Legally in Love Boxed Set 1

by Jennifer Griffith

  Josh breathed in and out for several long seconds, and then he said, “You’ve slain me, Morgan.”

  “Slain you?” Was this some kind of play-dead? She waited another long moment for his response.

  He opened his eyes and looked up at her through his lashes. “It’s like this.” He huffed out a breath. “We came into this with a clear purpose: get the grant and get through school—you, so Tory could get started; me, so I could graduate and join Brielle in the international policy career.”

  Hearing that other girl’s name was a knife in Morgan’s heart. “I know, which is what made it so wrong of me to be pining for you all that time.”

  “Pining? You were pining?”

  “Why do you think I made you dinner every night?”

  “You’re nice? Like to cook? Can’t see food go to waste?”

  “Those were excuses I made out loud, but it was really because I wanted to show you how much I was in love with you—but without telling you in so many words, fearing it would drive you off.” Here she went, spilling all her secrets to him, even the worst, most closely kept secrets of her soul. “I’ve never cooked for anyone else in my life. I thought I could win you by playing wife.” Speaking of driving him off, these words were going to send him shooting away—sure as anything. But it was time. He was right—this discussion and truth couldn’t wait another day. She had to come completely clean. So she pressed on, biting her lip until a little blood drew. Being honest was easy—just like opening a vein.

  “On that one morning, after we went to see your family, I couldn’t stand it anymore that you didn’t know how I felt, and I threw myself at you in the kitchen. You kissed back, and for a minute, I let myself hope you felt something for me, too. It’s so desperate-sounding now, I know, but you’d become something to me—something huge.”

  “I had?”

  “Josh, do you know that before I met you, I could never speak to a man I was remotely interested in? I would go into what Tory called the Conversation Coma, and I’d just be a blank. Guys would take an interest in me, ask me out, and then I was the most boring girl they’d ever met, and no one ever called me twice. I was an empty shell, as far as any guy worth knowing could tell. It was only the jerks who didn’t care, so I was stuck with them for years, getting the worst of their treatment, and feeling the worst about myself. Then…you.”

  “Me?” Josh’s eyes were open. “I never saw that in you. You were always just yourself.”

  “Right? I did have that first blackout when I was with you, and I was sure it was happening all over again. But then, somehow, no.” Her tears dried a little as she explained, but her heart was warm, and his cologne was spicy. “You just put me at ease. Maybe because of Brielle—because if I knew you weren’t even available, I didn’t have to think of you as a possibility. I could always talk to non-possibilities, like that old caretaker at Estrella Court, for instance, or professors, or people at Veg-Out.”

  “So I was like a customer. Just a business deal.”

  “Maybe I saw you as safe.” She laughed, and it again came out that high-pitched giggle she hated herself for. But when she did it, Josh put a hand on her waist, pressing her body deeper against the softness of the bedding. Why hadn’t she been sleeping on this cloud all this time? What a waste of a perfect mattress.

  “Oh, I am most definitely not safe.” Josh suddenly got that devilish grin she craved, showing those excellent teeth. “Not when it comes to you. I had to beg George to give me the night shift so I wouldn’t throw you down on this bed and complicate everything.”

  Morgan bit her lip. “But, in a way, wouldn’t it have uncomplicated everything?”

  Josh’s eyes closed again, and he rolled onto his back, his hands under his head and looking up at the ceiling. Morgan nestled up against him, her head in the nook of his shoulder and chest.

  “Morgan, these past few days have been incredible. You have been incredible. The whale watching, finding agates, the time we’ve just spent together. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it has been the best week of my life.”

  Morgan gulped. It was how she felt exactly, but she didn’t interrupt.

  “If—”

  “If, what?”

  “If I hadn’t met Brielle first, made those commitments to her, I’d have been all over you the first time I saw you in that gravel parking lot climbing out of your junked truck. I’d have gotten your number and taken you to all the finest student-affordable dinners in a ten-mile radius. I wouldn’t have taken no for an answer. I would have possibly even proposed for real by now.”

