Say Goodbye (Romantic Suspense #25) by Karen Rose

            He was sorry. That hurt more than anything. “Didn’t matter. You didn’t feel the same way.”

            “No,” he said simply. “I didn’t.”

            She recoiled, his words a physical blow. She’d thought it couldn’t hurt worse, but she’d been very wrong. “I know.”

            His very audible swallow was followed by a less than graceful escape. He lurched to his feet, backing from her room. When he cleared the door, he bolted and ran down the stairs.

            She heard the kitchen door close and the house was silent once more.

            She stared at the place where he had been for a minute, shocked by his sudden departure, shocked by the bluntness of his words.

            He’d run. From me. He’d been disgusted and he’d run. Her vision blurred, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever been so weary. I can’t keep doing this. Something had to change.

            She cleared the laptop and notebook from her bed and straightened the blankets as best she could with a one-hundred-twenty-pound Great Dane sprawled over them. “I can’t stay here,” she told Pebbles, who got up, turned in a circle, and flopped down beside her, big doggy head on the other pillow. “I’ll find a new place to live and come back to see you when I can.”

            But she knew deep down that wasn’t going to happen. She needed to cut Tom Hunter out of her life completely and move on. Again.




ROCKLIN, CALIFORNIA

            THURSDAY, MAY 25, 5:30 A.M.

            Tom stared at the image that filled his computer screen. Friedrich Pohlmann, known as Fritz to his family and friends. It was his official army photo.

            It was also his obituary.

            Fritz Pohlmann was the beloved son of Marian and Kristofer Pohlmann and was survived by two brothers and two sisters. And by his wife, Liza.

            Liza had been married. To a man who looked like me.

            Tom didn’t know what to think. How to feel. It was . . . shocking. Numbing. But below that was a current of hurt. Maybe even betrayal.

            She hadn’t told him about Fritz.

            He wondered if she’d told Fritz about him.

            He studied Fritz’s face, stoic and unsmiling in his uniform. It wasn’t like they could have been twins. But the resemblance was obvious at a glance. Same jaw, same hair. Same build.

            Different eyes. Fritz’s were brown and, in the more personal family photos attached to the online obit, appeared joyful. His smile was broad.

            Especially in the photo taken the day he and Liza had married. The man looked too damn happy as he stared adoringly at his wife.

            Wife.

            It was too much, and Tom had to click away from their wedding photo. He wasn’t even sure why. Because she’d been married at all? Because she’d married someone else?

            No, that wasn’t it. Tom was sure of that. Mostly sure.

            It was, he decided, because she’d never told anyone. Or had she? Had she told Dana and Ethan Buchanan? She hadn’t at Christmas. She’d said so. But later?

            Tom had a hard time believing that she had, because he hadn’t heard it through the family grapevine. Dana Buchanan was his mother’s best friend. If Dana knew, his mother knew.

            If his mother knew, she would have sounded different when they’d spoken on the phone the evening before. At one time, back when they were hiding from his biological father, his mother had been the master of controlling her emotions. All these years later, not so much. Thirteen years of living with Max Hunter had given her the freedom to be herself without fear.

            But Dana was cagey. She’d run a women’s shelter for years, protecting her clients’ secrets. Now she operated a halfway house for victims of sexual assault. She kept their secrets.

            Maybe she’d kept Liza’s, too. Suddenly knowing if Liza had told her Chicago family was more important than anything else.

            He glanced at the clock. It was seven thirty in Chicago. Dana would be awake. His fingers were typing out a text before he realized his own intention, but this wasn’t anyone else’s business. Only Liza’s. Not even mine. I don’t have the right.