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  "All of it!" he snapped back at me, and for just an instant, I felt doubt flicker to life inside me. He didn't sound like he was ashamed or upset at being caught, not how I'd expected him to react when I confronted him. I'd expected him to apologize, or admit it, or maybe even try and beg to get me back, to keep on spinning out the lies.

  I hadn't expected this anger.

  Sanford kept on glaring down at me, and he opened his mouth to continue pressing his point - but then, before he said anything, he paused and glanced up over my shoulder. I didn't want to turn my back on him, not sure what he would do in this state, but I risked a quick look back behind me.

  A man dressed in powder blue scrubs, with a pair of half-moon glasses pushed up on his balding forehead, had appeared from the doorway leading further into the clinic. "Miss Dean?" he asked, eyeing me rather suspiciously.

  "Yes, that's me," I said, taking a step away from Sanford and towards the doctor. "I'm Whiskers' owner. Is he-"

  The doctor risked a look past me at Sanford. "Would you rather discuss this in private?" he asked, clearly not sure what he'd walked in on but not wanting to get caught in the crossfire.

  I glared back at Sanford, and then nodded. "Yes, please."

  "Right this way, then."

  I followed the doctor back into a scrupulously clean room, which must have been linked to the operating room. "First, relax," the man said once we'd reached the back room, turning back to face me. "Whiskers is still unconscious from the anaesthetic, but he should be okay. He had a minor fracture on one leg, but the bone didn't splinter or penetrate the surface of the skin, and we've put a cast on it to keep it in place as it heals."

  "So he's going to be okay?" I felt like a weight that had been sitting on top of my chest had just been lifted off, giving me freedom to breathe once again. "He's not going to die?"

  "Die?" The doctor looked affronted, as if I'd just insulted his medical competence. "I should hope not! Whiskers was lucky - most car accidents are much more severe than this. The cat got off lightly, I'd say."

  "Car accident?" I took a deep breath, still not quite following all the events that had hit me in the last hour. "Doc, what exactly happened? I just got called to the hospital, and they told me that my cat was in surgery. I don't know anything else."

  The doctor frowned at me, as if he shouldn't be the one explaining this. "Yes. Your cat was apparently dashing across the driveway when he was struck by a car, although I suspect that it wasn't moving very fast. Someone pulling out of a driveway, according to the man out front with whom you were just arguing. Apparently, he was shouting at her as she tried to drive away, and she didn't see the cat until it was too late. The man out there said that he brought the cat in here immediately, which seems accurate. We gave him a light dose of anaesthesia so we could X-ray him, checking for broken fractures-"

  "Some woman hit him, and Sanford - er, the man out in the lobby - was yelling at her?" I repeated, confused. Had the woman been Valencia? Why had Sanford been yelling at her? Why hadn't she come with him to the veterinary hospital?"

  This time, there was no mistaking the annoyance in the doctor's expression. "This seems like something that you should ask him directly," he told me shortly. "We've had to put a cast on Whiskers, but it should be ready to be removed in approximately four weeks. If you can wait out in the lobby, we'll bring him out shortly, and the receptionist can go over follow-up care and set up a return date."

  I had more questions, but the doctor apparently didn't want to answer them. He rapped the clipboard in his hand against the knuckles of his other fist, gave me one last businesslike nod, and then headed away, probably off to check on pets with more serious injuries. I looked after him for a minute, and then turned reluctantly back towards the lobby area.

  As I returned to the lobby, more doubts welled up in my mind. What had happened? Sanford had been yelling at Valencia. He had said that I was wrong about everything, that I didn't understand what was going on. He looked angry, but he also clearly wanted to explain himself to me.

  Part of my mind shouted at me to not give him a single chance, to grab my cat and walk right out of here, keeping him cut out of my life. Any further contact with him would reopen the wound that, I suspected, was still a long way from scabbing over and starting to heal.

  But maybe he deserved one last chance. One single last thread of a chance, one last attempt to explain himself.

