Page 39 of Playing With Temptation
Man friend.
“Man friend, like Allen is your man friend, or a friend who happens to be a man and her roommate?”
“Man friend,” she repeated then added, “You don’t call a sixty-four-year-old man a boy friend.”
I had nothing to say to that, not because I’d already had this conversation with my mother fifty times in reference to Allen but because I was speechless and more than a little hurt my mom had never mentioned her friendship with Janis stayed strong.
“Rain—”
“You knew Jase got married,” I whispered. “You knew he had children. You knew and you never told me.”
“Rainy, please listen—”
A knock at the door saved me from hearing an explanation I didn’t want to hear.
“I have to go. There’s someone at the door.”
“Rain—”
“Love you, Mom.”
I should’ve felt bad for hanging up on my mom, but seriously, she’d kept in touch with my ex’s mother and kept it a secret.
My head was full of my mom’s betrayal mixed with my instant need to call her back and apologize for hanging up on her, so I opened the door without checking the peephole.
If I had, I wouldn’t have opened it. I would’ve ignored the knock and scooted my happy, blissfully naïve ass back into my office and pretended my new life back in Hollow Point hadn’t been blown to shit.
“Rainy Cross?” the woman asked, holding a large bouquet of flowers.
Carnations. Red, pink, and freaking white.
How the hell had Julian found me?
I glanced over the woman’s shoulder, half expecting to see the smug asshole leaning against his stupid BMW. Not that he’d ever been present when I received one of his many deliveries. No, the asshole just happened to be in the area every time I’d run into him.
As if he’d slummed it in my part of town. Never, not once, during the time he was married to Zoe or while they were dating had I ever seen him in a pizza parlor. But suddenly his wife dies, and he had a hankering for a pie.
“Miss?” the woman called. “Are you Rainy Cross?”
I wanted to tell her no, and she should take the flowers back to the shop and toss them, but it wasn’t this poor woman’s fault Julian was a creepy douche.
“Yes.”
She held out the flowers with a sweet smile. “Sorry for your loss.”
Punch to the stomach.
Asshole.
“Thank you,” I muttered and took the vase.
As quickly as I could without slamming the door in the woman’s face, I closed it and turned the lock.
Red. Pink. White.
After the third time I’d received this exact arrangement, I’d looked up the meaning of the colors.
Pink, remembrance.
