Page 16 of Hearts on Ice
Her sweats. Colby stepped into the tiny office and pulled the clothing out, brining the jacket to her nose first to make sure she couldn’t catch the lingering odor of vomit. When she couldn’t, she inspected them for stains, and was relieved to find none.
“Thank her for me. This means a lot.”
“Yeah, well, she’s a pro.” He was standing behind his desk, tapping a pen on the top, not really looking at anything, probably just trying to keep a barrier between them. “I actually have something else I need to show you.” He pulled out a sheaf of papers from a manilla envelope. “It’s a contract.”
“A contract?”
“Yes, between you and me.”
“For what?” She took the papers just because he held them toward her.
“For working together. I don’t want any surprises, and I want to make sure you fulfill your contract with Josh and Lexi.”
“I already signed contracts with them.”
“That’s fine, but this is for me. To protect me. And to protect you, too. Evan drew it up, so if you have questions or changes, we can discuss that, either I can take it to him, or we both can go see him.”
“I—do you want me to read it now?”
“No, you can take it home to read it, but I want it signed this week.”
She tucked the envelope in the equipment bag and looked up at him. “Thank you for putting those signs up.”
He lifted a shoulder, still looking at the top of his desk. “Should have done that a while back. It covers more than you, it covers the competition recording each other as well.”
“I do wish it had been in effect before yesterday,” she said with a sigh.
“Is that why you couldn’t sleep well?”
“Twitter had a lot of things to say, and most of it was how I deserved that and more. It’s not easy being hated.”
He was silent a minute. “I don’t hate you.”
He almost sounded surprised by the words. “You have more reason than most.”
“Yeah, I do, but I was hurt, Colby. I was hurt and you didn’t care. You were self-centered and laser-focused on what you wanted, everyone else be damned.”
Now she was looking at the top of his desk. “I’m sorry, Declan.”
“I’d always thought the two of us were more than the ice skating. I married you because I believed it. I thought you believed that, too. But clearly you didn’t.”
She didn’t say what their relationship had meant to her, the only stability she’d ever known, but she hadn’t known how to stop looking. She could see why he would think that he didn’t matter to her. That they didn’t matter. She hadn’t made any effort to clear that up. She’d just…left, and a few months later, he served her with divorce papers.
When she didn’t respond to his comment, which he clearly expected her to do, he said, “You might want to have your lawyer look over those.”
Of course he would think she had a lawyer. She’d hired one to extricate herself from their marriage with her own assets. She supposed she couldn’t be upset with him for not including her picture on the walls outside. She’d been very clear that he couldn’t profit off his association with her. Didn’t matter. He seemed to have done much better than she had with the money they had earned.
What would her life be like if they’d stayed married? They would have built this together, because that had been what they had been working toward, why they had joined the skating exhibition tour. If she had learned to be satisfied with their life together, well, she wouldn’t be in the mess she was in, would she?
“I’ll do that,” she said, keeping her voice crisp so her maudlin thoughts wouldn’t show through. “I brought the music. Can we hook it up to the PA and I can show you?”
He grunted a response before following her out of his office and locking it behind him.
“Is Tristan okay?” she asked as she laced up her skates, which she had polished within an inch of their life yesterday, and relaced.
He looked up at her from where he was lacing his own skates. “He was doing okay last night when I went by the house. Just a motion sickness thing.”
“You’re a good uncle, teaching them how to skate, and cleaning him up afterwards.”
