Still, it confused the hell out of me.  “Why?  Why on earth would he do that?”

“It was all for Iris.  All of it.  The reason he spied on you, approached you, seduced you.  It was all done only to protect her.”

And that confused me even more.  “His sister?  You’re saying he seduced me for his sister?”

She laughed, and it gave me the chills.  She was a scary woman, and she was clearly enjoying herself at my expense.

“It all goes back to your friend Alasdair Masters.”

What the fuck?  Why did it keep coming back to Dair?

I was more lost than ever.  “Dair?”

“Yes, Dair.  Dair and Iris.”

“Dair and Iris?” I repeated back dumbly.

“Yes.  Iris is obsessed with Dair, and she was worried that he was interested in you.  Heath knew she was worried, and Heath would do anything for his sister.  What his sister wants, Heath makes sure she gets.  First, he needed to check you out because that’s what he does.  And then he needed to eliminate you as a threat to his sister.”

“How would I be a threat to his sister?”

“A threat to her not getting what she wanted.”

I just stared at her.

“Dair.  She wanted Dair, so Heath made sure, firsthand, that you wouldn’t be in her way.”

“That’s ridiculous.  I don’t believe you.”

Only that was a lie.  What I meant was, I don’t want to believe you.

But I did.  She had a confidence about her that left so little room for personal insecurity that I just believed her.  Why would this woman come here and lie to me about a man that had already declared himself out of my life?  I couldn’t find a good reason, and so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Because it all made sense somehow.  With what I’d known, and what she’d told me, things started to connect about the way he was, the way he operated.

I saw it so clearly now.  How everything about him was a weapon.

Engineered to get what he wanted.

Calculated to yield the proper results.

And he’d wanted something from me.  Pushed all of my buttons to be sure he’d gotten it.

And he had.  Above and beyond.

“And where do you fit into this?” I asked her, but again, I knew.  She had the scorned lover role down pat.

Only I was wrong.  It was worse even than that.

“That night you went out on a date with Dair, and you came home to find Heath waiting for you.  I was sent to follow Dair, to track him down with orders to interfere if he so much as touched you.

“This is sick.  He had you spying on me?” I asked slowly.

“Yes.  And even now, he’s got me keeping an eye on you, making sure no one traced him to your place.”

“He still has you spying on me?”  I was disgusted and appalled.  At him, at her.

At myself.

“Yes.”

“Let me get this straight,” I began, my rare but memorable temper coming to the surface.  “Your lover tells you to spy on the other woman he’s been sleeping with, and you do it?  What the hell is wrong with you?”

I’d scored a hit; it was clear by her flashing eyes and the malevolent twist to her mouth.

I got the distinct impression that her temper was even more memorable than mine, and I had a brief feeling of regret that I’d provoked it on purpose.  This was not some normal woman.  If I pushed just the wrong button, she’d have no qualms about taking my life.  I knew it instinctively.

Luckily, I hadn’t pushed her quite that far.

“I’m his partner,” she said through gritted teeth.  “He and I have a history you couldn’t understand.  You’re nothing to him.  Part of a job.  I just thought you should know that’s all you ever were.  He never broke character with you.  Not for a second.  I just wanted you to know that.”

And then she left, because she’d accomplished what she came for.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

And so began the next stage of my Heath withdrawals.  This one was much less pretty than the first and lasted quite a bit longer.

I’ll confess, I had a few bitter moments there, a few man-hating days, where I cursed him as a bastard, and vented, ad nauseam, about what a deceitful son of a bitch he was to my girlfriends.

A brief moment in time where I swore off men for good.

I felt so foolish.  How had I fallen so easily for his act?

How had I made him out to be something that he wasn’t?

Had I always been a chronic romanticizer?

It was a serious question I asked myself, and the answer was not long in coming.

Yes, of course I was.  How else had I stayed married for so long, in ignorance, to a man whose main characteristic had to be, above all things, narcissism?

I put things, ideas, people on pedestals.  I made little poems in my mind about my loved ones, and though they didn’t rhyme, they were beautiful poetry, poetry that shaped the better things in my life.

So, of course, when I’d met a man like that, who consumed, who dominated, who was stoic to the point of unreadable, I turned him into a romantic figure, his feelings for me far too complicated to be said in words.

Foolish, I know.  I felt it keenly.

I’d taken in a wild animal.  How could I be surprised I’d been bitten in the process?