The Decoy Bride

by Lizzie Shane

  “For now, yes.”

  He folded his arms. “Okay. Go ahead.”

  “Apologize.”

  “For what?”

  She shrugged. “All of it. Whatever you did wrong.”

  “What makes you so sure I’m in the wrong?”

  “You’re male, so statistically, it’s likely that you are, but whether you’re wrong or not is irrelevant. Apologize anyway.”

  “Whether I’m wrong or not?”

  “This is good advice,” Pretty Boy piped up from where he was waiting at the sparring mats.

  Cross shot him a glare, but Candy wasn’t done. “You can be proud and alone or you can apologize and get your girl back.”

  “She isn’t my girl.”

  “But you want her to be, don’t you?”

  “Candy. I’m not that guy, okay? I don’t need love to complete me. And you need to back off. I’m not looking for a girlfriend and if I were—” He shook his head. “I’m just not, okay? I have other shit on my mind.”

  Which was a total lie. Even with his mother calling him every day and the dedication looming and that damn letter from his sister begging him to make that call, and with the way he’d been throwing himself into work ever since he got back in an attempt to redeem himself after the fucking Caribbean debacle, he didn’t have anything else on his mind. No matter how badly he wanted to. Bree kept invading his thoughts. It turned out what happened in the Caribbean didn’t necessarily stay in the Caribbean.

  He turned and continued stalking toward the changing rooms and this time Candy didn’t chase him, though she did call after him, “Remember, if you want to talk about your feelings, Pretty Boy is here for you!”

  Cross snorted, but didn’t stop walking. He didn’t want to talk about his feelings. He didn’t have feelings, damn it. At least not about Bree.

  He wasn’t a good bet, romantically, and the sooner everyone realized that, the better. His ex-wife had certainly told him what a disappointment he was in the love department enough times. And it wasn’t like his family was full of healthy examples.

  But Candy was right about one thing. He had been off, and he did need to focus. She was just wrong about what he needed to do to get his head back in the game.

  It wasn’t Bree. It was the rest of it. Everything he’d been avoiding.

  So when he got out to his car, he pulled the letter from the glove box…and made the call.

  *

  Through no fault of his own, his flight was late arriving in Des Moines, but Cross still felt inexplicably guilty as he rolled into town in his rental car only minutes before the first of the dedication events was supposed to occur—as if his reluctance to be there had somehow caused the headwinds.

  He’d texted his mother that he would meet her at the town square, where the mayor would be making a “small speech” about the effort to build the field house. It was his first communication with her in almost two weeks. Even after he spoke with Rachel the first time, he hadn’t been ready to talk to his mother yet.

  His sister would be arriving tomorrow.

  That first conversation, when he’d called her from his car, had been predictably awkward. He’d apologized for not calling sooner and explained that her letter had been a shock—that he had not, in fact, known about her until the day he read it.

  She’d been cautious too—as if she was feeling him out as much as he was her—and he’d liked her the better for it, but after their second conversation, she’d agreed to come to the dedication of their father’s field house. It seemed only fitting that she be there.

  The official ribbon cutting wasn’t until tomorrow, but Mayor Mike had two days of “festivities” planned and Cross—though his feelings were still mixed on the subject—had agreed to attend all of them. The speech. The cocktail reception. And then tomorrow the official ribbon cutting.

  The parking around the town square was full, and even the side streets nearby were lined with cars, forcing Cross to circle farther and farther away from the square before he finally found a space. Music floated through the air from the square as he jogged back toward the steps of city hall where a microphone had been set up for the mayor.

  He hadn’t expected a crowd for the bureaucratic showboating of the mayor’s speech leading up to the dedication. In spite of Mayor Mike’s references to gala events implying layers upon layers of pomp and circumstance, Cross had failed to recall exactly how much his small town excelled at making a big deal out of absolutely anything. He should have known. The tree lighting ceremony every December was an all day event.

