Hill Country Secret--A Clean Romance by Kit Hawthorne

Author:Kit Hawthorne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2020-06-15T19:05:37+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

WHEN ALEX GOT HOME, the first thing he did was to Google music festivals in Venice Beach, Florida, over the past summer. He found one that fit the bill, then started going through the featured bands one by one until he found one with a front man named Evan.

He knew instantly that he’d found the right Evan. He knew it by the breezy confidence, the pretty-boy face. The skinny jeans. The man bun.

Evan. What a punk name. Alex had never known anyone named Evan before, never thought about the name one way or another. Now he hated it.

It didn’t take long to find confirmation in the form of another picture of Evan, this time with his arm around Lauren.

She had her hair twisted up high on her head, with lots of loose tendrils curling around her face and neck. A hint of sunburn glowed on her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. The straps of an emerald-green swimsuit showed around the wide, off-the-shoulder neckline of a thin, see-through T-shirt. She was holding on to Evan and looking straight at the camera with an open, happy, beautiful smile.

The sight hit Alex like a gut punch. He actually couldn’t breathe for a moment, and he felt like he might throw up. All that love and trust and joy, and Evan had treated her like last week’s trash.

He went through all the band’s pictures from the festival, then googled the band and found its official site. Plenty more pictures here, from before and after Lauren, of Evan looking infuriating in a dozen other cities, always with a beautiful woman or two at his side.

Why on earth had he married her to begin with? What had he been thinking? Why go to the trouble of marriage if you didn’t mean it, if you weren’t ready to follow through? Maybe he knew Lauren wouldn’t go for a casual hookup, so he tailored his approach. And maybe he got drawn in by the challenge of the thing.

Come to think of it, for someone who had so little regard for marriage to begin with, there wasn’t any reason not to marry her.

It was even possible that on some level, he thought he wanted to do it. Maybe he’d convinced himself with all his emotional talk. People like that were just as capable of fooling themselves as they were of fooling other people. But they didn’t have the substance to back up their promises.

He went back to the picture of Evan and Lauren together. Lauren was tagged in it, and Alex saw a hashtag for Vincent Van-Go. He clicked the link.

It took him to Lauren’s Instagram. The pics at the top of the feed, the most recent ones, were of Enchanted Rock. He worked his way down to a shot of a night sky, all purple and blue, slashed with white lines in different directions—the Perseids meteor shower, captured with some kind of fancy camera with time-lapse capabilities. Evan would have been with her then; that was their stolen weekend of lovemaking and stargazing, when he’d made his brief return.

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