by Erika Rhys
She laughed. “According to my recollection, you seduced me.”
“Not my fault.” I reached for her hand, lifted it to my lips, and kissed it. “You’re irresistible.”
As she met my gaze, the laughter faded from her face, and her expression turned serious. Somber, even. Had I said something wrong? Or had Veronica’s attempted bribery shaken her more than I’d realized?
“I feel the same way about you,” she said. “Which is why we need to talk. When we agreed to our marriage arrangement, it was all about saving our respective businesses. We barely knew each other, and we couldn’t even be sure if we would get along as roommates.”
“I remember wondering about that, too,” I said, unsure where she was going. “But those days are far behind us.”
“First, we became friends,” she said. “Then, the night of our engagement party, we became lovers.”
I squeezed her hand. “Best decision we ever made.”
“I hope so,” she said. “Because making love with you, getting closer to you—it’s shown me who you really are and what our life together could be. I know you feel something for me—the way you respond to me tells me that much—but before we go through with this wedding, I need to tell you that I’m in love with you. With each taste of you, I want more, and with each passing day, my feelings for you deepen.”
As the significance of Ava’s words sank into me, my brain froze. She couldn’t really be in love with me—could she? The last thing I wanted was to hurt her, but telling her what she wanted to hear wasn’t an option. Because while I liked Ava tremendously and lusted after her constantly, I wasn’t in love with her.
And I couldn’t lie to her either.
“I care about you, Ava. You know I do. There’s nothing fake about our friendship or about how much I enjoy being with you.”
Her hand trembled in mine, before she quickly withdrew it and stood to her feet. When she spoke, her voice was flat. “There’s no need to go on. I get the message.”
“This has nothing to do with you,” I said. “You’re an amazing person. But I’ve never been in love with anyone, and I don’t expect I ever will be. I’m just not wired that way.”
Her lips tightened, and I sensed that she was battling back tears. “Don’t bother trying to let me down easy, Ronan. My feelings are what they are. So are yours.”
“I never meant to hurt you, and I’m sorry that I have.” Unable to bear the pain written on her face, I got to my feet, walked to the living-room window, and stared out at the night sky. “This is my fault—and I don’t even begin to know how to fix it.”
“Not everything can be fixed,” Ava said quietly. “And it’s more my fault than yours. But calling off the wedding would only make things worse for both of us, so if you’re worried that I’m about to go there, don’t be. I’m disappointed and sad, not stupid.”
Relief and guilt warred inside me. Relief that she was still willing to go through with the wedding, and guilt that despite her turning down Veronica’s money, which would have been three times more than I was paying her, I couldn’t be the man she wanted me to be.
“Thank you for standing by me,” I said. “Although right now, I don’t feel like I deserve that kind of loyalty.”
“You deserve to keep the business you’ve worked hard to build. But let’s be clear. Our physical intimacy is over. We need to return to our original arrangement.”
I’d seen that one coming, but it still cut deep. “Understood. Although I hope we can still be friends.”
“Maybe someday. Right now, I need time to clear my head. I’ll do my best to get there, but you’ll probably have to wait.”
I turned back to face her. “Deep down, you know I’m not right for you. Someday, after our fake marriage is over, you’ll find a man who’ll love you the way you deserve to be loved, and when you find him, no one will be happier for you than me. But the next two years will be easier on both of us if we find a way to get along.”
“You’ve made your point about trying to remain friends, and I agree with you. But that doesn’t change the fact that right now, I want a lot more than friendship from you. And as much as I wish I could, I can’t just switch those feelings off.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Yes, Ronan. Between now and the wedding, give me my space and leave me alone.”
And with that, she turned away, walked into her bedroom, and shut the door firmly behind her.
35
AVA
After I closed the door of my bedroom, I leaned against it, trembling from the effort of containing the storm of emotions raging through me.
How could I have been so stupid? Why was I such a goddamned fool?
I’d read Ronan all wrong. Sure, he liked me well enough—especially in bed—but Veronica’s cruel words had turned out to be true. He didn’t love me, and he never would.
As I stepped to the daybed and slumped onto it, hot tears slid from my eyes and streaked down my cheeks. A lump formed in my throat, and as the ache in my chest burned and expanded, I grabbed a large throw pillow and smashed my face into it, muffling my ragged gasps and the raw, torn sobs that escaped my lips. Maybe I couldn’t help crying over the loss of my misguided, hopeless dream of building a life with Ronan, but I hadn’t broken down in front of him, and the last thing I wanted was for him to hear me wailing in misery.
I still had my pride.
It was all I had left—so I clung to it like the life preserver that it was and rode out the storm.
When it finally passed, I remained on the daybed, my face still buried in the pillow. But after a few minutes, I sat up, wiped my eyes, and came to a decision. Before trying to sleep, I would take a shower.
I couldn’t wash Ronan out of my heart, but I could wash his touch from my skin.