  There was actually a crowd as the high school band finished playing and the mayor stepped up to the microphone. It looked like half of Harris had turned out for the event. Cross fell in at the back, nodding absently when a few of the townspeople standing closest to him did double takes and waved when they saw him, their faces lighting.

  He’d been back dozens of times in recent years, not only for planning the field house, but also for Christmas and his mother’s birthday. She’d moved back to Harris after his father’s death because this was where her parents were. His grandparents had died a few years back, but Linnea Cross had stayed, even when Cross offered to fly her out to live with him. She’d never been a city person. Hadn’t particularly liked being an NFL wife. But she’d loved her husband—and few places on earth was Big Aaron worshiped more than he was in Harris.

  At least that was why he’d thought she’d stayed at the time. Now, nothing was certain

  His parents had gotten married right out of high school and Cross had been born while his father was still playing college ball. His mother had never finished college, but she’d worked as a secretary for twenty years at the city hall and now stood beside Mayor Mike, evidently having gotten over her reservations about attending the dedication enough to be lured on stage. She seemed to radiate modest pride as Mayor Mike, who looked like he’d just graduated from college, waxed poetic about the honored donors who had contributed to the Field House Fund, with special thanks to the Cross family.

  Mayor Mike had wanted Cross on stage with him, and he silently thanked the headwinds that had given him an excuse to text the mayor and back out of that part of the spectacle. He was here to support the field house, but his feelings about the entire experience were decidedly mixed.

  He probably wouldn’t have gone at all, but he kept remembering what Bree had said about it being his accomplishment as well as his father’s and he hadn’t wanted to miss seeing it complete.

  Mayor Mike had a tendency to get carried away, but thankfully his speech was relatively brief. Once he’d finished his remarks and the high school band had started playing again, Cross wove his way through the crowd that had started to drift en masse toward the gazebo at the center of the town square where the high school football team and cheerleaders were setting up for some kind of fundraiser—now that the mayor had primed the pump by talking about the generous donors who had given them the Field House.

  Cross made his way instead toward the stage, forcing himself to smile at the frequent shouts of “Little Aaron!”

  He was thirty years old and six feet three inches tall—and the entire freaking town still called him Little Aaron.

  Except his mother.

  “Aaron! You’re here.” The mayor had already left his perch on the steps when his mother spotted him. Smiling and reaching for him like nothing was wrong—but that was Linnea Cross’s way, apparently. Never acknowledge when something wasn’t perfect.

  He pushed down that bitter thought, hating the way it had infiltrated his feelings toward his mother, and bent to hug her.

  “Hi, Mom.” He folded his mother into his arms, marveling as he always did at how small she was. She’d put on a fair amount of padding over the years, but the top of her head didn’t even come up to his clavicle.

  She turned her face to the side, pressing her cheek to his chest and whispering, “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  He felt something unknot i
n him at the familiar feel of her—even if part of him was still angry at her deception. She was still his mother. Still the one person he’d always wanted to protect above all others.

  “Did you make it in time for the speech?” she asked when he pulled away. Not I’m sorry for lying to you your entire life about the existence of your sibling. Just did you catch the speech? Cross’s jaw worked.

  “Yeah.” He stepped back. “I made it.” He jerked his chin toward the football team, suddenly eager to get this over with. “Should we head down there?”

  “Oh, no, that’s for the team—you’ll meet them tomorrow at the ribbon cutting. We have the VIP reception next. At the VFW. Didn’t Mayor MIke send you the itinerary?”

  “He did,” Cross admitted, but he’d been avoiding thinking about this event as much as possible over the last couple weeks, so he hadn’t really looked at it. “I didn’t take a close look at the times.”

  “Well then it’s a good thing I did,” she said with a forced smile. “Come on. Everyone is dying to ask you what Maggie Tate is really like. Gossip about you and that movie star is the only thing people in this town are more excited about than the dedication.”

