Chapter 1

Blair

I’d always heard that near-death experiences made people reevaluate their lives. I’d spent nearly thirty years sure about what I wanted in life, but all it had taken for me to start questioning everything was some severe turbulence on a 747.

I picked up my whiskey and took a healthy sip. No girly drinks for me. I had forced myself to drink whiskey until I liked it. Being tough—and letting other people know it—was how I’d gotten to where I was in life. Which was currently in a hotel bar in Phoenix, Arizona, waiting to hear if they had a room for me to spend the night.

Of course, I wasn’t supposed to be away from home at all, let alone in Phoenix. I was getting married in five days, so my bosses had agreed to let me have a short four-day workweek in their office in Kansas City, but then the senior partner had called me on Sunday afternoon with instructions to board a plane to Los Angeles. And that’s exactly what I’d done—despite the fact that I had a million and one things to do for my wedding. Robert Sisco Sr. didn’t want to hear excuses. Sisco, Sisco, and Reece only wanted to hear yes and see lots of dollar signs on checks, and my understanding of that fact was one of the reasons I was so close to making junior partner. They didn’t want my wedding to interfere with my work. Even if they were the primary reason I was getting married in the first place. Partners were typically married, which probably had something to do with the illusion of stability and maturity. It was all a bunch of hooey, but I really wanted to be a partner.

I took another gulp of my drink, the ice clinking against my glass because of my shaking hand.

The thing was, I’d realized something. My future life had flashed before my eyes in those awful minutes on board the plane, and I hadn’t liked the look of it.

Now I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get married after all.

On paper, Dr. Neil Fredrick was perfect for me. Educated, personable, stable. Neil was a firm believer in playing it safe. And stability was exactly what I wanted after bearing witness to my parents’ chaotic marriage—my father’s affairs, my parents’ subsequent divorce, and finally my father’s death, which had practically bankrupted the family.

But lately, I found myself wanting something … more.

I blamed it on my best friend Megan. Megan had gotten married two months ago, though not to her original groom. Their story was the kind of gushy, too-cute-to-be-true, fairy-tale romance that wasn’t supposed to happen in real life. But for Megan, the impossible had happened. The weekend of her wedding, she’d boarded a plane home to tell her parents that she and her cheating asshole fiancé had broken up. After imbibing several drinks and a large dose of Dramamine on the plane, she passed out and was carried off the plane by her gorgeous seatmate, who had then filled in as her substitute fiancé. By the end of the week, Josh had become her real husband, and the two were still nauseatingly happy.

Gag.

Still, I couldn’t dismiss the fact that their wild and crazy love had put a crack in my belief that I had the perfect arrangement—a crack that was starting to spider web. Neil and I had separate apartments, and although Neil had begun spending more time at my place, he remained surprisingly stubborn about keeping his after we were married.

A memory from a couple of months ago intruded on me, tapping directly on that crack in the glass.

“My apartment is closer to the hospital, Blair,” Neil had said matter-of-factly, sipping his morning coffee. “It will be easier for the nights I’m on call.”

It was hard to argue with his logic—and his stoic logic had always been one of his more attractive traits—but it still seemed … wrong. If we were unifying our lives in other ways, why keep separate places? And I knew how it would seem to everyone else.

“But the money—”

“The mortgage on my condo is more than covered by my salary, and the neighborhood is up-and-coming,” he had said, his eyes still glued to his phone as he read the news. “If I hold onto it for another five years, there’s a chance it will double in value. It makes financial sense to keep it.”

At the time, I’d wanted to point out that he could rent it, and that my condo was only twenty minutes from the hospital. But he’d already vehemently nixed the idea of sharing his place. According to Neil, the loft was a bachelor pad, and we needed to have a home worthy of entertaining our friends and colleagues. Not that we were known for our dinner parties.

But pointing out those facts would only have instigated an argument. And one of the best parts of our relationship was that we rarely argued. My job was taxing and full of dissent; when I came home, I coveted peace. And if I were truly honest with myself, a small part of me approved of the living arrangements. Now that he was staying at my apartment on a more consistent basis, I’d begun to find his presence surprisingly suffocating and his previously cute quirks—like the precise way he chewed his food or how he had to have the remote control positioned a very exact way on the coffee table—irritating as hell. But that was normal. As a divorce attorney, I knew better than to expect that marriage would be a roller coaster of excitement.

