by Lauren Layne
“Does it surprise you that I’m marrying Audrey?” he asked. “Or that I’m marrying at all? Because I seem to remember you made it quite clear I wasn’t marriage material.”
“You weren’t marriage material then,” she clarified softly. “You had some, um, growing up to do. Manhattan was your playground, and you treated it as such. You and I both knew you wouldn’t be happy settling down with me in DC.”
You never even asked.
But the thought lacked its usual punch of bitterness. For years he’d been bothered that Liz had underestimated him the way his parents had. Assuming that because he was quick to smile, because he prioritized fun and liked to do things on his own timeline in his own way, that he wasn’t serious about anything, or anyone.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have been happy there,” he agreed. “Maybe New York has always been my place. And maybe Audrey’s always been the one.”
He said it to push Liz’s buttons, but the moment the words were out of his mouth, Clarke felt thunderstruck. Not because the statement felt absurd, but because it didn’t.
Maybe Audrey’s always been the one.
Stunned, Clarke sat back all the way in his chair, finally registering what had been nagging at him for weeks. That in spite of Elizabeth and his mother’s manipulations, and even with the sheer savage annoyance of Scandal Boy, Clarke had never felt more centered than he had this past month.
As though his life was finally on track.
Clarke gave a quick shake of his head. Clearly this whole game he and Audrey were playing had started messing with his mind.
Elizabeth studied him closely, then frowned as though frustrated he wasn’t an open book.
“Clarke.” She started to reach across the desk, then, sensing her mistake in trying to touch him, pulled her hand back and simply looked at him steadily. “I miss you.”
Clarke couldn’t figure out if he was surprised by the announcement or not. On one hand, he wasn’t. Liz hadn’t been exactly subtle in her attempts to reconnect with him recently. But on the other hand, the Liz he’d known, or at least thought he’d known, had rarely expressed emotions, much less vulnerability, and he couldn’t quite figure out how he felt about this whole thing.
“Why?” he asked.
She laughed. “Why? Because you’re, well… we were good together.”
“Were we?”
“Clarke.” She was exasperated. “You know we were. We dated for a year. You don’t stay together that long if there’s not something there.”
“True. You also don’t leave town if there’s something there.”
“You know I had to leave. The opportunity—”
“You couldn’t turn it down, I understand that. I respected it. But you made it clear I didn’t have a part in that chapter of your life. Long distance wasn’t on the table, and you didn’t ask me to come along for the ride.”
“Would you have?”
He looked down at the desk, considering. “I don’t know,” he answered finally. “But the fact that you didn’t ask spoke volumes.”
She inhaled and held her breath for a moment, before releasing it slowly. “Well, I’m asking now. Not for you to move to DC with me, but to give us another chance, here in New York. To finish what we started.”
And with that, Clarke knew how he felt about this woman: gently indifferent.
“You’re too late, Liz,” he said softly, standing to indicate the end of the conversation. “I’m marrying Audrey.”
“Oh, please,” she snapped. “You’re only pretending to marry her to get back at your mother for bossing you around, and maybe to punish me, but—”
“You’re wrong,” Clarke interrupted sharply. “My relationship with Audrey doesn’t have anything to do with you. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I have to meet my fiancée for a cake-tasting appointment. I’m sure you remember your way out.”
* * *
The bakery was elite, even by Manhattan standards. Clarke had to get past a security guard in the lobby, an intercom outside a locked door, and now a receptionist who seemed to be on the verge of asking for identification after he’d said his name.
“Ms. Tate didn’t indicate that anyone would be joining her,” the blonde said coolly, giving him a once-over.
“I told her I couldn’t, but I managed to rearrange my schedule.”
“Hmm.” The receptionist looked less than impressed.
“Is she here yet?” Clarke asked patiently. “Actually, you know what? I’ll just call her and let her explain to you that I’m her fiancé, and then you can explain why I’m late to join her because I’m still out here in the lobby.”
He pulled out his phone, and the receptionist relented with a sigh. “This way, please.”
Clarke followed her down a short hallway, unsurprised to see that the space, while small, was swanky. Glossy photographs of elaborate cakes lined the walls, and the lighting was soft and strategic instead of the usual harsh fluorescent light in a Midtown high-rise. It looked nothing like any bakery he’d ever been in and didn’t smell like one, either.
“It doesn’t smell like cake,” he pointed out.
The icy blonde didn’t turn around. “This is our showroom and tasting space. The baking takes place elsewhere.”
She didn’t add the word obviously, but Clarke heard the silent addition just the same.
The receptionist stopped and motioned him through a doorway.
Audrey sat at a round table, preoccupied with her phone, and her eyes widened in surprise when she saw him. “Hey! What are you doing here?”
The blonde pounced. “You weren’t expecting him?”
“Oh, for the love of…” Irritated at being treated like a person of interest at a wedding cake shop, Clarke marched toward Audrey and, planting both hands on the arm of her chair, bent down and stamped his mouth over hers.
He meant the kiss to be cursory and brief, and solely for the benefit of the Stormtrooper blonde in the doorway, but the second his lips touched hers, they were in no hurry to leave.
