by Kat Cantrell
“Viv.” Vising his forehead between his fingers, he tried like hell to figure out how they’d gotten so off track. “You’ve been telling me for over a year that your career sucked up all your time and that’s why you didn’t date. How were you planning to meet said husband?”
“I don’t know,” she shot back defensively. “And cupcakes are important to me. It’s just not the only thing, and this marathon of business-plan goals kind of solidified that fact for me. I love the idea of sharing my recipes with a bigger block of customers. But not at the expense of the kind of marriage I think would make me happy. I want—need—to back off.”
Back off. From him, she meant. Jonas blinked as something wrenched loose in his chest, and it felt an awful lot like she’d gripped his heart in her fingers, then twisted until it fell out. “I understand. You deserve to have the kind of marriage you want and I can’t give that to you.”
Her face froze, going so glacial all at once he scarcely recognized her.
“You’ve never thought about having a real marriage?” she asked in a whisper.
Not once. Until now. And now it was all he could think about. What was a real marriage to her? Love, honor and cherish for the rest of her days? He could do two out of three. Would she accept that? Then he could keep her friendship, keep this marriage and...how crappy was that, to even contemplate how far he could take this without breaking his word to anyone? It was ridiculous. They should have hashed out this stuff long ago. Like before they got married. And he would have if she’d told him that she harbored secret dreams of hearts and googly eyes. Too bad that kind of stuff led to emotional evisceration when everything went south.
Like now.
“Viv.” She shifted to look at him, apparently clueing in that he had something serious to say. “I married you specifically because I have no intention of having a real marriage. It was deliberate.”
Something that looked a lot like pain flashed through her gaze. “Because I’m not real marriage material?”
A sound gurgled in his throat as he got caught between a vehement denial and an explanation that hopefully didn’t make him sound like an ass.
“Not because you’re unlovable or something.” God, what was wrong with him? He was hurting her with his thoughtlessness. She’d spilled her guts to him, obviously because she trusted him with the truth, and the best he could do was smash her dreams? “I care about you. That’s why we’re having this conversation, which we should have had a long time ago. I never told you about Marcus.”
Eyes wide, she shook her head but stayed silent as he spit out the tale of his friend who had loved and lost and then never recovered. When he wound it up with the tragedy and subsequent pact, she blinked away a sheen of tears that he had no idea what to do with.
“So you, Warren and Hendrix are all part of this...club?” she asked. “The Never Going to Fall in Love club?”
It sounded silly when she said it like that. “It’s not a club. We swore solemn vows and I take that seriously.”
She nodded once, but confusion completely screwed up her beautiful face. “I see. Instead of having something wonderful with a life partner, you intend to stick to a promise you made under duress a decade ago.”
“No,” he countered quietly. “I intend to stand by a promise I made, period. Because that’s who I am. It’s a measure of my ethical standards. A testament to the kind of man I want to be.”
“Alone? That’s the kind of man you want to be?”
“That’s not fair.” Why was she so concerned about his emotional state all at once? “I don’t want to be alone. That’s why I like being married to you so much. We have fun together. Eat dinner. Watch TV.”
“Not lately,” she said pointedly, and it was an arrow through his heart. If he was going to throw around his ethics like a blunt instrument, then he couldn’t very well pretend he didn’t know what she meant.
“Not lately,” he agreed. “I’d like to say it’s because we’ve both been busy. But that’s not the whole truth. I...started to get a little too attached to you. Distance was necessary.”
The sheen was back over her eyes. “Because of the pact. You’ve been pulling back on purpose.”
He nodded. The look on her face was killing him, and he’d like nothing more than to yank her into his arms and tell her to forget that nonsense. Because he wanted his friend back. His lover. His everything.
But he couldn’t. In the most unfair turnabout, he’d told her about the pact and instead of her running in the other direction like a lot of women, he was the one shutting down. “It was the only way I could keep you as my wife and honor the promises I made to myself and to my friends. And to you. I said no pressure. I meant to keep it that way. Which still stands, by the way.”
She laughed, but he didn’t think it was because she found any of this funny. “I think this is about the lowest-pressure marriage on the planet.”
“You misunderstand. I’m saying no pressure to stay married.”
Her gaze cut to him and he took the quick, hard punch to the gut in stride without letting on to her how difficult it had been to utter those words.
Take them back. Right now.
But he couldn’t.
“Jonas, we can’t get divorced. You’d lose your grandfather’s support to take over his role.”
The fact that she’d even consider that put the whole conversation in perspective. They were friends who cared about each other. Which meant he had to let her go, no matter how hard it was. “I know. But it’s not fair to you to stay in this marriage given that you want something different.”
“I do want something different,” she agreed quietly. “I have to go to LA. I can’t think about any of this right now.”
He let her fingers slip from his, and when she shut herself in her bedroom, the quiet click of the door burst through his chest like a gunshot to the heart. He wished he felt like congratulating himself on his fine upstanding character, but all he felt like doing was crawling into bed and throwing a blanket over his head. The absence of Viv left a cold, dark place inside that even a million blankets couldn’t warm.
