Read Scandal in Seattle for Free Online

“You ran away that day, and I never saw you again. You never gave me a chance to explain.”
    I exhaled sharply. “Trust me, what I walked in on was all the explanation I needed.”
    And strike two. One more, and I would be out of the game. Since I seemed incapable of saying anything without a bitter bite to it, I just had to stay quiet or practice that whole think-before-you-speak thing.
    “Evie—”
    “Eve,” I interrupted, flashing him a look. “You don’t get to call me Evie anymore.”
    He sighed, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Eve. I know it’s all probably just a bunch of shallow words to you now, but if you’d ever be willing to give me the opportunity to explain, I’d love the chance to.”
    I bit my tongue and took a moment before replying. “In all fairness, Henry, your explanation could include your body being invaded by an alien and you having no control of it, and that wouldn’t change anything.”
    That was the truth. The why behind his actions wouldn’t change where we ended up. It didn’t change the person I was or the person he was. Explanations, in my opinion, were always too little, too late. Men who kept it in their pants in the first place didn’t need explanations.
    “You’re right. Maybe it wouldn’t change anything.” His gaze shifted from the brightening ocean to me. I didn’t need to look into his eyes to feel their intensity. “But maybe it would change everything.”
    He’d always been good with words. However, that wasn’t my first rodeo with Henry Callahan, and I knew all of his tricks. Neither his words nor the way he said them would make my breath catch ever again.
    Since that topic of conversation was like trying to weave through a field of land mines, I diverted the conversation. Patting the dog’s head—she was now resting beside me—I smiled at her. That smile I didn’t have to fake. “How’s Molly girl doing?”
    After a few moments, Henry followed me down the topic-shifting path. “Getting old.” He scratched her barrel-sized belly, making her back legs flap in the air. “I’m not sure which one of you recognized the other first.”
    “It was probably me. It’s hard to forget the mug of a dog who chewed through every pair of shoes in your closet when she was a puppy.”
    True story. Although to ensure we knew she loved us both equally, she chewed through every one of Henry’s, too.
    “She still has one of your old sneakers tucked in her bed. It’s so ratty and holey, I keep waiting for it to disintegrate, but I don’t doubt Molly’d take my hand off if I tried to take it away.”
    She still had a piece of me. A piece of me—old, ratty, and about-to-disintegrate as it was—was still in Henry’s life. I couldn’t decide how I felt about that, so I stayed quiet and let Henry pick up the slack in the awkward silence.
    “Are you going to bite my head off if I ask you a question?” he asked.
    I stared at the horizon and lifted a shoulder. “That depends on the question.”
    “What are you doing here?”
    That was a loaded question. I had so many answers to that question, all of them true, that I had to sort through a few responses before I decided on an appropriate one. “Here at the beach at an unholy hour or here in Northern California?” I casually scooted a bit farther away from him. I didn’t know if he’d done it deliberately or not, but he’d sat a little too close.
    “Both heres.”
    Of course both heres .
    “I’m here this morning because I couldn’t sleep and thought a walk along the beach would be nice, and I’m here in Northern California for work.” Both answers were true, although I might have omitted some of the details.
    “Work? Where? How long now?”
    He was just as curious and unabashed as I remembered. It was endearing. It was also enraging.
    Keep things vague , I reminded myself. “I’m contracting for a software development company. It’s about a six-month contract that I just started.”
    “I probably