Page 37 of Penn

“What kind of deal?”

“A trade, really. A secret for a secret. You tell me one, and I’ll tell you one of mine,” she says. “Or, one more of mine.”

This has lots of possibilities. “Really?”

“Really. Tell me something juicy. Something real. Scandalous, even.”

I smirk at her. “You were watching that Bravo station again, weren’t you?”

“Maybe. Shut up!”

Laughing, I sit back. How deep do I want to go? We have this playful banter going now, but what if I ruin it by going too far into the trauma of my life?

The air becomes thick and heavy with the weight of things I’ve kept quiet for years. Only shared with a few people. And even though the last thing I want to do is talk about Veronica, I feel like I need to. To give Dixie a glimpse into the pain of my past.

“Alright,” I say, my voice stronger than I feel, “you want a real secret? Fine. I’ll give you the one that made me leave my old life behind and become a biker.”

Her brows lift. “You don’t have to—”

“Yeah, I do.” I look down at my bare feet and let out a long, calming breath. “Five years ago, I was a very different person. I had a normal job. A house. And a fiancée named Veronica.”

“You were engaged?”

I nod and bite my lower lip at the memory. “We’d been together since my freshman year in college. She was the one I thought I’d want my entire life, and when we graduated, I proposed. Then spent two years trying to give her everything she ever wanted.”

“What does that mean?”

“I worked eighty to ninety-hour weeks. I bought her the house of her dreams. Let her stay at home without needing to ever worry about money, and I made sure she had the car she desired. The clothes, the makeup, the restaurants. All of it.”

“Wow,” she whispers. “That sounds like a fantasy.”

Chuckling, I nod but can’t meet her eyes. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what it turned out to be. As it turned out, to make the money I needed to keep her happy, I had to travel often. We were one week before we were supposed to get married, and I’d come home early to help her with the arrangements.”

“Uh oh. This sounds like it’s not going to go well.”

Oh, how right she is. “I walked through the door with the chocolates she always insisted on whenever I flew through Chicago. But she wasn’t alone. I heard noises in our bedroom, and when I opened the door, I saw her fucking another man.”

The image still haunts me. Her hands on the headboard as she rides him. The look of pure pleasure on her face I thought was reserved for only me.

“Jesus, Penn, I’m sorry.”

The smell of the old house fills my nose, and my chest tightens. It’s like I’m back there again. Like I’m walking up the stairs to find her in our bed with someone else once again.

“Fucking the last person on earth I’d expect to find her with in the expensive sheets she insisted I buy her. Eighteen hundred thread count that kept in body heat like a fucking baked potato in tin foil, and she refused to sleep on anything else.”

“You know the guy she was with?”

This makes me snort. “Know him? Oh, yeah, I fucking knew him.”

“He was a friend?” Dixie whispers.

I look up and lock eyes with her. “My best man.”

“No!”

“It gets worse. My best man was Patrick. My twin brother.”

Her jaw drops, and I clench my fists at the memory. The vindictive smile he gave me when he saw me in the doorway. Like he finally won the game I was never interested in playing.