  I returned back out to the lobby, where he sat on a bench with his arms crossed, heavy brows drawn and still looking furious.

  "I hate that woman," he muttered, seemingly to himself, as I approached. His eyes rose up to meet mine, and he stood up so abruptly from the bench that I nearly stepped backward from the sudden movement.

  "How is he?" Sanford asked.

  "Who?" I replied, before I remembered why we were here. "Oh, Whiskers. The vet says that he's got a fracture on one of his legs, but they put a cast on him, and he should recover after a few weeks. They're going to bring him out."

  "Oh, thank goodness." Sanford looked down at his standing height, and then sank back down to the bench. "Don't read too much into this, but I've really gotten attached to that furry idiot. I don't know why."

  "Probably because both of you love being aloof and mysterious," I said before I could hold my tongue. For just a moment, Sanford grinned at my comeback, and I forgot about how he'd lied to me.

  After that brief moment, however, his grin faded. "Really, Elaine, just give me a chance to explain," he said, and if I didn't know better, I might have thought that he was begging.

  I crossed my own arms, but didn't shake my head. "You've got until they bring out my cat. Once I get him, I'm leaving forever."

  "Well, no pressure," he muttered to himself, raking a hand back through his hair. "But okay. First, and I cannot stress this enough, I'm not engaged."

  I raised my eyebrows. "That's how you're starting off? You're just going to declare that, and assume that I believe you?"

  "My god, woman, you're impossible!" Sanford's glare threatened to take over again, but he forced himself to take a deep breath and calm himself. "Here, again - I'm not engaged. I never lied to you. Valencia is a part of my past, and she's insane. I promise, if you just give me a little bit of time to tell my side of the story, you'll understand."

  I tried to think, tried to ignore the somewhat intoxicating effect of his presence here beside me, just like I'd dreamed about for the last few days, even as I did my best to banish him from my mind whenever possible. He'd snuck in, like a virus, burrowing in amid my thoughts until I couldn't keep out thoughts of him, his voice inside my head commenting richly on my own words and actions.

  If I gave him this chance, my last little bit of strength against him, the little barrier of resistance I'd managed to build up over the last few days, would surely fail. Could I bear to be hurt that deeply again?

  But what if he was telling the truth?

  "Miss Dean?" called out the receptionist's voice, as I sat there and stared at Sanford and tried to think over the pounding of blood in my ears. "Your cat is ready for you to take him."

  I started to stand up to reclaim Whiskers, but Sanford reached out and caught lightly at my wrist. "Please," he said one last time, and I saw my own hurt and pain reflected back in his eyes.

  "I'll listen," I told him. "But only after I get Whiskers home."

  He nodded, as if he hadn't expected anything more. "I'll be right behind you."

  I collected the cat carrier from the receptionist, pausing for a moment to bend down and peer inside of it. Whiskers' eyes blinked groggily back at me. I could see the bright plaster of his cast on his front leg; the doctor apparently decided that bright pink was Whiskers' ideal color. At least it might be easier to spot him, I hoped.

  Outside, I climbed into my car, stowed Whiskers' crate carrier in the passenger seat, and then drove back home - my real home, the little cottage next to Winterhearst mansion. I saw the grille of Sanford's black sports car kee
p pace behind me, the whole way, never letting me out of his sight for a moment.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  *

  I parked in my driveway, Sanford pulling in behind me, and carefully lifted Whiskers' cat carrier out of the passenger seat. Sanford stepped up behind me, looking unsure if he should help me or not as I struggled to hold both the cat carrier and my keys to the front door.

  Finally, after watching me nearly drop Whiskers for the second time, he moved in and gently lifted the cat carrier out of my hand. He didn't say anything, and I was grateful that he kept his mouth shut. He just stood a respectful step back behind me, holding the cat carrier as I slid my key into the deadbolt.

  Just as he'd want others to see us if he was really engaged, a poisonous little voice in my head whispered, but I ignored it. I'd promised to hear him out, and I'd give him one chance to speak his side before I threw him out.

