Starting Over by Cheryl Douglas Page B

“My whole heart will always belong to
you. No one could ever take your place.”
    She looked
pained. “Please don’t say that. That’s not what I want for you. I
want you to find happiness with someone else. I don’t want you to
be alone.”
    He smirked even
though his own pain burned him up. He was doing something he’d
never thought he would: saying good-bye to the love of his life.
“Then you’re a better person than I am. The thought of you falling
in love with another man, sharing his bed, makes me want to beat
the hell out of him.” His eyes fell to the swell of her breasts
peeking out from beneath the lace edge on her tank top. “In my
mind, you’ll always be mine. I can’t imagine anyone else having
you. No one else could ever love you as much as I do.”
    “Alex, please…”
She sucked in a breath and her chin trembled. “Don’t do this.”
    “I have to. It
may be my last chance to tell you how I feel.” He placed her right
hand over his heart. “I love you too much to try to hold on to you.
If you really want the divorce, I won’t fight you. Just know that
I’ll never stop loving you. You may not be mine on paper
anymore”—reaching for her left hand, he kissed the diamond rings
he’d placed there a decade earlier—“but you’ll always be the very
best part of me.”
     
    ***
     
    The inn was
quiet after the breakfast rush when Jane claimed the stool beside
her daughter at the breakfast bar. “How are you this morning?”
    “I’m okay,” Eve
said, folding the local newspaper and setting it aside.
    “I don’t know
how you could be. You just lost your aunt, and your marriage is
falling apart.” Reaching for the teapot in front of Eve, Jane
filled both of their cups.
    Eve couldn’t
decide whether her mother was trying to instigate an argument, so
she decided to wait for her to continue.
    “I know what
it’s like to lose someone you love, Eve. I’ve been there.”
    “Really?” Eve
raised an eyebrow as she sipped the camomile tea. Eve wasn’t in the
mood to rehash ancient history about the breakdown of her parents’
marriage and how her mother was the innocent victim, wronged by the
man she loved.
    “I thought I
knew what love was when I married your father, but it wasn’t until
I met Tim that I realized how toxic our relationship was. Your
father had fallen out of love with me long before I learned of his
affair, but I held on so hard because I was afraid to be
alone.”
    “Who’s Tim?”
Eve asked. She and her mother really were strangers. She knew so
little about the life Jane had been living for the past twenty
years.
    She smiled. “I
met him about nine years ago. I was working in a health food store,
taking some natural healing classes, and he came in to chat with me
from time to time. He had some ailments he was trying to treat with
natural remedies, and he would ask for my advice.”
    Listening to
her mother talk about Tim was like meeting her for the first time.
She transformed into a different person. The light in her eyes and
her smile was evidence of how much she loved him.
    “Did you two
marry?” Eve asked, her eyes drifting to her mother’s left hand. She
wasn’t wearing any rings, but Eve knew that didn’t mean she wasn’t
married.
    Jane smiled and
ran a fingertip around the edge of her cup. “No, we didn’t feel the
need for a piece of paper to prove our love to the world. We knew
how we felt about each other, and that’s the only thing that really
mattered.”
    “Why didn’t Tim
come with you?” Eve had mixed feelings about meeting her mother’s
boyfriend. She didn’t have any sense of loyalty to the father who
hadn’t been a part of her life in years, but seeing her with a man
other than Eve’s father would shed a different light on her
mother.
    “He passed away
a few months ago,” Jane said quietly.
    “I’m sorry.”
When Eve witnessed the pain on her mother’s face, she touched her
hand. “That must have been very difficult for