  Morgan gulped. This could have all been hers, if she had just gone about things in the right order, instead of screwing up so massively by trying to go through the back door.

  “Are you saying…?”

  “That I’m in love with you?” Josh reached over and stroked her hair. “It’s not something I’ve felt very often in my life. But I know when I’m with you, I don’t want to be with anyone else. And I know when I’m with you, I want to be a far better version of myself, and make everything in your life the best it can be.”

  “It sounds like how I define love, Josh.” She was so close to him, she could hear his heart’s pattern, and as he’d spoken it had sped up, and now it was thudding low and quick against her ear. He rubbed his hand down her arm, letting it come to a rest at the narrow part of her waist before her hip curved up. Her own heart had a race of its own going on, as her mind fought what her body wanted to do.

  Josh finally nodded. “If only.”

  The words hit Morgan like a bucket of cold water. He was lamenting losing her, but implying its inevitability.

  With the most supreme sacrifice she’d ever made, she swallowed hard. “I know you promised her you’d give her New Year’s Eve. It was after we’d planned to go out, but I can see now what you need to do.” She sat up, almost feeling like a surgery had to separate herself from him. “Go to her. Give her the best of you. I can’t be your second choice, Josh. It hurts far too much as it is.” Now the tears sprang back and came coursing out of her eyes. “I’ll be packing up the house, so don’t look for me tonight, but just meet me at Seagram’s in the morning. We can tell him then what we’ve decided.” She was on her feet, sliding back into her heels, smoothing her hair and the folds of her dress over her curves. Man, the guy was giving her up—and she was insisting on it. Tory would call her an idiot, and Morgan wouldn’t argue. “I hope, someday, someone will be as loyal to me as you are to what you know is right. Brielle is so lucky.”

  Morgan was a wretched fool.

  She shut the door behind her.

  ∞∞∞

  Josh sat stunned when the door gently closed behind her, his heart dying as she left him, insisting that he go to a fate he didn’t want, all based on a duty he didn’t think he was wise now to have been keeping, even mentally.

  Morgan loves me. The words ricocheted in his mind, paralyzing him, not letting him jump off the bed and go after her, which he should. All the kindnesses she’d shown him were for him. They weren’t just some kind of generalized niceness—they were expressions of love all along, and he’d cheapened them by not recognizing them for what they really were. The innermost parts of him had always held a tiny spark of hope that this was the case, but he’d covered those sparks, sure that it couldn’t be.

  The way she’d looked in his eyes as she admitted to never being able to speak to another man besides him was like she’d opened a door to her soul and let him look inside. When she did, he realized he’d seen her soul a few times before, and it was beautiful. She was allowing only Josh alone to see it. No other man had been granted access to those precious sights. The thought made his shoulders straighten and broaden. I’m her man. That’s basically what she just told me.

  The power of that realization shot adrenaline through him.

  All this time he’d mentally compared the differences between Brielle and Morgan, sometimes thinking what he wanted was the never-ending Spy-
Versus-Spy exhilaration that the idea of Brielle provided. But the truth was, Brielle had never let him into her world. She told him it existed, said it was exciting, but he’d never participated in it, and certainly never got a sense that she would give him a part of herself. Wasn’t that the essence of marriage? A unification?

  He needed to think this out. He let his science mind take over and make a comparison based on chemical formulas—somewhere he felt comfortable.

  Say, for instance, that he and Morgan were sulfur monoxide—Josh the sulfur and Morgan the oxygen, the two of them sharing a covalent bond, each giving two electrons, completing each other’s outer shell. Equal sharing, equal sacrifice, something different and rare—and that in certain circumstances that had even been known to glow—created when combined.

  Compare that to the bond he always imagined he and Brielle shared: carbon sulfide, with Josh still the sulfur, but Brielle the carbon. In fact, his chemistry mind had always thought of her as carbon, the building block of organic life. As carbon sulfide their bond was a triple bond, where they’d shared so many more electrons to complete each other. But now that he considered it more closely, that sharing hadn’t been equal.

