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I nodded. “Thank you.” Not that I would ever call the cops on Adam.
Once I closed the door again and locked it, I was alone with my despair, and my guilt. But it was the right thing to do for him—the only thing.
Yolanda was taking a week in the Bahamas with Bogdan and wouldn’t be around to talk to.
I considered calling Kirby, or even taking my cabbie’s advice and calling my sister, but Serena wouldn’t understand.
She hadn’t heard the vitriol in his father’s voice. She couldn’t understand how certain I was that he’d follow through on his threat to ruin Adam. Serena wasn’t the person to talk to. She was too kind, too trusting. It would be too easy in her world to think his father was just blowing off steam. She’d try to talk me into ruining Adam’s future.
That was one thing I wouldn’t do.
In the end, I walked to the liquor cabinet.
A full bottle of tequila looked like the best memory-erasing medicine, but then I remembered my last encounter with too much tequila. The bottle of scotch wasn’t as full, but it would do.
There was nothing about this evening I wanted to remember, not a single fucking thing.
My phone vibrated.
I turned it off.
The glass of scotch went down with a burn, which turned into warmth when it hit my stomach—a warmth I needed to offset the chill in my heart.
I was doing the right thing. To sacrifice for someone was the true measure of love, and I’d come to love Adam without realizing how strongly the word applied.
He’d joined the FBI on a mission, and it had become his calling, his reason for being—it defined him. Special Agent had become more a part of his name than Cartwright.
They could do a movie about him, Special Agent Adam Cartwright. Instead of the man with the golden gun, he was the man with the golden heart—defender of the weak, punisher of the evil, and the epitome of the Bureau’s mottoFidelity, Bravery, and Integrity.
I couldn’t give him the chance to sacrifice his career and ruin his relationship with his family over me. That would be selfish, and we wouldn’t end up in a happy place. It would eat away at him, and in the end it would destroy us. There wasn’t a happy place left for us after his father’s threat.
It should have been obvious from the start. But the heart wants what the heart wants, and I hadn’t been able to resist the allure of the prize I couldn’t have. Now he’d be some other woman’s prize.
Daddy had always emphasized that family came first, and I had to allow Adam to put his first. Anything less would be sacrilege, and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing what I’d cost him.
It would destroy him to give up his dreams, it would torture me, and in the end, it would tear us apart.
Like ripping off a Band-Aid, the only right way to minimize his pain, my pain, our pain, was to get it over with quickly. It hurt like hell to put him through this, but it was kinder than drawing it out.
If this was the less painful way, I was sure as hell not subjecting either of us to the harder way of talking ourselves in circles before coming to the same conclusion. That would be self-flagellation in the extreme.
I poured and guzzled another glass of the amber liquid and downed it. It wouldn’t be the last this evening.
Chapter 41
Adam (Two weekslater)
I couldn’t makeout the time on the clock at the far end of the bar, but I knew it wasn’t late enough to shuffle home yet. Fuck, the place was still open. I’d taken to not wearing my watch after work, so I couldn’t focus on how slowly the time went by as I tried to forget Kelly—my Kelly. It had been two weeks, and it felt like two years.
“I’ll have another,” I told Tommy behind the bar.
“You ought to slow down, you know.”
Tommy’s was his place, and the best place for me to tie one on, because it was within walking distance of my apartment.
“I pay. You serve. That’s the way it works.”
It had to be after midnight, because that’s when he’d been hassling me to stop since I’d started coming here a week ago. It was a nightly ritual: he bitched, and I told him to shove it.
