The Ex-Girlfriends' Club

In fact, to her immeasurable shame and chagrin, she’d never been able to keep her wits about her when it came to Bennett, a fact that became glaringly evident with each botched attempt at resisting him. He crooked his finger, she came. The end. The emotional tug and off-the-charts attraction she’d always felt for him had never been governed by anything remotely close to rationale. It had been ruled by her heart and her body, completely excluding her brain and anything close to common sense.

He was Bennett—her Ben—and, as such, he would always hold a special place in her pathetically miserable broken heart.

Though he’d been a good kid, an A-plus eager-to-please—almost desperate-to-please, in retrospect—student and a budding athlete through the majority of their school years, something had happened to Bennett in their senior year of high school, and for no apparent reason he’d done an about-face.

For starters, he’d dumped her—right before prom, which at the time had been the mother of all humiliations—without reason, without provocation and without warning.

She’d been devastated, and to this day Eden still didn’t know why he’d done it.

Then his grades had plummeted, he’d started hanging out with the wrong crowd and within a month had become their ringleader. Most painful of all, he’d turned into a skirt-chasing fiend bent on bedding practically every girl in the county.

In short, the seemingly manic effort he’d put into toeing the line—a misguided attempt to atone for the bad reputation of his parents, she knew—had been nothing compared to the effort he’d put into crossing it.

He smoked. He drank. He cursed. He grew long hair and pierced his ear. Tame by regular standards but positively scandalous in their little hometown. A strange set of rules for a city named Hell, of all things, she’d admit, but just as rigid as any Bible Belt burg below the Mason-Dixon Line.

And the first time he’d tossed one of those heavy-lidded, baby-I-could-rock-your-world glances at her, she’d melted.

She’d fallen hook, line and sinker. Eden let go a shallow breath.

But Bennett Wilder had the rare ability to make a girl feel as though she were the only woman on the planet, and more importantly, the only one for him in the entire galaxy. When he’d looked at her and smiled—just smiled—the rest of the world had simply fallen away. Eden grimaced.

Unfortunately, being with Bennett meant that her world was in danger of being rocked, flipped, shattered and otherwise knocked for a loop and off its axis.

Prior to his move to what she’d dubbed his dark side, they’d been high school sweethearts. The term sounded so blasé, so casual—unsubstantial, even. And yet even now Eden couldn’t competently describe what that time—every minute spent with Ben—had meant to her.

Holding hands, planning futures, building dreams while she watched him whittle away on a piece of wood. He’d been funny, earnest, dark and sexy and, though she hadn’t realized it at the time, curiously grateful for being with her. She smiled sadly, remembering. He’d been her hero, her warrior, her confidant and best friend. And on a hot summer night by Fire Lake, he’d been her first. She’d been his, too, which for Eden had made it all the more sweet.

Call her stupid, but even after all this time and even knowing what she knew now—that years later they’d get back together and he’d dump her again without so much as a goodbye—she still believed that they’d had something special.

Regardless, that second breakup had been particularly hard to swallow. Four years at Georgia Tech followed by three in Atlanta as a probation officer had given Eden seven years’ worth of distance and perspective…which had promptly fallen by the wayside the minute she’d returned to Hell at twenty-five.

Come home, her dad, Hell’s longtime mayor, had pleaded. Hell needs you. More like he’d needed her, but Eden had been homesick all the same. She hadn’t necessarily missed her mother, who sadly she’d never been close to. But she’d missed her aunt Devi—her mother’s sister and surrogate mama—and all the people of her little town.

Just as she’d feared, though, she hadn’t been back in the apartment above her parents’ garage two weeks before she’d been right back in Bennett’s bed. Time hadn’t changed a thing. The pull, the need, the absolute unadulterated desire to be with him had been stronger than ever.

He’d been working construction for Ryan Mothershed at the time, and she’d happened upon him at the Ice Water Bar and Grill. An hour of playing pool and a single slaying glance later and predictably—poof!—her panties and her good sense had both fallen away. Given his particular talent for making her brain and her undergarments disappear—not to mention his own penchant for vanishing from her life—Eden had secretly dubbed him “the Magician.”

The only thing that never actually managed to fade was the way she felt about him. That, Eden thought with a tired smile, was purely magical.

She’d tried dating a bit while in college and later, working for Fulton County, but nothing had ever compared to the way Ben had made her feel. Sure, she could develop a certain fondness for other guys and drum up a bit of sexual enthusiasm, but it was barely more than superficial, and ultimately Eden had given up the business altogether. Other than the requisite ricochet lay after Bennett had left town three years ago, to help soothe her wounded pride, Eden hadn’t been with anyone since.

