And satisfying, he mused. More satisfying than he’d expected.

“I’ve got myself an intern for the summer, and she’s working out. She’s smart. I don’t have to ask you how business is going. I’m in the middle of it. You were right about the wall.”

“Yeah, I was.”

He just shook his head. “Not just the aesthetics, which have yet to be fully realized, but from the relief on my sister’s face when they all came up for a cookout and she saw what was going in.”

“Good. And how’d that go? The cookout?”

“All I had to do was provide the burgers, dogs, drinks. Since Emily and Britt made everything else, it went just fine. So, the ex-husband.”

Brows lifted, Darby glanced over. “That’s some segue.”

“Inside my head, it was. What’s the story, or is it off-limits?”

“If it was off-limits, I’d have said a line drive broke my nose.” She shrugged. “Okay. I’ve just finished college, and there he is. Great-looking guy, a friend of a friend of a friend I meet at a party. Trent Willoughby.”

“Willoughby. Sense and Sensibility.”

“Points for you knowing Austen.”

“Big readers in my family,” he told her.

“Yeah, mine, too. So Willoughby—and he’s just that handsome and charming and romantic. Trust-fund kid, but I don’t hold that against him. He’s started up his own advertising firm with two of his college buddies. We talk, some sparks, and since he’s a friend of a friend of a friend, I figured sure, we can exchange numbers.”

“I guess he called.”

“The very next day. He hadn’t moved on me at the party, kept it easy. So he says his family has a box at Camden Yards, and the O’s are playing at home, would I like to go? I go, because who wouldn’t? If you’ve never watched a game from a box, you’re missing something. I also discovered he knew next to nothing about baseball, but I found that endearing, right? He’d made the date to please me. Sweet.

“One thing led to another, blah, blah, blah. I met his family, he met my mother. Everything was smooth. We dated for six months, and all I saw was this terrific guy, considerate, interesting, crazy about me, romantic. He takes me to Paris—I mean freaking Paris—for a long weekend.”

With a half laugh, she sipped more beer. “I’d never been out of the country, never, in fact, been west of the fricking Mississippi, and now I’m in Paris. It’s dazzling. And he proposes to me on the banks of the Seine, with the moonlight, and Jesus, I wasn’t thinking about marriage—not yet, down the road—but Paris, moonlight. So, I said yes.”

She took a moment and studied her beer. “I didn’t really want a big, splashy wedding, but it got out of hand—or out of my hands. You could say his family sort of took over, and I got swept up. If I tried to throttle it back, he’d say how it would hurt their feelings. Anyway, more blah, blah, blah. I can say, looking back I can now see there were signs. But that’s hindsight. Was he demanding, possessive, domineering? Yes, to all, but so subtle, and offset by that crazy-about-me, the romance, the little sweet things.

“I was stupid,” she murmured. “And he was just so good at it.”

“It doesn’t take being stupid to get taken in,” Zane corrected.

“Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, right before the wedding, he drove me out to this fancy gated community, pulled up to this monster house in a maze of monster houses. Our house, he told me. And I’m ‘but—but.’ His parents put down the deposit as a wedding gift. Done deal, not once consulting me. But he rolled over that. Surprise! Ten days before the wedding, and I’m a little sick. I don’t want this monster house in Stepford Land, one that’s a solid forty minutes from my mother, from our business.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Tried. Not hard enough. I let him manipulate me, no question there. I thought, Well, I can make it work. I can landscape the yard, make it mine. I can just get up earlier to get to work. I loved him, didn’t I? The important thing is we were starting our lives together.

“So we did. We had the big, splashy wedding his family somehow pulled off in six months because I should be a spring bride. Even though that’s our busiest season. We had a honeymoon in Paris, where he started pushing for me to go off birth control so we could start a family.”

“You didn’t talk about kids before?”

“We did, and we’d agreed to wait a little. So I pushed back there, I want a year with him first before we talk kids. Hell, I was only twenty-three, I had plenty of time.

“We’re barely home when he gets back on that again. He wants to make a baby with me, start our family. Don’t I want to have his children? Then it’s that I work too much, too hard. I’m coming home too late, and too tired. Owning a business should mean I don’t have to work.”

At Zane’s quick laugh, she had to smile.

“Right? Owning means you work the hardest, but he didn’t get it. And I’d already seen he didn’t exactly put in tons of time and effort in his own firm. So it’s around and around, up and down.”

She paused, stared out at the view, the boats gliding on the lake. He waited, saying nothing.

“Six weeks and two days after I said ‘I do,’ I come home from a long, sweaty day that ended with me fighting ugly traffic, and he’s sitting there, drinking a gin and tonic.”

She had to stop again, let out a little breath. “He’s laying down the law. Look at me, exhausted, filthy, and he’s coming home to an empty house. A house he provided for me. I’m to sell the business and start behaving like a wife.

“I was so tired. It wasn’t the work, you know, I loved the work. It was that horrible commute. I said no, I wasn’t selling the business, and I wasn’t going to talk about it because I needed a shower. The next thing I knew I was on the floor.”

She shook her head. “In the year I’d known him he’d never shown any signs of violence. None. He could be demanding, yes, pushy, single-minded, and yeah, he could strike out with words. But that backhand shocked the hell out of me. It seemed to shock him, too. He was immediately contrite, appalled at himself. He cried. He made excuses—he’d had a terrible day, too much to drink, he’d been so worried about me, and more. He begged for forgiveness. I’d been married six weeks, and now the man I’d married was on his knees, weeping.”

Zane said nothing. He already saw the end.

“I told him he had one chance, only one. If he ever hit me again, we were finished. Not only that, I’d file charges.”

“How long did it take him?”

“Three weeks. By then I’d realized it wasn’t going to work, that I fell for the man I thought he was, not the man he actually was. I’d been freaking Marianne Dashwood, and that was just mortifying.”

He couldn’t help himself, and put a hand over hers. “She turned out just fine.”

“Yeah, it took her a while. Me, too. The man I had married was so damn needy and … just not altogether right. If I spent time outside of work with my mother or a friend, I was taking time from him. If I disagreed about the smallest thing, I was attacking him. Didn’t love him enough. Any time, effort, affection I gave to anything or anyone else was stealing it from him.”

Stupid, she thought again. She’d been incredibly stupid.

“I came home from work, and he went right at me. Verbally first. He even accused me of having an affair with one of the crew—a guy I’d known forever who was happily married with two kids. My mistake was to laugh at that one. Then he went at me physically.”

She paused for a moment, studied the view until she felt settled again, able to finish.

“No backhand this time. The first punch broke my nose, and he was raging, pounding. You can’t think when someone’s beating you like that. You just try to get away, make it stop. Basically, he beat the crap out of me, tearing at my clothes, screaming all the time, and I couldn’t make it stop, I couldn’t get away. At some point we must’ve knocked a lamp over because I got my hand on it and hit him with it, hard enough to stun him. I ran outside. There were neighbors out in their yards, thank God. I just ran screaming for help. I couldn’t even see where I was running. People came over to help me, even when he came charging out of the house, they helped me. Somebody called the cops, and they helped me. Even when he tried to spin it that I’d attacked him—that didn’t fly.

“I filed charges, I filed for divorce, and moved back in with my mother. She was a brick, an absolute brick. He got a really good lawyer, but I had the medical records, the police report, the witness statements. He got three to five.”

“Should’ve been more.”

“Well, really good lawyer. He got out in three. I had a restraining order, but come on.”

“Did he come after you again?”

“He caught me when I got home one night after seeing a movie with some friends. But he got the surprise this time. I’d taken self-defense courses, and martial arts. Kung fu.”

“No shit? Kung fu?”