Clarke realized then what he’d actually been hoping for with this kiss was confirmation that the kiss the night of the engagement party had been a fluke and that the addictive sweetness of Audrey’s lips had been his imagination.
This kiss shot that hope to hell. Her lips parted slightly in surprise, and Clarke had to fight the urge to deepen the kiss all the way, to kiss her for real. Strange, that as well as he knew Audrey, as much as he thought he knew everything about her, he hadn’t known this. That her lips would be so soft or feel so… right.
He forced himself to pull back, his point more than proven. Sensing Audrey’s confusion and avoiding her gaze, he turned around and gave the receptionist his cockiest grin. See? I belong to her.
Finally satisfied that Clarke was actually supposed to be here, the blonde gave them both a polite nod. “A team member will be with you as soon as possible to begin the tasting. We’re running just slightly behind schedule. Can I get you anything to drink? Coffee? Tea? Wine?”
The wine was extremely tempting, given how his day was going so far, but he and Audrey both shook their heads. Audrey waited until the receptionist’s clicking heels faded away, then gave him a searching look. “What was that about?”
“What is this, the Fort Knox of bakeries?” he grumbled, hooking the leg of the chair with his shoe and pulling it out so he could sit beside her. “I seriously thought she was going to hit the panic button because my name wasn’t on her approved list.”
“Well, you told me you had a meeting and couldn’t make it, so I told her I was alone.”
“I did have a meeting,” he said, rubbing his temples.
“It got canceled?”
Something like that.
In reality, he’d been so thrown off balance by Liz’s visit and the strange storm of realizations it had wrought, that he’d stomped out of the York office building and was halfway to the cake shop before he remembered the reason he’d declined the tasting appointment
in the first place.
He’d thought about turning back around to take the scheduled vendor meeting, but instead had called one of the guys on his team who’d been requesting more responsibility in an unsubtle bid for a promotion and asked him to take the meeting on his behalf.
“You okay?” she asked.
Clarke lifted his head, intending to tell her about the office drop-in from Elizabeth, but then… didn’t. Audrey and Clarke didn’t not have secrets, per se, but they also stopped short of telling each other all the details of their romantic lives. They tried as best they could to make their friendship and respective relationships work alongside each other, either with the rare double date when they’d both been seriously seeing someone at the same time, or the slightly more uncomfortable third-wheel scenario, when he’d been with Elizabeth and she’d been with Brayden.
However, they’d never shared intimate details of the physical or emotional variety. They limited it to the highlight reel—creepy Randy and his room of mirrors or the time Clarke had gone home with a woman who’d had twelve birds and their cages in her bedroom. But that was the shallow stuff—the entertaining bits.
The emotional stuff? Not so much. Clarke had known, of course, that Brayden’s death and betrayal had ravaged Audrey, but her friendship with Claire and Naomi had been her rock during that turmoil. As for him, his only serious relationship had been Elizabeth, and he’d told Audrey next to nothing about her leaving. Not about the conversation leading up to it and not about the fact that it had hurt.
She reached out and gently pressed the tip of her index finger between his eyebrows. “What is this? You’re frowning. You never frown.”
He instinctively lifted his hand to capture her fingers in his. He didn’t let go. “Sorry. Rough day.”
“Well, you’ve chosen the right way to make it better. This cake company is super exclusive, and the cake itself is insanely delicious. They made this bourbon pecan cake for Diana Collier’s wedding, and it was—”
“Dree,” he interrupted, his grip tightening on her fingers. “How long are we doing this?”
“The cake tasting? It shouldn’t last more than an hour or so—”
“Not the cake. This.” He gestured between them. “How long are we keeping up the charade?”
Audrey exhaled slowly. “I don’t know. It’s all starting to feel a little real, isn’t it?”
He gave her a half smile. “Let’s just say in the early days of our little game, people would tell me congratulations, and it would take me a full ten seconds to remember what they were referring to. Now, they tell me congratulations, and I actually half listen when they start offering marriage advice. Now, it takes me a full ten seconds to remember that I’m not actually getting married.”
She laughed. “I know what you mean. I spent an hour on the phone with the wedding planner this morning. I felt guilty until I went back and looked at her contract and confirmed that she’ll get paid no matter what. And paid quite well, I might add.”
“Contract? You signed a contract with the Wedding Belles?”
Audrey groaned and tugged her hand away from his to cover her face with both palms. “I know. I know! I’ve officially lost all touch with reality and control of the situation.”
So have I. He sat back in his chair, tapping his fingers against the table. It didn’t even particularly bother him that they’d spent so much time, energy, and money on their charade. What bothered him was that the further along they got in this game of pretend, the less it was about the wedding, and he was starting to see all too clearly what it could be like after the wedding.
It was increasingly easy to imagine what that life with Audrey would be like.
“Hey,” Clarke said, waiting until she’d lowered her hands so he could see her face. “Did you mean it the other night at dinner? When you said you weren’t planning to get married?”
