by Lucy Kevin
He could remember the kiss they’d shared—every last detail. It was the best kiss he’d ever experienced. It had been the closest he’d ever felt to any woman, including his ex-wife.
Yet right then, just holding hands on the bleachers with Rose was even sweeter.
“Yes!” Rose yelled, dragging him to his feet as the ball sailed into the outfield. “We’ve won!”
For a moment, he thought that she might hug him, and maybe that would have been even better than the hand-holding, but Rose dropped her ice cream stick into the garbage can and rushed forward to congratulate the kids instead.
And even when she told him she needed to get back because Donovan would be picking her up soon for a champagne toast one of his colleagues was throwing the two of them, RJ knew the afternoon had gone better than he could possibly have hoped.
Rose had held his hand. She’d sat on the bleachers during a Little League game with him like a couple would have done, and it had felt so right.
More than that, the afternoon had proved that the real Rose was still in there somewhere, and that she was still a smart, funny woman who would rather eat an ice cream at a children’s baseball game than go to an art gallery any day.
Chapter Ten
The party was everything Rose had come to expect from Donovan’s friends. It was stylish, elegant, refined...and she kept having to hold back a yawn. Of course, she reminded herself, they were all here to celebrate her and Donovan, so that should be enough.
Rose had barely had time to get home and change before Donovan had picked her up. She’d thrown on a sleek navy blue dress and heels, but without the time to put together anything better, she felt severely underdressed next to the collection of plastic surgeons and their model-beautiful wives and girlfriends. Donovan had assured her that she looked lovely, but she’d had a hard time believing he meant it.
Maybe it was because of the way he’d said, “You look lovely tonight, Rose,” as calmly as if he’d been telling a client how well her surgery had gone, and with just as little passion.
She knew he had a measured approach to life, but she hadn’t wanted to just be told that she was looking good; she’d wanted to feel it. She’d wanted his smoldering gaze to silently tell her that what he really wanted was to cut the party short, take her back to his place, and get her out of the dress she was wearing.
The trouble was, she’d never seen Donovan give a look like that. It wasn’t exactly the proper thing to do, was it? As for going to bed together…well, they’d hardly seen much of recently, and when they had, they’d both been so busy with planning the wedding.
Donovan always told her he believed the key to a successful relationship was clear and open lines of communication. Now, if only they could find enough time to work on those lines.
Well, now wasn’t the moment; that was for sure. They were currently standing beside one of Donovan’s friends who was telling a story about the time they’d both talked a senatorial candidate into a face lift and the apparently miraculous results it had produced for his career. She had been introduced to Edward at a champagne toast earlier in the week. He had a different woman by his side tonight, though to Rose’s eye they were more or less interchangeably blonde and pretty.
“…and now we have at least one friend in high places,” Edward said, “thanks to Donovan.”
“His eyebrows are in a high place, at least,” another surgeon joked. “Permanently, now.”
That got a laugh from everyone, and Rose remembered to join in at the last second.
“To Donovan and his lovely bride to be,” Edward finished.
His toast was abbreviated to simply “To Donovan!” when everyone else said it, but Rose was willing to let that go. After all, he was their friend and she knew she should be making more of an effort. The trouble was that half the things she felt like saying weren’t exactly things she suspected the group would think of as witty or funny...or even appropriate.
“It’s nice of so many people to want to wish us well, isn’t it?” Donovan said a short while later.
“It is,” Rose agreed with a smile that felt brittle, especially when compared to how much fun she’d had out at the Little League field earlier that day with RJ and the children.
Thinking of RJ during this party had Rose feeling terribly disloyal. She reached for Donovan’s hand, but as she did so, her mind immediately flicked back to the feel of RJ’s large, calloused hand in hers during the game. Reaching for him had been such a simple, natural thing to do.
God, what was wrong with her? She shouldn’t be thinking about RJ at all this close to her wedding. Yet thoughts of him kept coming, kept intruding. Like how she could imagine the way he’d liven up this party, for one thing. Even without saying much, he’d make it so easy for her to feel comfortable. With RJ, she’d be able to relax.
Why should she need him around to do that though? Maybe all she needed here was to loosen up just a little. Rose resolved to try it with the next couple they ended up talking to, another plastic surgeon with another pretty blonde on his arm.
“Frank,” Donovan said, “it’s good to see you.”
“I wouldn’t miss your celebration, now would I?”
Donovan nodded to the woman with his friend. “Tiffany, you’re looking great as always.”
“So, what do you do, Tiffany?” Rose asked.
The other woman looked surprised by her question. “I’m a model. Thanks, in large part, to Frank’s brilliant work.”
The words, A little re-modeling before the modeling? sounded in Rose’s head, but she knew better than to say them. Instead she simply forced her smile to remain fixed on her face.
“Frank,” Donovan said, “weren’t you telling me that you were planning on opening up a new practice?”
“That’s right. Not too far from you, as it happens. But don’t worry, I won’t steal all of your clients,” he said with a slap to Donovan’s back. “I know you still have a wedding to pay for. Unless, of course, it’s on the house since the wife-to-be owns the wedding venue!”