  All along, he’d thought of the carbon giving, giving, giving to his sulfur, just like Brielle had to give and give while she waited for Josh to become what she needed him to be.

  Suddenly, though, the thought occurred to him Brielle hadn’t been the giving one in their covalent bond. Instead, Brielle’s carbon had taken more of his sulfur’s electrons, demanding them to fill her shell. And despite the triple bonding to complete their electron shells, it wasn’t as natural a covalence as the equal sharing between him and Morgan’s sulfur monoxide, and it was easily broken down.

  Brielle insisted that if she was going to accept Josh as her partner, he’d have to be the exact person she dictated, do the job she did, have the same interests she had, make the same hobby choices, even. He’d have to set aside all his passion for energy research, snuff out the candle of his inventiveness, and focus on the history of political relations between countries whose names he couldn’t pronounce—and live in those countries, where he couldn’t even get access to the chemicals and equipment that let him do the research that really turned him into a thinking, creating, world-changing man.

  Josh had to do what he had to do—it was time to go to Brielle and let her know that things were over and done. He’d wasted too much of Morgan’s time already by not being honest with himself and not opening up to her when she was giving so much of herself to him. It was time.

  With a rush of excitement, he dialed Morgan’s number. She didn’t pick up, but he couldn’t leave something this huge on a message. He needed to be face to face with her, or at least speak to her on the phone.

  Yes. This was right. This was so right.

  He dialed her again. Surely she’d pick up now.

  No. Well, he’d take care of things and go to her as soon as he was free.

  He pulled out of the driveway and headed through town to the coast. He needed to steel his nerves, figure out his line of argument for when he met Brielle. He’d have to bring years of expectation to an end, and he knew it would be tough for him, despite the fact he was the one breaking up, not the one getting dumped, maybe even tougher, especially if Brielle was the new Brielle with the vulnerable side she’d shown him last week.

  Gazing out in the waves, he imagined the whales’ passing, the agates roiling and being polished, and the way Morgan looked when she taught him about them.

  Echoes of something Morgan said weeks ago came wafting back to him. Making a man in his own image was God’s job, not a girlfriend’s.

  Morgan was right.

  She might be soft-spoken, she might not be setting the world ablaze with her so-called big plans for change, or defending the world against terrorist threats, but Morgan was wise. She had good counsel for him. She didn’t throw it in his face or argue about it. She said it once, and then she let it drop, allowing him to eventually (and in this case after far too long) come to her very wise conclusion in his own time.

  Morgan would never force him to be what she insisted he be. She’d take him as he was and encourage him to be the best version of himself, jumping for joy when he succeeded, wrapping him in her loving arms when he fell short of his goal.

  And feeding him, body and soul, every single day he was in her presence.

  Morgan. Morgan Clark. Her gentleness didn’t shout at the world, it whispered.

  How would I like my own children to be raised? What kind of life do I want to live?

  He glanced out at the ocean and an earth-shattering realization hit him—why Bronco couldn’t stand Brielle, and why Brielle fought so hard against Bronco: they had the same personality. One came in a much cuter package with freckles and spiral curls in her hair, and for the time being her energy was focused solely on her career and the larger global threats—but life evolved. Time would come where their world would be within the walls of their home, and then how would Brielle’s blazing temperament flare out? Josh pictured char and ashes.

  If Brielle did ever intend to focus on home and hearth. Did she? Josh didn’t actually know. Every conversation about the future with her had centered on living in Pakistan and rooting out the threats there, or on their lives in some Sub-Saharan African outpost, fortifying the U.S.-installed government against warlords and insurgents. Children didn’t pop up in that picture ever, unlike the many times he and Morgan had talked about their own childhoods, and her plans to make her own kids’ childhoods happy.

