by Lizzie Shane
She pulled a face. “I know. It’s like saying I have a hard time remembering your father was Michael Jackson. Who forgets…What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
He shook himself. “Nothing. It’s just—that may be the sexiest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
She looked up at him—and his mouth went dry at the sudden heat in her eyes. “Ren…”
“Do you want to get out of here?”
“Hell yes,” she breathed.
He was towing her across the dance floor before the last word died. They wove between the tables that had been set up on the side lawn, not caring who stared. Nothing mattered but the two of them in this moment.
She slipped in front of him as soon as they reached the edge of the area that had been lit for the reception, laughing breathlessly as they began to run. He put one hand on the small of her back to steady her in her heels—and because he needed to touch her, to feel the warmth of her against his palm.
Candy. His Candy.
Her smile was breathless with lust and mischief as she opened the carriage house door. “I kept expecting my mother to appear to stop us. She’s going to kill me for bailing on the reception early.”
He met her grin with one of his own. “We stayed through dinner and the speeches. What’s left? Cake and the bouquet toss?”
“I’d rather have you for dessert,” she said with an exaggerated wag of her eyebrows that made him laugh.
Only with Candy did he feel this head-spinning combination of lust and euphoria. So freaking delighted to be with her, on the edge of laughing for the joy of it and ten seconds away from losing his mind if he couldn’t get her naked.
Ren knew, as they raced up the carriage house stairs, that this could be a bad idea—the last thing he needed was to get in any deeper with her—but he couldn’t turn her away. He could never turn her away.
Instead he spun her into his arms as soon as they crossed the threshold, catching her lips in a kiss that spoke of everything he’d never been able to make her hear. Love. So much love. Dear God, she reached into his heart and made it beat just for her.
“Candy,” he breathed against her skin when she turned her head to the side, breaking the kiss, but pulling him closer, tighter, tugging at his clothes.
“Hurry,” she whispered, matching his desperation.
He kissed her again, yanking at his tie and collar while she kicked off her heels and backed toward the bed, sliding down her side zipper. Neither of them broke the kiss as they struggled out of their clothes, half-laughing when he tripped over her shoes and she stumbled against the bed.
Something was different tonight—not just the sense of frantic urgency mixed with champagne bubbles of delight in his bloodstream, but something about her. The way she looked at him. The way she kissed him. With all of her. Nothing held back.
This was finally it.
CHAPTER FORTY
This was it. This was them.
Candy pulled Ren against her at the edge of the bed, drawing him into a kiss with a piercing sense of relief. She hadn’t screwed it up. She hadn’t lost him after all. This. This was what she needed. He was what she needed. And she was going to hold on tight and never let him go.
If there was something more desperate about her touch tonight, he didn’t seem to notice. If anything, he matched it. Just as ravenous. Just as frantic as he lowered her to the bed and followed her down, his weight pressing her into the softness of the comforter.
His fingertips trailed fire everywhere he touched and Candy sighed against his lips. He knew her body—the experience of a man who’d been her lover for years—but every touch was heightened tonight.
She gasped his name as her body arched on a jolt of sensation and he was there, drugging her with kisses even as his hands drove her wild. She was barely coherent, gasping words that had no meaning when he finally slid inside her. Her first orgasm rocked her, the second following so closely on the first she didn’t have time to come down. Then he was coming too, whispering words in her ear that sliced right through her—threatening to diffuse her pleasure with a bolt of terror.
“I love you, Candy.”
Then a third orgasm ripped through her scattering her thoughts, and her fears, and sending her flying.
*
“Why did you write those emails?”
Candy stiffened in Ren’s arms. She’d been trying to cling to her afterglow, bracing herself and hoping maybe they wouldn’t have to talk about the L word he’d dropped mid-coitus—then he’d sprung that question on her out of left field. “What?”
“The emails to your father that I supposedly wrote, why write them at all? I mean, I understand the first few—putting his mind at ease about our supposed marriage and keeping him from coming out to LA to meet me—but why keep it up for so many years?”
“I don’t know.” She squirmed out of his arms and dropped her feet over the side of the bed, going to the bathroom to clean herself up. She enjoyed the freedom of a partner—and a birth control—that she trusted so they didn’t have to keep diving for condoms, but the aftermath certainly was stickier.
She took longer than necessary in the bathroom, hoping he would get the hint. He usually did. Ren knew her. And he knew when not to push. Knew when she was at her limit.
Except tonight when she stepped out of the bathroom wrapped in a robe, he was sitting on the edge of the bed in a pair of boxer shorts, watching her. Music filtered to them from the reception still in progress on the other side of the house. Some sweet slow song—about love, no doubt. As if love were a cure-all pill and not the excuse people used as a get out of jail free card.
“Do you love me?”
She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry as the desert. “What?”
“It’s a simple question.”