Her mother was constantly harping on her to find someone new, get married and produce some grandchildren, but Eden had decided those things simply weren’t in her cards and she’d come to terms with that. Did she long for a family? Sometimes get lonely? Of course. But settling wasn’t worth it, and she enjoyed her own company too much to compromise.

“Do you think we should let him know about this woman, Eden?” Kate asked, thankfully detouring her unproductive walk down memory lane.

Eden blinked, jarred back into the present. “Let him know about it?”

“Yeah,” Kate said. “Something’s not right.”

Eden rubbed an imaginary line from between her brows, tried to gather her focus, which was hard anytime her thoughts drifted to Bennett. She agreed that something wasn’t right, but the idea of contacting him didn’t feel right, either.

Distinctly wrong, in fact.

As far as she knew, Bennett had left town for good immediately after he’d left her bed and had put those woodworking skills he’d learned from his grandfather—Grady Wilder, another rounder, Eden thought with a fond smile—to very profitable use as an artisan catering to the Low Country’s upper crust.

Despite everything that had happened between them, Eden secretly warmed with pride at his success. She was equally proud of him and for him. She’d always known that he had a special talent, and seeing that recognized and knowing how validated it must make Bennett feel was especially gratifying.

By all accounts, he’d created a life as far removed from Hell as possible. Thanks to Kate, she was aware of his monthly treks to the Golden Gate Retirement Home to see his grandfather, but as far as she knew, he’d never darkened another door in town aside from that one.

Thankfully, and much to her shame and ultimate relief, Eden hadn’t seen him again.

Certainly there were times when she fantasized about what she would say if she ever ran into him. What girl who’d had her heart broken didn’t? But the idea of willingly contacting him after he’d walked away without so much as a goodbye had never occurred to her.

Eden considered herself relatively brave—she had to be in her line of work—but facing Bennett required an emotional courage and a sexual wherewithal she wasn’t altogether certain she possessed. In fact, past history had consistently proved otherwise. So her best course of action if she wanted to hang on to her heart, her underwear and the smallest modicum of self-respect demanded that she stay far, far away from him.

Furthermore, she had too much pride and, frankly, didn’t know whether she could get through the confrontation without breaking down and making a fool of herself. She swallowed.

True, he’d broken her heart in high school. But three years ago, when he’d walked away for the second time, he’d obliterated it.

She had no one to blame but herself, of course. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But knowing that certainly didn’t lessen the hurt. It only served to make her feel more stupid. In retrospect, giving him the second chance—the “by,” as Kate had called it—hadn’t been the wisest move she’d made, but per tradition, she hadn’t been able to resist and…she’d still believed in him.

In them, specifically.

And she’d been wrong.

The Web page had been her bitter brainchild, her way of injecting a little retribution toward Bennett, even if it had been conducted through the somewhat passive-aggressive venue of cyberspace. It had made her feel better—all of them, as a matter of fact. Just because she’d been the most recent casualty didn’t mean that the others’ heartbreak had been any less.

“Eden?”

She started. “Er…do you really think it’s that serious?” she asked Kate. “Serious enough to contact him?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Eden said, knowing as the words left her mouth that they were a lie. Kate was right. Something about Artemis525’s post stirred her instincts, and those instincts told her that the woman—whoever she was—didn’t appear to be wired correctly.

But did they need to call him? Warn him? Honestly, so long as he wasn’t in town she didn’t see any reason to alert him to the threat. Between the psycho’s local ISP address—meaning she was using a local Internet service provider—and Bennett’s reputation, she felt as if this chick was a hometown girl. She shared her opinion with Kate.

“What do you think?” she asked, hoping against hope that her friend wouldn’t call her on being a coward, an agonizing label which set her teeth on edge.

Aside from Bennett, she’d never been afraid of anything in her life.

Kate paused, then let go a breath. “I guess you’re right. But I’m going to let the other nurses know to call me if I’m not on shift the next time he visits Grady.” A significant chuckle drifted over the line. “I’ll let him know about her.”

Eden chewed the smile lurking at the corner of her lip. “So you’re going to tell him about the club?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I?” Kate replied, sounding particularly pleased with the idea. Though Kate hadn’t been a Bennett casualty per se, she’d been there to nurse Eden through her heartbreak. At an even five feet, with short dark hair and pale blue eyes, Kate was small but fierce. Like Tinkerbell, Eden had often thought.

Eden grinned, somewhat heartened by the idea that Bennett—whom she was relatively certain didn’t know the site existed because she hadn’t felt the wrath of his anger pinging her from Savannah—was going to find out what she and the other girls had done. A perverse thrill whipped through her imagining his handsome outraged face.