  The old crossroads loomed in front of him, but this time there was a blinding neon sign pointing the way Josh ought to go. No, the way he wanted to go. Forget about duty and previous commitments and who saw whom first. For the first time he could see beyond the horizon to the end of the road with Morgan, and at it stood a vast green valley of happiness. All he had to do was take his first step down it, and then never look back.

  But he’d have to tell Brielle.

  He called Chip instead.

  “Hey, man. Happy New Year.” Chip must be watching a movie. It was loud in the background. “I’m really glad you called. You and Morgan going to come up tomorrow morning and watch the Rose Parade with us? And then the game? Tell her to bring some of that rice stuff, and we’ll all try to play it cool, not gush all over her about it.”

  “She makes some other good things.”

  “Oh, tell her to bring those, too.”

  “Can’t, man. Sorry.” They had to go see Seagram. And he had to do a lot before that.

  “Dang. That’s a bummer. I mean, we like you, but we love Morgan. How did you get so lucky? She’s amazing.”

  “I know.” For the first time, Josh said this with conviction. He wanted to go on and on about it, but he’d called Chip with a question, and he’d better ask it. “But I’ve got girl trouble.”

  “What? You do? I can’t imagine in what universe Morgan could be trouble.”

  “She’s not. Brielle came back.”

  Chip groaned. Josh was taken aback. He hadn’t known Brielle was groan-worthy.

  “Not her again. I swear, we all thought you made a slick escape. Heather and I have talked it over a thousand times, how close that was. She’s the worst.”

  She was? Josh didn’t necessarily want to hear that. “I have to see her. She’s here from Germany.”

  “Send her back!” Chip hollered this. “Okay, okay, sorry. I can tell you’re really into Morgan, and that’s… just, thank goodness you’re finally seeing light and truth. But you have to cut that other hernia of a girl loose.”

  “I promised her I’d spend New Year’s Eve with her at her friend’s wedding. Morgan told me I should go to her.”

  “Morgan did? What is she smoking?”

  “Nothing but barbecue brisket. But she is right, Chip. I did make commitments to Brielle. Morgan deserves a man who keeps commitments he makes.”

  “That’s for darn sure.” The backgr
ound noise around Chip dampened. He must be finally taking this seriously. Josh relaxed. Chip had his back. He’d know what to do. “Morgan is by far the best thing you’ve ever done, man. Do not endanger that, no matter what she says.”

  “I know she is. I love her. She’s amazing. But Brielle—”

  “Brielle is mean.” Chip didn’t let him finish explaining the situation.

  “She is?”

  “She doesn’t care about you. That’s the whole reason all of us hated her, Bronco most of all.” Chip sounded exasperated. “You might think Bronco is your worst enemy, and he’s no stellar paragon of virtue, but he did the best thing he knew how to do to get that woman out of your life. He’s just not a very creative manipulator. I told him he should just tell you he didn’t like her and why—that she was trying to turn you into her Mini-Me, the male version, and steer the vehicle of your life in every way—but he said you’d never listen, and he would do whatever it took to keep you away from her. That’s why he cut you off. He figured she was a gold digger. That’s why he kept you from getting jobs to pay for your school in her ridiculous life-plan for you which you obviously hated, and why he was bent on getting her away by lining up that job in Germany for her. He figured you’d find someone else while she was gone.”

  “What?” All the air sucked out of Josh’s lungs. “Bronco lined that up?” No.

  “Duh. How else would she get that job? At an embassy? Please. No one is going to hire anyone as irritating as Brielle Dupree without being leveraged. Bronco spent nearly all his political capital getting rid of her. Saving you.”

  Josh’s mouth went dry. “I had no idea.”

  “I know. Bronco, believe it or not, was too nervous about losing his relationship with you to tell you any of this.”

  “Well, it would have made me hate him. He was right about that.” But Josh had hated him anyway for the past three years while all this stewed. Somehow, though, the knowledge that Bronco would go to such incredible lengths to protect Josh lit a candle in his heart, the first light of respect for his father he’d felt in a long time. “But I can at least see his motives.”