  Inside, Sanford carefully lowered the cat carrier down to the floor of my little living room, and I opened the latch on the metal grate door. Slowly, looking very unsure about trusting his newly plastered leg, Whiskers emerged from his little shelter. He sniffed at the air, peered up at me, and then eventually wandered the few steps over to Sanford and flopped down in a large, furry lump on the man's feet.

  Well, he didn't seem to hate Sanford for being involved in the whole broken leg thing, I considered. Was that a point in the man's favor?

  "You big, dumb softie," Sanford said down to the cat, dropping down onto my couch. Whiskers just meowed up at him, and with a grunt, Sanford reached forward and scooped the cat's bulk up to deposit him in his lap on the couch. "Total pushover," he said as he scratched Whiskers behind the ears, and I didn't know if he was talking about himself or the cat.

  I didn't let this domestic side of Sanford derail me. "Talk," I commanded him, intentionally not sitting down so that I still had the advantage of height.

  He sighed. "This will take a little while."

  Reluctantly, I sat down in the armchair next to the couch - but I did my best to keep up my angry expression. "Fine. You'd better start, then, before I kick you out."

  Sanford leaned back on the couch. "I told you, before, about how I ended up putting together my own business, expanding, growing it until I eventually sold it," he said, looking up at the ceiling. "I was lucky on the business side; I didn't make any mistakes that proved to be too big for me to fix.

  "On the relationship side, however, I wasn't as lucky."

  I leaned in, my curiosity piqued despite my best intentions to remain aloof. Was Valencia his mistake?

  "As I'm sure you're guessing right now, I met Valencia in those early days of my success, when everything felt like it was happening perfectly for me, like a fairy tale, almost," Sanford went on after a minute, grimacing at the memory. "And she seemed perfect, too, at least at the beginning. She was young and sexy, and she knew how to show off her body, and all the fun clubs and cool hangouts. For a kid like me, coming from the wrong side of the tracks and just wanting desperately to be popular for the first time in my life, with money to burn?" He sighed. "I must have seemed like the perfect mark for her."

  "A mark?" I repeated back, surprised. That wasn't the word that I'd expected.

  But Sanford nodded. "I fell hard for her, and she seemed to do the same. We spent as much time together as I could spare away from the shops, and there was always something exciting happening. We'd get the VIP booth in a club and have bottle service, or go to some art gala with expensive tickets benefitting charity, or I'd just take her shopping. I'd shower her in gifts to show her how much I loved her, and she showered me in attention and affection, made me feel like the biggest guy in the world."

  "Sounds perfect," I said, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

  He laughed, although there was no humor in the sound. "Hah, that's the way it looked from the outside, I bet," he replied. "And maybe I would have said that it was perfect, if you'd asked me back then. I couldn't see what was right in front of my own eyes."

  "Which was what?"

  Sanford shrugged, scratched Whiskers a little harder behind the ears. The cat purred loudly, his eyes squeezed shut in slits of ecstasy. "The first sign was after I proposed," he said.

  Immediately, the hand of his not on my cat shot out to hold me back as I lunged up from the chair. "Relax! Just let me finish telling the story before you attack!" he implored, and although part of me screamed out for his blood, I forced myself back down into the chair, although my muscles remained tense and ready to spring.

  "Anyway, after I proposed, she immediately started going on and on about how she had all of these perfect ideas for the wedding, how we'd have a huge party, how we could invite all these friends of hers, how she could get a huge and expensive dress. I sat there, listening to her talk about all of this, and it suddenly hit me."

  "What hit you?" I gave in and asked, after Sanford fell silent for a minute.

  "That she really didn't care about me," he answered softly. "I could have been any other man, literally anyone else, and it wouldn't have mattered to her. She wanted the rich husband to buy all her toys and for her to cling to at parties. She didn't care about my history, about anything that made me unique. She didn't say a single thing about our life together. She just wanted to talk about all the benefits that would come to her."

  Thinking back to my brief little encounter with Valencia, I nodded. "That seems to describe her pretty well, still."