In fact, if I’d learned anything from my work, it was this: the couples who ended up divorcing after just a year or two were usually the ones who’d been head-over-heels, drawing-hearts-on-everything in love when they approached the altar. Megan’s delirious happiness aside, there was no such thing as true love.

If there were, I would still be with Garrett Lowry.

I clanked my now-empty glass on the bar to get the bartender’s attention. “Another, please.”

He shot me a grin as he poured my drink. “Must have been some kind of Monday.”

I grabbed the glass out of his hands. “You have no idea.”

The deposition had run nearly two hours longer than planned, and I’d barely made it to LAX in time to catch my plane. My feeling of relief had been short-lived; the severe turbulence had convinced me and most of the other passengers that we were about to meet our maker. By the time we landed in Phoenix, many of the connecting flights had been canceled or delayed, and I discovered I was stuck overnight in Arizona. The airline had sent me to this hotel, but there had been a problem at the check-in desk.

Half my whiskey was gone before I realized it. There were so many things I needed to do in Kansas City, and I wouldn’t get back until at least mid-morning, which meant I’d have to rush to get to my morning deposition. To make matters worse, the damn airline hadn’t even confirmed me on the six a.m. flight. They’d only made a vague promise to text me around four in the morning to confirm if I had a ticket.

So now I was well on my way to getting drunk in the bar of an Embassy Suites, playing another round of This Is Your Life, Blair Anne Myers Hansen, and I wasn’t too happy with what I saw.

Practical, pragmatic, sensible Blair wanted a heart-stopping, butterflies-in-my-stomach kind of love.

All that turbulence must have rattled my brains.

But I couldn’t deny the fact that I’d been thinking of Garrett a lot over the last two months—much more than the asshole deserved. Truth be told, he was the only man I’d ever loved. And look how that had turned out. Five years later, I could finally admit to the role I’d played in our breakup, but that didn’t make it suck any less.

The rift had formed the night I’d received word of my estranged father’s death. Rather than share the news with Garrett when he came over, I had lashed out at him, picking a fight over some nitpicky complaint. Anger had always been my go-to reaction, and Garrett had weathered many a storm, but that night he’d responded with a fire equal to my own. The fight had spiraled out of control, and before I realized what was happening, Garrett had packed the toiletries and clothes he kept at my apartment into a duffel bag. And then he was gone.

I had spent the next day drowning in an emotional fog of dismay, grief, and loss, and even skipping classes—something I never did. After hours of stewing in my turbulent emotions, I had realized I felt an intense ache for Garrett. For the first time ever, I had truly needed someone. I remembered the moment I had decided to swallow my pride and go to him, ready to beg for his forgiveness and ask him to go with me to my father’s funeral. Never in a million years would I have guessed the surprise that I would find in his apartment.

Jody Stewart, a fellow second-year law student, who’d made no secret of her lust for Garrett, had opened his door wearing cheap superstore lingerie. Neon green, to make matters worse.

I had turned around and never looked back, not even when Garrett had run after me. Or when he’d pounded on my apartment door for an hour begging and pleading with me to let him explain. Not even when he’d tried to approach me in class every day for two solid weeks.

When he’d begun to single-handedly plow his way through nearly every available woman in law school the next year, not to mention a couple of not-so-available ones, I knew I’d made the right decision.

Garrett Lowry was a player.

He may have taken a momentary side-stop with me, but he’d wasted no time before jumping back into the game. I was better off without him.

Still, the memories chafed.

Between Garrett’s betrayal and my father’s bad behavior, it had been easy for me to decide what type of law to practice. In fact, I should thank them both. Maybe I’d take daisies to my father’s grave when I came back from my honeymoon. He’d always hated daisies.

I was motioning to the bartender to bring me another drink, wishing the hotel staff would finally give me a damn room key, when I noticed him—a man was standing in the entrance of the bar, his gaze fixed on me. I did a double take, certain the Embassy Suites was now including hallucinogens in their drinks, because standing in the doorway was the player himself—Garrett Lowry.

I stopped the bartender as he grabbed my glass. “I’m going to need you to make that a double.”