Wife-to-be? Rose clenched her teeth together behind her smile. She had a name. It was Rose.
“My staff volunteered to work our wedding for free as a gift,” she explained, “but I couldn’t possibly allow them to do that when they have bills and mortgages to pay.”
Donovan gave her just a small shake of his head; not disapproving, exactly, because he was never that, but gently warning her away from continuing to talk about the finances surrounding their wedding.
Rose felt her insides curl up into a tight little ball knowing she’d made a faux pas by talking about money at all, even though Frank had done just that with his un-funny joke.
When Donovan was dragged away to talk business, Rose found herself standing in the corner listening to Tiffany talking about a photo shoot she’d just done.
“The photographer had every ounce of his attention focused on me. It made me feel so sexy. But then, you must know exactly what that feels like. After all, you’ve got Donovan, haven’t you?”
Rose barely stopped herself from frowning. “Oh yes,” she made herself say, “you’re right. Donovan’s wonderful.” And he was. He was nice and kind to her and they enjoyed art and opera together. What more could she want?
“You’re very fortunate, you know,” Tiffany said. “Everyone was wondering which lucky girl would get Donovan, and it’s you.”
It was the same thing Millicent had said to Rose in the gallery that morning. Only, Rose couldn’t help but think it made her sound more like a lottery winner than the woman Donovan McIntyre loved with all his heart and couldn’t wait to start a new life with.
Rose was still thinking about that while Donovan drove her home a while later, but there were plenty of other things on her mind too. The party. The baseball game before that. The hundreds of times RJ had made her laugh over the years.
And how wrong it would be to keep what had happened last Valentine’s Day from her fiancé.
&n
bsp; “RJ and I kissed once,” Rose blurted.
Perhaps another man would have crashed the car at hearing her confession, but Donovan didn’t do that. He didn’t even pull over, either, though he did glance at her when they stopped at a red light.
Why wasn’t he reacting?
And why, oh why, did she want to push him until he did?
“It was last year on Valentine’s Day, and we did it for a contest in a bar, but we still did it, and I wanted you to know.”
Now, Rose could see the tension in Donovan’s jaw as he kept driving, but he didn’t slow down, and he didn’t shout. Instead, she watched him spend the next few seconds thinking it all through.
“Well,” he said at last in a very reasonable voice, “I guess that’s only to be expected.”
“Only to be expected?” Rose repeated. “Is that all you have to say? That it’s ‘only to be expected’?”
“You’re a very beautiful woman, Rose, and it has been obvious for a while now that your gardener likes you.”
“But…” Rose wasn’t sure what to say. She wasn’t sure exactly what reaction she’d been hoping for, only that it should be more than this, shouldn’t it?
Donovan was the man she was marrying, but he was reacting to the news that she’d kissed another man like it was nothing. Like it didn’t matter to him at all.
“Don’t you care?”
“Of course I care,” Donovan said. “I just don’t see that getting angry about it will help matters. This accidental kiss you had with your gardener is simply something we need to talk through rationally, like the two reasonable adults that we are. Or were you expecting me to drive straight over to his house and punch him in the face?”
“Well, no.” Though that might at least have shown her how passionately he felt about her. And she felt a nearly irrepressible urge to correct Donovan when he called RJ a gardener. Because he was so much more than that. The truth was, she couldn’t run the Rose Chalet without him.
“Besides, you just told me that it wasn’t anything serious, just a contest on Valentine’s Day.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that it was a contest that involved kissing another man?”
“Perhaps a little,” he said, “but I can understand it, too. You wanted to see what it would be like to enjoy a brief forbidden moment. Let’s face it, Rose, that’s all it was. Perhaps if it was someone else that you kissed, I might be more upset. But it isn’t like your gardener is actually a threat to us.”
“RJ isn’t just a gardener,” she finally had to retort. “Not only has he designed and landscaped pretty much the entire Rose Chalet property, he’s also helped with the important details in putting hundreds of weddings together.”
“Okay, so he’s a useful gardener who is also good with a hammer and nails,” Donovan said. “It still doesn’t mean he’d ever be good enough for you. It was just a silly moment of fun for you, but it was nearly a year ago now, yes? A meaningless kiss from a year ago.”
“But that’s…Donovan, why are you being so reasonable about this?”
“I love you, and more importantly, I trust you, Rose. I trust you to make the right decisions, and to know just how good we are together. You obviously feel guilty about the kiss, but you don’t need to. You really don’t.”
“But—”
“You’ve unburdened yourself and I’m not upset. Everything is fine between us. Perfectly fine.”
It was all so reasonable and neat, so sealed off and free of emotion. In that moment, Rose felt like screaming...and that just made her feel worse.
Why couldn’t Donovan react? Why did he have to be so measured about things? Why, for once, couldn’t he just go with what he felt, like so many other men would have?
Like RJ would have.
She tried to push the errant thought back, but it was true. If RJ had heard that she’d kissed another man, he would have reacted so passionately, so intensely.
Beside her, Donovan just kept driving, his expression as calm and even as if she’d never admitted to kissing another man at all.
