And then she reluctantly called her father.
The fallout over the next twenty-four hours was massive. He fired the law firm who had handled the annulment. Monica used the biggest weapon at her disposal—her knowledge of how much her father hated publicity—and promised to make this very ugly if he got involved.
Her attorney strongly encouraged her to quickly and quietly file a formal divorce petition in the courts and let a process server deliver the application to Josh.
She knew her father would lose his mind if she zoomed ahead with a quickie divorce—which would be fine. A reason to do it, in fact.
Except that Josh would also lose his mind, for other reasons, and she wasn’t that cowardly.
It was her fault they were in this position, so no. She had to explain the situation to him herself.
She really didn’t want to. It wouldn’t go well.
I’m so sorry. The apology she’d tried to give him as he stormed out of her life. That she would try to give him again today, whenever she finally made her way to Pine Harbour…and he wouldn’t accept.
She was going into the lion’s den and she knew it.
And she was doing it alone.
She’d reluctantly agreed to keep her mother posted, but considering the fact that it was Monica’s life that had been turned inside out, she didn’t understand why her mother was being so clingy about this situation. On the other hand, unnecessarily injured feelings was a Bianca Fischer classic.
So there didn’t need to be a logical explanation why her mother wanted hourly updates on this side trip.
“How is the weather there?”
She could picture her mother staring out the window of her Upper East Side apartment, out across Central Park, in the general direction of Middle of Nowhere, Ontario, Canada. “Fine,” she lied. No need to mention the wet flurries.
“I looked up Toronto weather. It’s snowing there.”
“I’m not in Toronto. And I learned how to drive in Switzerland, Mom. I’ll be fine.”
“You spun out and crashed a Ferrari. Your father shouldn’t have—”
And that was enough of that conversation. “Gotta go, Mom. I’ll drive safely.”
She quashed the little flutter of inherited fear when the rental car agent repeated the pilot’s cheery warning of intermittent wet snow flurries, instead focusing on the promise the weather would clear shortly.
Good. While—one collision notwithstanding—she had learned to drive in Europe, so it wasn’t the first time she’d encountered gross wet white stuff on the road, she wasn’t looking forward to a white-knuckle drive through a foreign country.
Even if it did look a lot like the one she’d just departed in many ways.
But there were lots of small signals that she’d left behind the comfort of Southern California for a journey into the unknown—in more ways than one. The road signs were in different measurements. Where she’d expect the speed limit to be fifty miles an hour, it was eighty kilometres. And her phone coolly informed her she only had seventy-three of those kilometres to go before she would be face to face with the last person on earth who wanted to see her.
The bumper stickers and billboards all had a slightly different tone to them. She imagined them all saying, Josh doesn’t want to see you and You should have a lawyer handle this.
When she stopped at a coffee shop, she did a double take when the woman at the counter asked her if she wanted a divorce cookie.
“Excuse me?”
“Do you want a frosted cookie?”
“No.” She cast a longing look at the treat. She didn’t deserve such goodness. Not yet. Maybe after she did the hard thing. “Thank you.”
The woman gave her a sympathetic smile. “Long drive today?”
“Something like that.”
“You aren’t from around here, are you?”
“How can you tell?”
That got her a shrug. “You’ve got that not-from-around-here vibe. First visit?”
“Yes.” And it would be her last. Once this was done, she wouldn’t have any reason to ever return.
And to further underline that she wasn’t at home, that she was entering unknown territory, at least one of the random radio stations she flipped past was in French. From her time at boarding school, she knew just enough of the language to be dangerous. But she was pretty sure Va voir ailleurs si j’y suis was a uniquely Swiss derogatory flip off, so she was imagining things there, too.
Every part of her subconscious was warning her that danger lay ahead.
Josh wouldn’t want to see her.
And when she stopped just south of Pine Harbour, pulling off the road into a scenic lookout spot to check her messages—really? There wasn’t anything that she needed to handle urgently?—she had to confront the gross feeling that the guilt she was feeling had nothing to do with skipping out on work, and everything to do with coming face to face with the man she hurt.
Josh Kincaid was still her husband, and no matter how hard it would be to see him again, she owed it to him to fix this properly, once and for all.
If she hadn’t used him for her own purposes in the very beginning, none of this would have ever happened.
3
Three years earlier
Monica checked her lipstick, her tits, and her winsome smile. All were on point. Good. The hot mechanic who had just returned from vacation was probably the only guy in the building who didn’t know who she was, and she needed a crash course in car racing.
She’d spent the last two weeks dodging subtle barbs and not-so-subtle shade about her suitability for the sweet marketing gig she’d been handed by virtue of being the boss’s daughter. She’d expected all of that. She hadn’t been prepared for the sharpest cuts to come from her father himself.
“You don’t need to know anything about racing, sweetheart. You just need to remember how often people want you to post on Instagram.”
That was her whole job, it seemed. Posting blink and you’d miss it slice-of-life video from the Fischer Racing campus to the team’s Instagram Stories. And if someone had Instagram and didn’t know how to use it, she could “consult with them.”
Nobody wanted her consultation.
She pushed through the interior door between the executive suites and the back garage bay and leaned against the wall. She’d watched this guy earlier, during the team workout in the morning.
That had been some good Insta content. Hot Mechanic peeling his sweat-slicked t-shirt up his rangy torso, revealing a six-pack dusted in golden brown fuzz. He’d wiped his face with the hem, then dropped it down, letting the damp fabric cling to his belly, not fixing the way it rode up a bit, still teasing a slice of his lower abdomen above the waistband of his shorts.
She hadn’t posted it online. She’d saved it to her phone instead. Maybe he had an account himself. It would be better content for him than it would be for the team.
That’s what she told herself—that she saved it for him, this guy whose name she didn’t even know, but who she’d decided was her final chance to reboot her short-lived career in this building.
That decision had happened immediately after the workout. He’d taken charge of the pit crew, even though she didn’t think that was his job, and reminded everyone of the day’s agenda.