“Yes,” she said automatically. “If the past year and a half have taught me anything, it’s that while the idea of Prince Charming and happily ever after is pretty great, it’s hardly without risk. And when those things go wrong, they can go really wrong. The thrill of falling in love isn’t worth the risk of ending up on the wrong side of the divorce statistic, or worse, getting your heart shattered.”
Clarke’s brain was humming with protests. What if the marriage’s foundation was on something far more stable than any romantic love? What if it was founded on a lifelong friendship?
Clarke felt an idea forming, one of the better ideas he’d ever had.
He opened his mouth. “Audrey—”
“There’s the happy couple!”
Audrey and Clarke both turned toward the doorway, where a tall, wiry man wearing a mint-green bow tie sashayed over to them, hand outstretched.
“I am so sorry to make you wait,” he said, giving them both a handshake before sitting down at the table beside them. “We had a bit of a frosting emergency. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s all hands on deck. Now,” he said, opening an enormous binder, “I have your profile right here, and it says you haven’t yet narrowed down your cake flavors, which is good news for me, as it means we’ll get to sample all of them this afternoon…”
Audrey immediately leaned forward in excitement as Clarke slumped back slightly, tuning out as the exuberant employee droned on about ganache and raspberry coulis.
For the life of him, Clarke couldn’t figure out if he was relieved or disappointed that the man had interrupted what he’d been about to propose to his best friend.
Chapter Twelve
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29
Clarke returned to the office an hour later, his temper vastly improved by large quantities of sugar and the usual mood boost he got by spending time with Audrey. Even with plenty unsaid between them, even as he felt himself rethinking everything, one thing never changed: simply being around her, Clarke always felt all the shit of the world fade away.
The reprieve from the real world, however, was temporary. No sooner had Clarke’s ass settled back into his desk chair than his assistant buzzed his phone.
He picked up. “Yup.”
“Mr. West would like to see you in his office.”
Not your father. Always Mr. West would like to see you.
Priscilla had always made a habit of referring to Clarke’s father as Mr. West. Though, now that he thought about it, Clarke wouldn’t be surprised if the instructions came straight from Alton himself, in an attempt to maintain distance. It’s not as though Alton had ever been eager to call attention to the fact that he and Clarke shared a bloodline.
“Let me guess,” Clarke said, tiredly rubbing his eyes, “he expects me up there ASAP.”
He heard the smile in his assistant’s voice. “Ten minutes ago, actually. I called your cell. And texted.”
“Sorry about that,” he said, pulling his phone out of his suit pocket and taking it off the Do Not Disturb setting.
The stairwells in Manhattan high-rises didn’t get much use, save for the occasional torturous fire drill, but since his VP title meant he was a mere one floor beneath his father’s top-of-the-top office space, he’d taken to using the staircase. Partially because taking the elevator one floor seemed lazy and indulgent, partially because the cold stairwell was sometimes the only solitude he got during the workday.
But mostly because it drove his father crazy.
The staircase ensured Clarke entered the executive floor behind the desk of Alton’s assistant. He had nothing against Roberta, but one-upping his father was a rare bonus Clarke enjoyed taking advantage of.
Today, however, Clarke was denied the pleasure of catching his dad off guard. Alton’s office door was open, and instead of looking surprised to see Clarke, he seemed to be waiting for him.
Clarke lifted his eyebrows. He’d never known his father to wait on anyone. He’d never been able to figure out if his father was a study in indifference or actually was indifferent. Indifferent to his wife, indifferent to his son… indif
ferent to his whole damn life outside of work.
Alton nodded in relief when he saw Clarke. “Come in. Shut the door.”
Clarke did as instructed, then bowed. “You rang?”
“Cut the crap, son.”
Clarke did his best to hide is surprise. Alton had called him son plenty over the years, but almost never in the office. He gave his father a closer look, noting that he seemed almost distracted.
“Everything okay?” Clarke asked.
“Sure. Sure. Sit.”
Clarke did, a little unnerved and surprised he hadn’t been summoned to receive marching orders or to answer a barrage of questions about his quarterly report or to get lectured about how if he really wanted the company, he had to stay hungry.
“You were out to lunch?” Alton asked awkwardly.
“Sure.” Cake counted as lunch, right? Clarke refused to explain how he chose to spend his time. He wasn’t some fresh-out-of-college analyst. He didn’t need his schedule managed by his boss or his dad.
Again, his father surprised him, nodding agreeably instead of pointing out that Maria always ate at her desk, or not at all, and if Clarke wanted the company as much as she did, he’d survive on PowerBars and Tums, too.
“How was Audrey?”
Clarke sat back in his chair, tapping his fingers together as he studied his dad. “How do you know I was with Audrey?”
“Seemed logical. What with her being your future wife and all.”
His father’s gaze locked on Clarke’s as he said it, a slight mocking emphasis on future wife. Well, that answered his question. His dad may be aloof, but he wasn’t entirely oblivious. He knew all about the battle of wills happening between his son and his wife.
“You wanted something?” Clarke asked, not feeling up to playing whatever game Alton was trying to play. He already had his hands full managing his mother.