  "Yeah, she hasn't changed at all." Sanford snorted. "I had hoped that when I dumped her, she might take a look at herself and decide to fix some of the... less wonderful aspects of her personality."

  Inside my head, I replayed that last sentence. He dumped her! That meant that they weren't engaged, just as he said! Unless he was lying to me, he had been engaged to Valencia, but wasn't with her any longer!

  But what was she doing at his house, then? I forced myself to close my mouth and listen, hoping that he'd reveal the answers. It took all my concentration to not burst out with more questions, but I managed to keep my jaw clamped shut.

  Sanford frowned at me for a second, as if wondering why I wasn't exploding with questions. "Even with that realization, it took me four months to finally break up with her," he went on after a second. "I tried to gently change her, at first, but I soon realized that she didn't have any inclination to change. She was happy with her shallow, self-centered personality, only caring about things as they affected her. And try as I might, I couldn't get through to her on why this wasn't what I wanted."

  He reached up and rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. "As I bet you can guess, she didn't take the breakup well."

  "Didn't take it well? It seems like she didn't even notice," I said, not sure if I was joking or not.

  "Oh, she definitely noticed when I did it the first time," Sanford insisted. "She very nearly lit my apartment on fire! She broke most of my furniture before I picked her up, bodily threw her out of my apartment, and then threatened to call the police on her if she showed up again. The last I saw of her, she was standing outside of my apartment on the sidewalk, shouting up to me that she wasn't going to return any of the jewelry I bought for her."

  I laughed at that. "Wow. She sounds like a gem, herself."

  "Trust me, I was more than happy to give up that jewelry in exchange for getting her out of my life," he chuckled along with me. "But I decided that I needed to get out of there. Every time I tried to meet another woman, to move on past her, I'd soon see that she was after the same things. Every other woman I knew was one of Valencia's friends, or at least ran in the same circles. And they all looked at me like a meal ticket on legs."

  "So you decided to move away? Head back to your hometown?" I guessed.

  He nodded. "And that's why I showed up here with no plans. I just needed to get away from the city, from all of it. When that offer came in to sell the business, I jumped at it - not because I wanted to get out of the business, but because I wa
nted to get away from that life that I'd built for myself, all the attention it attracted. I found the Winterhearst mansion for sale, and it seemed like fate was telling me to buy it, so I did - with no other plans or forethought."

  In spite of myself, I found my defenses relaxing, dropping away. Sanford sounded like he was telling the truth. If this was a lie, it was unnecessarily elaborate, and it did make sense.

  Except, that is, for one big, glaring hole.

  "So if you broke up with her," I asked, dreading the answer to this question but needing it nonetheless, "why was Valencia back here, the other day?"

  Sanford groaned. "Because she's crazy, that's why!"

  I frowned at him, and even Whiskers lifted his head up from the man's lap to look up at him. "Really, I don't know what got into her, but she somehow believed that she could get me back," he went on. "I had to go up to the city to take care of some unexpected problem with closing the deal on selling my apartment up there, so that I could move down here full-time. But when I got there, there wasn't any problem, and the building manager said that some blonde in a slutty getup had been asking about me."

  "Valencia," I filled in.

  "That's right. And when I got back down here, there she was, trying to move into my house, trying to get her life back! She threw herself at me, insisting that she'd changed, that she was willing to do whatever it took to get me back, that she cared about me."

  "And you didn't buy it?" I asked, remembering how the woman looked perfectly made up, sex poured into a slutty little tight dress and heels.

  For a moment, Sanford hesitated. "Maybe, a month ago, I might have," he admitted. "I was engaged to her, and that kind of attachment sticks around unless something big happens to disrupt it."

  My breath caught in my throat. "And did something big happen to you?"

  Before answering, Sanford carefully slipped his fingers under Whiskers and moved the feline off to one side. The cat protested with a soft but annoyed meow, but didn't get up from his new spot next to the man that he'd decided he liked better than me.