Ten
The trip to LA was a disaster. Oh, the cooking show was fine. She won the first round. But Viv hated having to fake smile, hated pretending her marriage wasn’t fake, hated the fakeness of baking on camera with a script full of fake dialogue.
There was nothing real about her, apparently. And it had been slowly sapping her happiness away until she couldn’t stand it if one more person called her Mrs. Kim. Why had she changed her name? Even that was temporary until some ambiguous point in the future.
Well, there was one thing that was real. The way she felt about Jonas, as evidenced by the numbness inside that she carried 24/7. Finally, she had someone to care about and he cared about her. Yay. He cared so much that he was willing to let her out of the favor of being married to him so she could find someone else.
How ironic that she’d ended up exactly where she’d intended to be. All practiced up for her next relationship, except she didn’t want to move on. She wanted Jonas, just like she had for over a year, and she wanted him to feel the same about her.
The cooking show, or rather the more correctly labeled entertainment venue disguised as a cupcake battle, wrapped up the next day. Viv won the final round and Franca cheered from the sidelines, pointing to her phone, where she was presumably checking out the stats on Cupcaked’s new digital storefront. Every time the show’s camera zoomed in on Viv’s face, they put a graphic overlay on the screen with her name and the name of her cupcake bakery. Whatever results that had produced made Franca giddy, apparently.
It was all too overwhelming. None of this was what she wanted. Instead of cooking shows, Viv should have been spending fourteen hours a day working on her marriage. The what-ifs were all she could think about.
On the plane ride home, Franca jabbered about things like click-through rates, branding and production schedules. They’d already decided to outsource the baking for the digital storefront because Viv’s current setup couldn’t handle the anticipated volume. Judging by the numbers Franca was throwing out, it had been a good decision.
Except for the part where none of this was what Viv wanted. And it was high time she fixed that.
When she got home, she drafted a letter to Franca thanking her for all of her hard work on Viv’s behalf but explaining that her career was not in fact the most important thing in her life, so Franca’s services were no longer needed. The improvements to Cupcaked were great and Viv intended to use the strategies that they’d both developed. But she couldn’t continue to invest so much energy into her business, not if she hoped to fix whatever was broken in Jonas’s head that made him think that saying a few words a decade ago could ever compare with the joy of having the kind of marriage she’d watched her sisters experience. Viv had been shuffled to the side once again and she wasn’t okay with that.
Jonas came home late. No surprise there. That seemed to be the norm. But she was not prepared to see the lines of fatigue around his eyes. Or the slight shock flickering through his expression when he caught sight of her sitting on the couch.
“Hey,” he called. “Didn’t know you were back.”
“Surprise.” Served him right. “Sit down so we can talk.”
Caution drenched his demeanor and he took his time slinging his leather bag over the back of a chair. “Can it wait? I have a presentation to the board tomorrow and I’d like to go over—”
“You’re prepared,” she told him and patted the cushion next to her. “I’ve known you for a long time and I would bet every last cupcake pan I own that you’ve been working on that PowerPoint every spare second for days. You’re going to kill it. Sit.”
It was a huge kick that he obeyed, and she nearly swooned when the masculine scent of her husband washed over her. He was too far away to touch, but she could rectify that easily. When it was time. She was flying a little blind here, but she did know one thing—she was starting over from scratch. No familiar ingredients. No beloved pan. The oven wasn’t even heated up yet. But she had her apron on and the battle lines drawn. Somehow, she needed to bake a marriage until it came out the way she liked.
“What’s up? How was the show?” he asked conversationally, but strictly to change the subject, she was pretty sure.
“Fine. I won. It was fabulous. I fired Franca.”
That got his attention. “What? Why would you do that?”
“Because she’s too good for me. She needs to go help someone run an empire.” She smiled as she gave Jonas a once-over. “You should hire her, in fact.”
“Maybe I will.” His dark eyes had a flat, guarded quality that she didn’t like. While she knew academically that she had to take a whole different track with him, it was another thing entirely to be this close but yet so far.
“Jonas, we have to finish our conversation. The one from the other day.”
“I wasn’t confused about which one you meant.” A brief lift of his lips encouraged her to continue, but then the shield between them snapped back into place. “You’ve decided to go.”
“No. I’m not going anywhere.” Crossing her arms so she couldn’t reach out to him ranked as one of the hardest things she’d done. But it was necessary to be clear about this without adding a bunch of other stuff into the mix. “I said I was going to do you this favor and as strongly as you believe in keeping your word, it inspires me to do the same. I’m here for the duration.”
Confusion replaced the guardedness and she wasn’t sure which one she liked less. “You’re staying? As my wife?”
“And your friend.” She shrugged. “Nothing you said changed anything for me. I still want the marriage I envision and I definitely won’t get that if I divorce you.”
Jonas flinched and a million different things sprang into the atmosphere between them. “You’re not thinking clearly. You’ll never meet someone who can give you what you want if you stay married to me.”