I got to my feet and slowly undressed myself, before going into the bathroom and turning the hot water to a near-scalding temperature. After I stepped into the shower, I washed and rinsed my hair, before scrubbing every inch of my body. As I washed myself, my tears blended with the shower’s hot spray, and my heart throbbed with grief.
But by the time I toweled myself dry, found an oversized T-shirt to sleep in, and made up the daybed with sheets and a duvet, my emotions shifted from agony into disbelief.
How could I have misread Ronan so completely?
Had I focused too much on the powerful chemistry that pulled us together and not enough on who he really was? Or had I deluded myself and seen only what I wanted to see in him, the same mistake I’d made with my ex-fiancé?
In any case, if I was honest with myself, this disaster was my fault. I couldn’t blame Ronan, and he didn’t deserve to pay the price for my stupidity. By telling him to leave me alone, I’d ended tonight’s conversation on a harsher note than I’d meant to—but maybe it was for the best. With the wedding a week away, I desperately needed time and space to adjust to my new reality.
How had I ended up here? Where had I gone wrong?
I’d agreed to marry Ronan to save my business, but at this point, it wasn’t about Oasis anymore. No amount of money could possibly be worth spending the next two years of my life in this kind of pain. But if there was any escape from marrying Ronan and living with him for the next two years, I couldn’t see it, because even if I was ready to sacrifice my own business, without our marriage, he would lose his business too.
And I couldn’t do that to him. I had to keep my commitment, which meant that somehow I needed to give up my foolish dreams of building a life with Ronan, pick up the pieces of my shattered heart, and move on.
But how was I supposed to move on when I had to live with him for the next two fucking years?
I slipped between the sheets, switched off the light, and pulled the blanket up to my ears. Darkness and silence surrounded me, and as I rested my now-aching head against the pillow, my limited options pressed in on me like a vise.
All I could do was keep as much distance from Ronan as pos
sible and do my best to get through one day at a time.
Which brought me back to the most immediate question.
How the hell was I going to survive the wedding?
36
RONAN
Over the next few days, Ava spent most of the time closeted in her room. Whenever she emerged, I did my best to act normal, and she responded politely to whatever I said, but it was as if a glass wall had descended between us.
After several days of near-silence, one morning when she was making a pot of coffee, I joined her in the kitchen and made an attempt to reach out to her.
“That coffee smells good,” I said.
She reached into a cupboard, took down a mug, filled it, and placed it on the counter beside me. “Here you go.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She filled a second cup for herself and headed toward her room.
“Can we talk for a minute?” I said.
She turned back to me. “Of course. What do you want to talk about?”
“You. Me. This…situation we’re in. Before, it felt like we were in it together—and now, it feels like we’re each on our own. I miss our friendship.”
A shadow of pain crossed her face. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But you’ll have to talk to someone else about that. I know I’m not being a very good friend right now, but I’m doing the best I can.”
“We can’t go on like this,” I said. “Living in the same apartment and barely speaking.”
“Things between us have changed.”
“I’m not pretending they haven’t. But we can’t go on being this uncomfortable around each other.”
She regarded me thoughtfully. “You have a point. I don’t feel like talking, but how about watching the morning news together?”
“Let’s do it.”
She walked into the living room, stepped to the coffee table, picked up the remote, and switched on CNN. After I sat down in my favorite armchair, she seated herself on the end of the couch furthest from me and fixed her attention on the television screen.
As Wolf Blitzer droned on about North Korea, I watched Ava out of the corner of my vision, wishing that I could join her on the couch like I used to. Sure, I wanted to fuck her—my desire for her was stronger than ever—but right now, I would have happily settled for holding her hand or feeling her head rest against my shoulder.
But by being honest about who I was, I’d stepped up and taken the consequences like a man. Before, when I’d convinced Ava to sleep with me, the thought that she might develop feelings for me hadn’t crossed my mind. I’d always attracted debutantes and party girls like flies, but never a woman like Ava, who deserved a better man than I’d ever be.
My recklessness had damaged our friendship, but I wouldn’t let that happen again. In time, she’d understand that I’d done the right thing for both of us and thank me for it.
But in the meantime, watching the news together was progress.
And right now, I’d take whatever I could get.
37
AVA
By the morning of the day of the wedding, I had reached a numbed acceptance of what I needed to do.
I’d put on the wedding dress that I’d selected with so much hope and wore it with a smile on my face, even though Ronan’s rejection had burned my heart to ash. I’d stand before the Southampton elite and speak fake vows, even though I still wanted to believe in the words that would emerge from my lips. And I’d smile my way through an elaborate reception and dinner, even though I craved to be alone.
Over the past week, I’d done my best to avoid Ronan, crawl under the emotional equivalent of a rock, and lick my wounds, but nothing could ease the pain in my heart, a pain that was only worsened by Ronan’s well-meaning efforts to make it up to me.
Which, at the moment, included borrowing his father’s helicopter and pilot to fly us from the downtown Manhattan heliport to Southampton, a gesture that would have thrilled me just a week ago—but now only made me ache for what might have been.
