Not Quite Married Read Online Free PDF Page A

sell me?”
    He regarded her, those laser-blue eyes boring twin holes right through her. “You think I’m lying to you? You think I would come here and ask you to marry me if I was already married?”
    Okay, maybe he had a teeny-weeny point there. She tried to dial it back a notch. “You didn’t exactly ask me, Dalton. You told me.” It came out sounding plaintive and she couldn’t decide which was worse: being a raving bitch or coming off as pitiful.
    He demanded, “Do you think I’m lying to you?”
    “I...” She gave up all pretense of angry defiance, dropping her arms away from her body, letting out a low, sad sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything—not about you. Not really. On the island, you were...like someone else entirely, completely different from how you are now. It’s very disorienting.”
    He looked almost stricken. For about half a second. But then his jaw hardened again and his eyes narrowed. “I think you should call Astrid and ask her if there’s anything going on between her and me.”
    Her mouth dropped open. “Excuse me. Did you just say I should call your ex-wife?”
    “That is exactly what I said.”
    “Not. Going. To. Happen.”
    “Why not? Afraid to find out I’m not a lying, cheating would-be bigamist, after all?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Then you will call Astrid.”
    “Hello. Are you there, Dalton?”
    “That’s a ridiculous question.”
    “Just trying to be absolutely sure you can hear me.”
    “Of course I can hear you.”
    “Good. The last thing I’m up for is a little chat with your wife.”
    “ Ex -wife ,” he curtly clarified. And then he lifted a hand and pinched the bridge of his nose. Was he getting a headache? She certainly was. “All right,” he said. “This has not gone well. I need to regroup and come up with another plan to get through to you.”
    “Get through to me about what? Because, honestly, Dalton. Two strangers getting married is not any kind of viable solution to anything.”
    “We’ve lost months because you read something on the internet and jumped to conclusions.”
    “Don’t forget that you put a detective on me.”
    “...And learned that you were getting married.”
    “But I didn’t get married.”
    “Which I didn’t find out until Tuesday when you finally came and talked to me. The heart of the matter is you should have come to me earlier.”
    She clucked her tongue. “Fascinating analysis of the situation. Also totally unfair. Why would I want to come to you? You made it way clear on the island that you were done with me.”
    “I wasn’t done with you.”
    “It certainly sounded like it to me.”
    He pinched the bridge of his nose again. “It was different on the island. I was different.”
    “I’ll say.”
    “I didn’t want to ruin something beautiful and I was afraid that if we continued when we returned home, it would all go to hell.”
    “So you’re saying that on the island you were pretending to be someone you’re not.”
    “No, I’m...” He stopped himself, glanced away, and then said, way too quietly, “By God. You are the most infuriating woman.”
    She started to feel a little bit bad about then. In his own overbearing way, he really was trying. And she wasn’t helping. Because he had hurt her and she just couldn’t trust him. And his proposal of marriage had actually tempted her—at the same time as it had made her want to beat him about the head and shoulders with a large, blunt object. As she tried to think of something to say that might get them on a better footing with each other, he pulled a phone from his pocket and poked at it repeatedly. Her cell, on the coffee table, pinged.
    He put his phone away. “I’ve texted you her number.”
    “Her, who?”
    “Astrid. You have her number now. You can call her and she’ll be happy to tell you that she and I have no plans to remarry, that we are amicably and permanently divorced, that we are not dating or in any way romantically or