Page 81 of My Fiancé's Brother 2

“Private Mark Novikov, in his seventh week of BUDs.”

“I have no idea who that is.”

“He was feeding you his burger.” Jackson's voice sounded terse.

My eyes went wide. “I didn’t even know his name, how did you find out his name?”

“If a man is hitting on my wife, I make it my business to find out who he is.”

I felt bewildered by this conversation. “He wasn’t hitting on me, he was being nice.”

“You said he knew what was going on with your food. What did you mean by that?”

I glanced over my shoulder at Jackson. He looked pissed. “It was nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“He understood why I wasn’t eating, that’s all.”

“Care to share that with me?”

Did I want to share with my husband just how awkward I was in social settings? “Not really.”

“I’m asking you to.”

I sat there for a long moment. I hated this conversation. “I get anxious to the point that I can’t eat. He saw my plate and said that he understood how I felt because his sister is the same way.”

“Why were you anxious?”

“Jackson,” desperation tinged my voice. “Can’t we just chalk up that BBQ as a big stupid moment and forget about it?”

“What happened?”

My face flushed with shame. I didn’t want him to know how much I was hated here. I didn’t want him to see that I was a social outcast, already failing miserably to fit into his world. “The wives don’t like me.”

“Why do you think that?”

“They don’t want to get to know me.”

“What happened?”

“Well, they didn’t like my clothes. They thought I was stuck up. They didn’t think I was pretty enough for you. And they also said that you and Harper were secretly meeting to go running together. And that you discussed our marriage with Harper who now believes it’s doomed. So she's just biding her time until you leave me for her.”

Jackson’s entire body went still. “They said all this to you?”

“Most of it I overheard when I was coming back from the bathroom.”

“I didn’t deliberately go running with Harper. We’ve run together for years, and we have often used the same routes. It didn’t seem like a big deal when we ended up on the same route. I never took it as anything other than coincidence.”

“Okay.” I believed him. I wasn’t so sure that Harper’s intentions were so pure, but I believed Jackson when he told me that he didn’t deliberately go out of his way to meet up with her.

“I've never discussed our marriage with her. Not once.”

I looked over at him. Our eyes met. “Okay.”

“Nothing is going on between Harper and me,” he was emphatic.

Yet. A small voice whispered to my heart.

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