The video kept rolling. It was cute to see Shiloh’s reaction to Caden when he walked in and how she pretended not to look at him when she was doing just that. And there was Caden, openly staring at Shiloh, making his interest quite obvious.
“Go get her, Tiger,” Dalton said, also picking up on his brother’s predatory demeanor. “Wait! Zero in on that guy and woman standing over by the buffet table.”
Dalton’s sudden outburst almost scared Jules. “What guy? What woman?”
“That one,” he said, pointing, getting off the sofa to move closer to the screen. “The woman in the blue dress.”
“Her name is Nannette Gaither,” Jules told him. “Shiloh’s working with her on the city’s annual ball for cancer research. The same function Caden is headlining. I joined them for lunch one day, and she seems nice, just a little too chatty for my taste.”
“I don’t care about her. I want you to zero on him—the man she’s with.”
Jules froze the screen on a close-up of the man in question. “I believe he’s Nannette’s fiancé. I can check with Shana to be certain. Why does he interest you?”
Dalton came back to the sofa and sat down, his gaze not leaving the television screen. She reached out and felt his body trembling, feeling his anger. “Dalton, what is it? What’s wrong?”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. “That’s him.”
“That’s who?”
He drew in a deep breath and shifted his gaze from the television to her. “I wondered if I would remember him. If I would be able to recognize him if I ever saw him again...and honestly, I never thought I would. He looks different, older, gray around the temples, a little weight around the middle, less hair, but it’s him.”
She swallowed tightly. She knew the answer to her next question but figured she needed to ask it, anyway. Not for her, but for Dalton. “Who is he, Dalton?”
He reached out and gripped her hand. As he stared into her eyes, she saw the hurt, the pain and the agony of the past trying to drown him when he said, “He’s the man who was with my mother at the boathouse that day.”
Thirty-Five
Dalton leaned back in the recliner and stared at Jules. He had managed to slip out of bed without waking her, deciding to sit in the chair and watch her sleep.
And think.
He thought he’d purged all the guilt inside him when he’d confessed to his father that he’d known about his mother’s affair. But seeing that man on the video had affected him in a bad way, and Jules had been right there to help see him through it.
She had held him tightly, telling him everything would be all right, and that what had happened was in the past, that his mother’s mistakes were not his. Jules had even talked him out of leaving right then to find the man and confront him.
He’d wanted to tell the guy he had been at the boathouse that day, hiding out in the closet. That he’d seen them naked, kissing in bed. He wondered how many other times the two had met there, right under his father’s nose at Sutton Hills? How had the man even gotten on the property without anyone knowing about it?
Jules made a sound, shifting in her sleep and kicking off the covers, something he noticed she did a lot. Dalton crossed the room and slid the covers back over her naked body. And then he stood there, leaning against the bedpost to look at her.
It had been raining earlier, practically pouring by the time she had turned off the video. He’d swept her into his arms and carried her into the bedroom. And then she had tried to do what time hadn’t been able to do—purge all the guilt from him. She had made love to him in ways they had experienced before, but something about tonight had been different. It had meaning. A deeper definition. It had been perfect.