  The words were nervous chatter, her posture stiff, and it was instinctive for him to want to put her at ease, but instead his own words were awkward and stiff. “That was just a stunt. Maggie and I were never together.”

  “Well, you can’t blame me for wishful thinking.”

  Is that why you never told me about my sister? The words were on the tip of his tongue, but they weren’t alone. More and more faces he recognized were nodding to them and calling out greetings as they neared the VFW.

  He’d come here not only for the dedication and because he wanted his sister to feel like she was a part of something that had been built in their father’s honor, but also to talk to his mother. To finally clear the air, once and for all.

  But now wasn’t the time.

  A fact which became glaringly evident when Mayor Mike bore down on him as soon as he entered the VFW hall.

  The VFW building wasn’t far from the town square, and there were already over a dozen people inside, where plastic flutes overflowed with Costco quantities of champagne and teenagers in football uniforms carried trays of hors d’oeuvres.

  “There he is! The man himself!” Mayor Mike exclaimed, loud enough for the entire room to hear him as he descended on Cross. “We were afraid you weren’t going to make it.”

  “Just some headwinds,” Cross said, keeping his own voice at a normal speaking level since he had no interest in performing this conversation for the whole town.

  “You should have been up there with me,” Mayor Mike continued at full volume. “After all, this is your baby more than anyone else’s. I’m just the bureaucrat—you’re the heart and soul behind the Aaron Cross Senior Field House.”

  Cross gritted his teeth around a smile. “I don’t need to be up on the stage.”

  “Humble. Just like your father.”

  Cross ground his molars harder to avoid pointing out that Mayor Mike hadn’t even been born when his father died and couldn’t possibly know whether the man was humble or not. In Harris, every virtue was always ascribed to Big Aaron first and anyone else second.

  “I wanted to ask you about that victory flag again,” Mike began, and Cross broke in.

  “Actually, I was thinking about that. I think it would mean more to the students if they raised the money to get the flag themselves. It would really be their victory flag that way.”

  Mike visibly deflated, but he acknowledged, “Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good idea. But the bleachers—”

  “Are good. Everything is good. You did a good job, Mike. But now we’re done. Both of us. Enjoy it.” He clapped the mayor on the shoulder and moved away before the man could come up with another way to ask him for money. He’d done enough for the town for now.

  And yes, he’d done it. In his father’s name, sure, but he was the one who’d funded the project and kept Mayor Mike in check when he wanted a facility that would have made a Big Ten football coach proud. He wouldn’t be giving any more money to the monument to his father. It was a public building—the town could support the maintenance on their own field house.

  These last few months he’d grown bitter about Mayor Mike’s demands—long before he’d been disillusioned about his father. He’d started to resent the time suck and money drain that the field house had become, but now as he strolled through the VFW, chatting with the townspeople and receiving their thanks for everything he’d done, he was reminded that it hadn’t all been for his father.

  It had been for the town. For his old football coach. For the students and athletes who would come after him—and maybe make it even bigger than either Aaron Cross ever had.

  He had actually done a good thing.

  He chatted with the townspeople and sipped champagne, avoiding his mother when she tried to catch his eye and Mayor Mike when he tried to catch his arm. He’d been braced for the usual questions—about his father, how his knee was doing, if he missed the NFL, if he still talked to his buddies in the NFL, what he’d thought of this game or that one, when he was coming back to Harris to stay, there was always a coaching job open for him if he wanted it…

  And he got those, but this time, peppered in with the usual refrain was a new theme.

  How long have you been dating Maggie Tate? Did you bring Maggie Tate with you? Did you really steal Maggie Tate from Demarco Whitten? Guess he should have known better than to go up against a Cross, eh?

