But I’d make it right. I had to.
I was obsessed with my beautiful girl who looked at me like no other guy existed.
As I walked away to go find my woman, I wondered how anybody could ever think that Ruby was the lucky one when I knew damn well it was the opposite.
My dark-eyed angel had stumbled into my life just when I’d needed her most, and I knew I wasn’t going to survive without her.
Carter could go fuck himself.
“Do you really love him?”
I was surprised by the baritone voice that spoke from the darkness, and I stopped the swing I was riding on, even though I knew exactly who had spoken.
It was Carter Lawson, the last person I wanted to talk to at the moment.
When I’d run away, my only objective had been to escape after I’d left the ballroom, pretty sure nobody would find me on the playground that sat some distance away from the main resort. I’d stumbled upon it by accident. I’d stayed because it seemed like a good place to think. “How did you find me?” I asked him coldly.
Carter moved up beside me and sat in the swing next to me as he answered wryly, “I have two sisters. Why is it that women always want to go stare at the moon and stars when they’re pissed off, anyway?”
The only illumination nearby was a tiny solar light near the merry-go-round, so I couldn’t see much of Carter except his massive form next to me, but it seemed pretty strange that a guy like him, dressed in a tux, would be sitting on a large swing set. “I don’t know,” I answered with a sigh. “And yes, I love him. How could I not? Your brother is the most amazing man I’ve ever known.”
The anger I’d felt toward Carter was gone, but my hurt about what many people probably thought about my relationship with Jett was still bothering me. Maybe Jett didn’t care what people were saying, but the last thing I wanted was to be a source of gossip for him.
“I never really slept with Lisette,” he said. “I only told Jett that I did because I knew she was going to be poisonous for him after his accident. For weeks, she put off coming up to the hospital. But I knew she’d show up eventually, and that he’d be crushed because Lisette had no heart. She’s always been a bitch, but he never really saw it. I wanted him to dump her, and since he believes in marriage, I thought the one thing that would get him to break up with her was if she was cheating.”
“So she never came to see him at all? Not even when he was critical?”
“Not once,” Carter confirmed. “She was too busy with her social life.”
“Oh, God,” I said, shocked that a woman could be engaged to a guy and not rush to the hospital when he was in bad shape. It was almost unfathomable. “Why haven’t you told him the truth?”
“I tried. I swear I did. But he wouldn’t listen. The sad part of the drama is that he’d already seen Lisette earlier in the day, and she’d broken up with him. She was with him for the first and only time, when he was still in a lot of pain, just to break up with him. But I blurted out my lie before he could mention that he was already free of her claws. So I lost my brother for nothing.”
I didn’t have siblings, so I had no idea how much Carter had risked to tell Jett something like that. But I could imagine it hadn’t been easy. “You were trying to manipulate him when he was down,” I admonished.
“For his own good,” Carter rasped.
“For what you thought was good for him,” I corrected. “Jett was a grown adult. He should have been allowed to make that choice for himself.”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “But it’s not easy to watch somebody you love making a big mistake. He would have been miserable with her. And she was going to make his recovery more difficult. I was trying to do the right thing.”
“But you’re wrong about me,” I informed him. “I don’t care about your brother because of his money. I love him because there isn’t another man like him on the planet. I’m sorry you can’t see how incredible he is, but I see it.”