“What?” he snapped, his fingers tightening unintentionally.
Gia reached up and wrenched his hand from her arm, but her voice was still gentle when she said, “Her training is done. She has learned all she needs to know to survive as one of us and she has now gone home to her husband.”
Justin stared at her with bewilderment and then shook his head faintly. “But . . . how?”
“I gave her money. She took a taxi to the bus station. Her bus leaves in five minutes. She is on the way home.”
Justin’s mouth snapped closed and he rushed past her, his only thought to get to that bus station and stop Holly.
“You’ll never make it to the station in time,” Gia said patiently, following him out of the nightclub. “I deliberately waited to tell you until it would be too late for you to stop her.”
“Why?” He whirled to scowl at her furiously. “What the hell have I ever done to you that would make you do this to me?”
Gia shook her head sadly and walked forward to rub his arm. “I didn’t do this to hurt you, Justin. I did this to help you. She is drenched in guilt over your shared dreams and too angry right now to be reasonable. The sooner she goes home, the sooner she will realize that there is no way she can make her marriage work now that she is immortal. And that means the sooner she will return to you. This way she left before she or you could say something that you both might later regret.”
Justin turned his head away and then asked, “Do you really think her marriage won’t work out now?”
“Of course. She can read his mind and control him. A relationship that is so unbalanced cannot work.”
“What if he is a possible life mate to her too?” he asked, naming his biggest fear.
“I don’t think so,” Gia said with slow certainty.
Justin immediately turned back to look at her. “Why?”
“Because in her thoughts her upset is that she cheated, even that she cheated on her husband, but never once did she think she had cheated on James.”
“But James is her husband,” Justin pointed out with confusion.
“Yes, but she thinks of him as her husband, not as James, the man she loves,” she tried to explain, and then waved that away and said, “Never mind, only a girl would understand. The point is I do not think it will take long for her to realize the marriage cannot work. So the sooner she gets home the better. And you have to let her go so that she can see that and return to you free of all doubts and reservations.”
Justin narrowed his eyes. “This is sounding like that stupid ‘if you love her let her go’ bit.”
“I suppose it is,” Gia said with a crooked smile. “In this instance it is true.”
Sighing miserably, Justin glanced to Dante and Tomasso who had been silent throughout.
“She’s a woman,” Dante said with a shrug. “Women always seem to understand this nonsense better than us poor men.”
“Women know women,” Tomasso added.
Shaking his head, Justin turned to continue on to the car, saying, “Come on. Let’s get back to Jackie and Vincent’s. I could use something to eat. Maybe ice cream.”
“Ice cream is good for drowning sorrows,” Dante said approvingly.
“Spoken like a woman,” Justin muttered as he pushed the button on the key fob to unlock the SUV. Christ, Holly was gone and he was left with two eating machines and a sprightly little Italian female who . . . who had his best interests at heart, Justin told himself wearily as he got behind the steering wheel.
Sixteen
Holly paid the taxi driver the fare for the ride home from the bus station and slid quickly out of the car, wincing as bright sunlight struck her face. It had been a long exhausting ten hours and three transfers since she’d got on the bus in Los Angeles and she hadn’t slept a wink the whole way. Instead, she’d spent the entire journey mentally beating herself for everything from dream cheating on her husband to running with scissors.
Two weeks ago her life had been settled. She was married to a man she’d grown up with, had always loved, and could never imagine cheating on. She was working on the last year of her degree with the promise of a good career before her . . . and she was mortal. Now she had a marriage everyone seemed to think would quickly crumble to pieces, she had cheated on her husband, in her mind if not physically, and she was immortal.