Chapter Eleven
RJ went to work early on Thursday morning. He wasn’t going to give Rose anything less than her dream wedding, even if it meant he had to put in extra hours before anyone else was on the property. In fact, it was probably better that way, because then she wouldn’t see all the details as he built them. Some surprises, he wanted to keep for her big day.
He was using a nail gun to get two-by-four beams into position in the main hall, and wanted to get them in place before Rose could see them. It wasn’t exactly an elegant solution, but it would give him a strong core to build the rest of the setup around.
The same strong core that Rose seemed to be so determined to ignore in herself.
“Hey, RJ.” He looked up to see his brother approaching.
“Patrick, I thought you’d be busy working on Rose and Donovan’s new home. Aren’t they planning on moving in after the wedding?” Thinking about the two of them together in the new house had RJ’s gut clenching.
“We’re actually pretty close to completion,” Patrick told him.
“I bet it goes even quicker when Donovan is willing to spend the money for additional contractors.”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” his brother told him. “It means that I can come down here to offer my services. Or was Phoebe wrong when she told me you have to re-build the entire wedding setup from scratch?”
“She wasn’t wrong.”
“I’m surprised to hear that Rose changed her mind about the whole thing. That isn’t like her.”
RJ didn’t want to go into the details, even with his brother. “The important thing is that it needs to get done by Saturday.”
Patrick shrugged and picked up a hammer without asking, starting to nail a crossbeam into position. “We’ve both done plenty of jobs like that. It starts out one way and ends up as something else entirely.”
Just then, Tyce arrived. RJ checked his watch in mock surprise. “Isn’t this the earliest you’ve ever been in to work? All that time around Whitney has changed you, man.”
Tyce grinned. “I hope so, but that’s not why I’m in early. Since you’re working on a new setup, I’m going to need to put up a new lighting rig.”
“Are you still having trouble getting enough students for your string section?” RJ asked, with genuine concern. Rose deserved the wedding of her dreams.
She also deserved the right groom, of course.
“I’ve been speaking with a talented quartet, but whether they have enough pieces together to play the whole gig, I’m not sure. I’m going to have speakers ready as insurance.”
“I’ll tell you what,” RJ offered. “If you can help Patrick and me out with this, I’ll help you with the lighting rig and the speakers.”
They set to work, and soon the three of them were making better progress than RJ had hoped for. After an hour or so, they paused to inspect their handiwork. It was looking good.
“RJ,” Patrick said from out of the blue, “I need to talk to you about something important.”
RJ’s brother pulled a box out of his pocket. Inside was a platinum wedding set, sparkling with small diamonds.
Patrick was going to ask Phoebe to marry him?
RJ had known that his brother was serious about his friend and co-worker at the chalet, and that Phoebe was serious about him too. Yet he’d never thought that they’d move this quickly.
Tyce immediately joked, “It’s lovely, Patrick, but you know, you just aren’t my type.”
“I know it might seem a little soon, but I love Phoebe so much, and if she’s ready, I’d love to get married.”
“Welcome to the club.” Tyce said with a grin. “Whitney and I have been talking, and I was going to speak to Rose about setting a date here next year. Apparently, it’s going to take that long to arrange for all the Bannings to turn up at once.”
RJ stood there, trying to take it all in. Here were two men who would pr
eviously have been as likely to discuss their feelings as they would have been to run naked down the streets of San Francisco, yet here they were, talking about weddings and how in love they were.
Suddenly, RJ couldn’t keep from admitting his own feelings.
“I’m in love with Rose.”
His words hung in the air for a second or two before Patrick slapped him on the shoulder.
“At last, he confesses the truth. Does she know yet?” his brother asked.
“Wait a minute, you already knew how I felt about Rose?”
“Of course we do,” Tyce broke in. “The two of you have always had something special between you. So,” he said echoing Patrick’s question, “have you told her?”
“She’s getting married to another man,” RJ reminded them. “In three days.”
“They aren’t married yet,” Patrick pointed out, before frowning. “I hope you haven’t put off going after Rose because of what happened with your ex-wife.”
“Of course I have,” he told his brother. “I never wanted to break up a relationship that way, by encouraging Rose to cheat on Donovan.”
No, he’d simply wanted her to realize that Donovan was all wrong for her and to dump him so that he could cleanly ask her out. But that had never happened.
“Look,” Patrick said in a no-nonsense manner, “I’m not sure you and Betsy were ever meant to be. You were both young when you got married and when she cheated on you, I know it hurt. But I also know that you’re happier since leaving her than you ever were in that relationship. My guess is that you both are. Take it from me, RJ, the important thing is whether you’re with the person you really love, and that she really loves you, too. Not how you end up there.”
“Your brother has a point,” Tyce agreed.
RJ shook his head. “It isn’t that simple, guys. Because what if it turns out that Rose would be happier with Donovan?”
“Then she’ll marry Donovan,” Patrick said. “It’s simple, really. If she loves you, she’ll be with you. If she loves Donovan, she’ll be with him. But if you don’t fight for her, then you’ll never know who she really loves.”