“For a smart man, you’re being slow to catch on.” The little noise of disgust sounded in her chest before she could check it. But men. So dense. “I want a real marriage with you, not some random guy off the street. What do you think we’ve been doing here but building this into something amazing? I know you want to honor your word to your friends—”
“Viv.” The quiet reverberation of her name stopped her cold and she glanced at him. He’d gone so still that her pulse tumbled. “It’s not just a promise I made to my friends. I have no room in my life for a real marriage. The pact was easy for me to make. It’s not that I swore to never fall in love. It’s that I refuse to. It’s a destructive emotion that leads to more destruction. That’s not something I’m willing to chance.”
Her mouth unhinged and she literally couldn’t make a sound to save her life. Something cold swept along her skin as she absorbed his sincerity.
“Am I making sense?” he asked after a long pause.
That she could answer easily. “None. Absolutely no sense.”
His mouth firmed into a long line and he nodded. “It’s a hard concept for someone like you who wants to put your faith and trust in someone else. I don’t. I can’t. I’ve built something from nothing, expanded Kim Electronics into a billion-dollar enterprise in the American market, and I’m poised to take that to the next level. I cannot let a woman nor the emotions one might introduce ruin everything.”
She’d only thought nothing could make her colder than his opening statement. But the ice forming from this last round of crazy made her shiver. “You’re lumping me in that category? I’m this nebulous entity known as ‘woman’ who might go Helen of Troy on your business? I don’t even know what to say to that.”
Grimly, he shook his head. “There’s nothing to say. Consider this from my perspective. I didn’t even know you wanted anything beyond your career until a couple of days ago. What else don’t I know? I can’t take that risk. Not with you.”
“What?” Her voice cracked. “You’re saying you don’t trust me because I didn’t blather on about hearts and flowers from the first moment I met you?”
Pathetic. Not-clingy hadn’t worked. In fact, it might have backfired. If she’d just told him how she felt from the beginning, she could have used the last five weeks to combat his stupid pact.
Something white-hot and angry rose up in her throat. Seriously, this was so unfair. She couldn’t be herself with anyone. Instead there were all these rules and games and potholes and loopholes, none of which she understood or cared about.
“Viv.” He reached out and then jerked his hand back before touching her, as if he’d only just realized that they weren’t in a place where that was okay. “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s...me. I can’t manage how insane you make me.”
She eyed him, sniffling back a tsunami of tears. “So now I make you crazy? Listen, buster, I’m not the one talking crazy here—”
A strangled sound stopped her rant. Jonas shook his head, clearly bemused. “Not crazy. Give me a break. I was expecting you to walk out the door, not grill me on things I don’t know how to explain. Just stop for a second.”
His head dropped into his hands and he massaged his temples.
“Insane and crazy are the same thing.”
“I mean how much I want you!” he burst out. “All the time. You make me insane with wanting to touch you, and roll into you in the middle of the night to hold you. Kiss you until you can’t breathe. So, yeah, I’ll give you that. It makes me crazy. In this case, it does mean the same thing.”
Reeling, she stared at him, dumbstruck, numb, so off balance she couldn’t figure out how to make her brain work. What in the world was wrong with any of that?
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me, Jonas.”
“It’s already way too much.” He threw up his hands. “How much worse will it get? I refuse to let my emotions control me like that.”
This was awful. He was consciously rejecting the concept of allowing anything deeper to grow between them. Period. No questions asked. She let that reality seep into her soul as her nails dug into her palms with little pinpricks of pain that somehow centered her. If this was his decision, she had to find a way to live with it.
“So, what happens next?” she whispered. “I don’t want a divorce. Do you?”
At that, he visibly crumpled, folding in on himself as if everything hurt. She knew the feeling.
“I can’t even answer that.” His voice dipped so low that she could scarcely make it out. “My grandfather asked me to come to Korea as soon as possible. He got some bad news from his doctor and he’s retiring earlier than expected.”
“Oh, no.” Viv’s hand flew to her mouth as she took in the devastation flitting through Jonas’s expression. “Is he going to be okay?”
“I don’t know. He wants you to come. How can I ask that of you?” His gaze held a world of pain and indecision and a million other things that her own expression probably mirrored. “It’s not fair to you.”
This was where the rubber met the road. He wasn’t asking her to go, nor would he. He was simply stating facts and giving the choice to her. If she wanted to claim a real marriage for herself, she had to stand by her husband through thick and thin, sickness and health, vows of honor and family emergencies.
This was the ultimate test. Did she love Jonas enough to ignore her own needs in order to fulfill his? If nothing else, it was her sole opportunity to do and be whatever she wanted in a relationship. Her marriage, her rules. If she had a mind to cling like Saran Wrap to Jonas, it was her right.
In what was probably the easiest move of the entire conversation, she reached out to lace her fingers with his and held on tight. “If you strip everything else away, I’m still your wife. Your grandfather could still pass his support to someone else if he suspects something isn’t right between us. If you want me to go, I’ll go.”