  It was immediately apparent that none of them knew the whole story. None of them had even heard of the existence of a decoy—and no matter how many times he explained that he hadn’t ever dated Maggie Tate, that it had just been a stunt designed to draw attention away from the real Maggie for security reasons, none of them believed him. They all thought they knew the truth and they didn’t care to hear anything that didn’t confirm what they already believed. Even when he denied it, they patted him on the back and commended him on his discretion, winking and grinning.

  It was his father all over again. If it didn’t fit into their idea of the legend, it didn’t exist. And he was so tired of legends and lies.

  “I’ll be damned. Aaron Cross, in the flesh.”

  He turned, hoping his forced smile was some semblance of pleasant and trying to keep from cracking the plastic champagne flute in his grip—but his stiff smile fell into a natural one as soon as he saw who had come up behind him. “Reg?”

  Reggie Purcell grinned at him, toasting him with his plastic champagne flute. “In the flesh.”

  One year behind Cross at Harris High and the starting quarterback Cross’s junior and senior years, Reg had been good—good enough to get a scholarship to play college ball, if Cross remembered correctly—but if Cross had lived in his father’s shadow, Reg had lived in his. Though he’d never seemed to mind. Reg never seemed to mind much of anything, always with that loose, easy smile—and stoned off his ass half the time when he wasn’t playing ball.

  Though that had been high school. He wore a tie and button down shirt now as he rubbed elbows with Harris’ most respectable citizens—though his smile was still loose and lazy as he clasped Cross’s hand.

  “When did you move back?” Cross asked.

  “Couple years back. I’m an architect now, if you can believe it.”

  “No shit.” School had never seemed to interest Reg much—of course, in Harris none of the star players had ever been encouraged to study much beyond their playbooks.

  Reg grinned, entertained by his shock. “No shit. Turns out being good at calculating angles is good for more than just throwing a football. Who knew, right? No one ever told me that before I left Harris.”

  “There is a slight football obsession here.”

  Reg snorted at the understatement. “Heard you were hooking up with Maggie Tate. That true?”

  Cross grimaced. “No. Not true.”

  “Yeah?
So you mean you hot shot NFL guys aren’t swimming in hot actress ass? You’re ruining all my fantasies of what I could have had if I went pro.” The words were as light as everything Reg said—as if nothing he said could be taken seriously, but Cross hesitated long enough for a small, curvaceous woman with a massive pregnant belly to appear at Reg’s elbow, shooting him a glare.

  “Hot actress ass? Really, Reggie?”

  Reg’s grin grew even wider as he slung his arm over the woman’s shoulders, tucking her against his side. “You know your ass is the only hot ass I care about, but I gotta give Cross shit about his pathetic inability to score with Maggie Tate.” He flashed his shit-eating grin at Cross and tilted his head toward the woman under his arm. “This is my Millie. She teaches English at the high school now and she won’t even let me smoke the pot she confiscates. Can you believe it?” Millie elbowed him in the ribs hard enough to make his body sway, but he just laughed. “You got a girl who keeps you on your toes, even if you couldn’t lock down Maggie Tate?”

  “Reggie. Rude.”

  “What? I’m just asking.”

  And for some reason, unlike all the times when his happily coupled-off coworkers had asked him about his love life, Cross didn’t mind the question. He wasn’t tempted to bitch about everyone who was married trying to inflict that state on every innocent bystander they met.

  He just thought of Bree.

  He’d been doing a good job of not thinking about her for the last few days—at least insofar as he wasn’t obsessively thinking of nothing but her—but now he couldn’t help thinking how different this would be if she were here.

  She’d be watching everyone, fascinated by things he didn’t even notice. What would she see here? Would she be annoyed by the hypocrisy of his father’s legend? Or would she see something else entirely in the town’s celebration and their rabid fixation on a football hero who’d died over twenty years ago?

  What would the people of Harris think of her? Half of them would probably think she was Maggie, even if they told everyone she wasn’t—until she did something on impulse. Something purely Bree. He couldn’t predict what it would be. He could never predict her—but he knew it would be an adventure if she came here. She made everything feel that way—