One Night - Forbidden Hearts Series Book 1

35. The Cats Out of the Bag

"What the fuck?" I said to myself as I sat in my truck outside of the bar called Down the Rabbit Hole.

Danielle mentioned to me earlier that she was riding with Lanie up here to hang with the girls. I came up here, hoping to surprise her, and it turns out that I'm the one who was surprised.

Jackson and Anne were currently lip-locked and all over each other in the parking lot. A dozen questions went through my mind as I watched them. How long has this been going on? Who knew about it? Most importantly, why didn't they tell me?

Since we had an open relationship, Anne was free to see other people, but this was Jackson. My brother. Now that I thought about it, Jackson knew exactly where to find her the day that she got into an argument with her mom and broke her phone.

I thought back further and remembered when he and I were on the plane to Hawaii and he was asking me questions about her. At the time, I didn't think anything of it. Now, it made total sense. Has this been going on since Hawaii? Possibly before?

I cursed under my breath when I thought about when we all went over the cake choices yesterday. They had both disappeared from the dining room. That must have been what they were doing.

I watched as they got into Jackson's truck and pulled off. I needed to find out exactly what was going on here. I parked my truck and waited a few minutes before going inside the bar. I immediately spotted Lanie and Danielle sitting at a high top and started to walk over.

I was waiting to see their reaction when they saw me. Lanie looked over at me and her eyes widened with surprised an alarm. Oh, yeah, they both knew about this. I watched as Lanie tapped Danielle on the shoulder and pointed towards me. She had the same expression as Lanie did.

Danielle quickly composed herself before she slid from the bar stool and came up to me with a smile. "Hey, what are you doing here?"

I didn't want to make a scene here. And this wasn't the place to talk about this. I smile at her as I answered, "I wanted to surprise you."

She smiled shyly at me. "Well, you definitely did." She glanced to Lanie before she looked back at me. "Let me say bye to Lanie and I'll be ready."

I watched as she walked over to Lanie and they exchanged words quietly. After a few minutes, they hugged and said goodbye.

"Ready?" She asked when she walked back over to me.

"Yeah, let's get out of here."

We walked outside to my truck and I started driving in the direction of her apartment. She was quiet for a while and I'm pretty sure she knew there was a good chance that I saw Anne and Jackson outside of the bar.

"I have a question for you," I said and she looked over at me. "Is there something going on between Anne and Jackson?"

She didn't say anything at first. I glanced over at her and she let out a long breath. "You saw them, didn't you?"

At least she didn't lie to my face. "Yeah, I did. How long has this been going on, Danielle? How long have they been sneaking around behind my back?"

"Ryan, you need to talk to talk to Harper about this. She and Jackson were going to tell you--"

"But they didn't. Are you really not going to tell me?"