Page 25 of Out to Get Her
Why must every man in her life insist on baiting her?
“Good to see you too, Nathan.”
It was not at all good to see Nathan Ardoin.
As much as she loved her job working in a small town—knowing the ins and outs of everyone’s lives and interacting with the citizens—she hated regularly brushing up against people she’d booted from her personal life. If she could go the rest of her days without ever seeing her ex-husband again, she’d be a very happy woman.
Nathan, thankfully, decided not to play around and waste her time any more than he had while they’d been married.
“I didn’t kill him.”
She stood at a loss for words, staring at the man she’d once foolishly loved. The man who now made her skin crawl.
He’d always been blunt, especially with her, but he was also a master manipulator. For him to jump to the point without dancing around the truth meant he didn’t want her sniffing at something.
“Don’t look so shocked,” he said. “Thatiswhy you’re here, isn’t it?”
She ignored the condescension and dismissal in his voice. Or tried to, at least. “May I come in? I do have a few questions for you that aren’t answered with that one statement.”
The words burned like acid. She was asking this man to enter the house she’d once lived in. The house she’d called her own home for five years.
Now she was standing at the front door, begging for an invitation.
She hated it, but she wouldn’t go through her questions in the doorway. He had the upper hand at the moment. She needed to either get control of their interaction or at least get on equal footing.
He paused longer than necessary, just to piss her off or make her uncomfortable. Maybe both.
Then he moved aside and gestured. “Of course.”
“Thank you.”
Samantha took a deep breath and stepped through the entryway. The place still looked exactly the same. Same furniture she’d picked out. Same books on the shelves.Herbooks on the shelves. It was all the same as the day she’d left. If it were anyone else, she’d assume he was too lazy or too busy or too unconcerned to change things and make the place his own after the divorce. But since this was Nathan, she knew the truth: he’d used her.
He’d taken her free labor in researching and purchasing and designing the place, and he’d claimed her work as his own. Like he did with everyone and everything he touched. He absorbed the people and things around him, building the facade of a life and personality from the people he chewed up and spit out, like some grotesque sci-fi creature.
Not that she’d had much of an identity on her own before him. She’d always been her mother’s daughter, then she was Nathan’s wife. It didn’t matter that she had her own name or job or life. To everyone else, she was just “a Keller” and then “an Ardoin.”
Now, she was finally just Samantha.
Not that her first name held any weight on its own or that anyone cared about it. But she felt good to be her own person finally.
Even if she was still carrying around the weight of that last name.
He followed her into the living room and sat in the dark blue wingback chair he knew she loved. With her jaw set so firmly she’d have to take ibuprofen that night to ease the inflammation, Samantha sat on the edge of the nearby loveseat.
She put her legal pad in her lap and clicked open her pen. “I’m just here to ask a few questions. As you can imagine, I’ll be asking a lot of people questions over the next couple days. You are not my lead suspect in Paul’s death, but I do need to clear some things up to eliminate you.”
If only she could legally eliminate him from her life for good.
He gave his smarmy smile and tapped the arm of the chair with his fingertips. “You’ve gotten better at this.”
Definitely ibuprofen later.
“Let’s start with the obvious,” she said. “Where were you yesterday afternoon?”
He gave another sly smile. “With a friend.”
“I’m going to assume your vague answer means it was a female friend.” Her stomach rolled, but not from any lingering jealousy or hurt. Her nausea was from pure disgust. “Name.”