Why couldn’t he go back to being the arrogant dickhead with whom I’d contracted this crazy fake-marriage agreement? Couldn’t he see that each act of thoughtfulness just drove another knife into my heart?
As Ronan helped me into the helicopter, before handing me the boxes containing our wedding clothes, I checked my wave of self-pity.
I’d gotten myself into this mess. I’d gone into it with my eyes open. Agreeing to a fake marriage had been a gamble, and giving in to my desire for Ronan had been another.
I’d gambled knowingly—and I’d lost.
Now, I had to pay the price for that loss, and through the seven circles of hell that stretched before me, I needed to maintain as much dignity as I could muster. Which, today, meant plastering a big fake smile on my face and doing my best to look and act like the happiest woman on earth.
As I settled into one of the helicopter’s luxurious leather-upholstered bucket seats, Ronan handed me a headset with large ear cushions and an attached mic. When he did, our fingers touched for the briefest of instants, and the spark that shot through me told me—as if I needed any reminding—just how much I still craved his every look and touch.
Fuck my life.
Forcing my face into a neutral expression, I slipped the headset over my ears, anticipating the respite that the forty-minute flight to Southampton seemed likely to provide. While our headsets would cancel much of the engine noise, being on the same communication channel as the pilot limited our ability to speak freely—a limitation for which I was grateful. If I was going to get through today, I needed to seize every second of quiet that I could.
The pilot started up the engines, which whined, hummed, and screeched as the rotors began to spin. As their spinning sped up, the whup-whup sound I associated with helicopters emerged from the noise.
The pilot’s voice came over my headphones. “Prepare for takeoff.”
Seconds later, the helicopter lifted from the ground and banked toward the ocean. As we picked up speed, the city’s looming skyscrapers shrank away beyond my window.
As Manhattan receded into the distance, I chanced a sidelong glance at Ronan, who sat across from me, looking out the opposite window. Dressed for the flight in jeans, a leather bomber jacket, and aviator sunglasses, he was impossibly handsome, and I couldn’t help wishing that things could have turned out differently between us.
Pushing away the grief that threatened to overwhelm me, I turned back to the window, fixed my gaze on the horizon, and forced myself to take a deep breath. I couldn’t afford to give way to my feelings, and dwelling on what could have been wouldn’t help me get through the day I faced.
Just then, the helicopter emitted a coughing sound and lurched to the left, throwing me against the right arm of my seat. For an instant, terror arced through my veins, before the engine sound shifted back to normal, and the aircraft righted itself.
“Sorry,” the pilot said. “One of the engines cut out for a second—but it’s fine now. Anyway, this bird’s a twin-engine, so there’s nothing to fear.”
Ronan leaned forward in his seat and spoke into the mic on his headset. “Ava—are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said as I readjusted my own headset, which had slipped off one ear.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “Even if we lost one of the two engines—which we haven’t—this copter flies perfectly well on one.”
“Thanks,” I said, meaning it. “That makes me feel safer.”
“You and me both,” he said with a reassuring smile. “Although for a few seconds there, I was wishing I’d asked for Dad’s limo instead.”
Relieved that the helicopter was fine, I smiled back. “You and me both—but if you had, we’d still be sitting in traffic, instead of halfway to Southampton.”
“True,” he said. “Now that spring has arrived, I’m sure traffic’s bumper-to-bumper much of the way.”
Throughout the rest of the flight,
which passed without incident, Ronan and I sat in companionable silence, and when we approached Southampton, I felt more confident about my ability to handle the day to come.
I wasn’t fully myself, and I couldn’t expect to be flying high anytime soon. But like an aircraft chugging along on one engine instead of two, I was getting by. I was doing what I’d committed to do and what needed to be done to save Ronan’s business.
And one step at a time, I would survive this wedding.
38
RONAN
When the helicopter landed at the Southampton estate, Veronica rushed Ava and me to the third-floor bedrooms, where we would change and prepare for the wedding. Since Ava and I had opted for an afternoon wedding, I’d chosen to wear a charcoal-gray morning suit and a white shirt, together with a pale silver vest and tie.
I had nearly finished dressing and was fiddling with my cufflinks when someone knocked on the door.
“Come in,” I called, expecting Jack, who was to be my best man.
But when the door opened, my brother, Aiden, entered, wearing a fitted dark suit and an awkward expression.
“Do you have a few minutes?” he said. “We need to talk.”
“A few,” I said, working my second cufflink into place. “But you’ll need to make it quick, because Veronica’s expecting me downstairs in half an hour, and you know how she is.”
Aiden closed the door behind him before turning toward me. “I used to think I understood my mother better than anyone. Now, I’m not so sure.”
I finished securing the cufflink and began to put on my tie. “What do you mean?”
“I overheard her talking to her friend Marianne about her plans to break up you and Ava—and later, I questioned her about what I’d heard.”
I stopped what I was doing and looked my brother in the eye. “Then you know that Veronica offered Ava three million bucks to break up with me.”