The patience in his voice aggravated her more than anything. So calm. So understanding, but he didn’t understand at all. “It’s not simple for me,” she snapped, wrapping her arms tight around her waist. “I know your parents and grandparents had this perfect, iconic love, but I wasn’t raised that way. I still hear that voice whispering to me in my dreams about how they don’t love me and they aren’t coming for me, but when they do love you, it’s almost worse. My mother used love like a weapon, manipulating my father into abandoning Laura by threatening to take us away if he didn’t. I have never wanted to bring anyone else into the insanity of my family. I don’t ever want children—but I know you do. To me, family is a negative, but it’s everything you want. I don’t trust people—”
“You trust me.”
“I know! And it scares the shit out of me! You have to understand, Ren. That is never going to change. No matter how much I might want it to—”
“But if you want it to—”
“I can’t, Ren! I’m not like you, okay? I can’t love you like you want me to!”
The words seemed to echo in the sudden silence in the room. Even the band from the reception had stopped playing.
Ren stood, his movements wooden. “I should go.”
“What?” The exclamation escaped on a yelp.
“I need to think.” He shoved his feet into his pants and fastened them with brisk efficiency, reaching next for the shirt they’d thrown aside.
“Ren…”
She wanted to say she hadn’t meant it. Or that she had, but that it was the fear talking. The fear that she would screw things up between them. What if she didn’t know how to be in a normal, functional relationship? She’d been broken for so long, and Ren seemed to think all he had to do was wave the magic love wand and all her fears and insecurities would just float away. That fear had catapulted the words out of her mouth before she even knew what she was saying, but now she couldn’t seem to figure out how to take them back. A thousand pleas dried up in her mouth, choking her as he got dressed in silence.
His bag was already packed. He’d done it this morning when they thought the wedding might be called off. When he had his jacket on and his
tie dangling loose around his neck—looking like some kind of sexy, rumpled high-end cologne ad—he dipped into the closet and collected his suitcase.
And still she couldn’t seem to speak.
He paused at the door, looking back at her with hurt in his eyes. “Would it have killed you to say it?”
The words burned on her tongue. I’m sorry. I love you. Please don’t go. But her throat was closed off and all she could do was stare, her arms still wrapped tight around her waist, trying to hold herself together as resignation entered his eyes.
He nodded once. “Goodbye, Candy.” And he was gone. Digging a hole into her chest where her heart was supposed to be.
*
Ren stood in the giant circular driveway, waiting for his Uber. He’d left Candy the rental car, which had seemed chivalrous at the time, but that was before he had to stand beneath her window for fifteen minutes waiting for the damn car and listening to the sounds of a wedding reception behind him.
He could have given her room. He could have backed down. God knew he’d been doing that for years.
Maybe he’d finally reached his limit. Or maybe it was coming to terms with the fact that Javi was never going to change and neither was Candy. Though if she wanted to…
His gaze was drawn helplessly back toward the carriage house. If she would just come outside… Or even look out the window… He just needed something from her. Some kind of sign that there was hope. That he wasn’t wasting his heart on her.
The sex had been amazing and he’d thought something was different, that something had finally broken through her walls—but then as soon as he’d opened his mouth, asking her about those damn emails where she’d outlined the life they could have together—she’d retreated at full speed.
He’d been clinging to that last shred of hope—even when he thought it was dead it would spring back to life like Lazarus refusing to die—but she was clinging to her fear just as hard. She might need him as much as he needed her, but neither of them could seem to accept what the other was offering. And if she couldn’t give him something—anything—then he needed to walk away. To give himself the space to find the strength to be done with her, because he couldn’t think for shit when she was with him.
He loved her, but she was the one who’d told him over and over again that love wasn’t a free pass.
The Uber pulled into the driveway, the lights panning over Candy’s gorgeous ancestral home. Ren spared one last look toward the carriage house, pausing, half of him hoping that she would come running out in some dramatic movie ending, begging him to stay.
And he would have stayed. He would have clung to that little shred of hope a little longer.
But the carriage house stayed dark and silent. And Ren got into the car. Driving away without a backward glance.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Ren was still gone when she woke up in the morning. She’d slept terribly, waking up at every sound hoping it would be the sound of him returning, giving her another chance as he always did. The sound of every car in the driveway as the stragglers left the reception brought her jerking to awareness, scanning every corner of the room and listening intently for his tread on the stairs.
She heard the happy couple drive off. She heard Scott stumble back to his room. She heard the band members joking as they loaded their gear. What she never heard was Ren.
She’d spent the night tossing and turning. And thinking. Regretting. Trying to figure out why she always choked so royally when push came to shove.
She started a dozen texts—apologies, pleas, explanations—but never hit send.
Reluctant as she was to face her family, she needed coffee too badly to hide until her flight that afternoon and the nearest Starbucks was miles away.
The house was buzzing with activity—both the house staff and the extra personnel brought on for the wedding bustling around dismantling the fairy kingdom they’d created for Charlotte yesterday. As Candy stepped out onto the terrace in pursuit of coffee, she could see that the tables from the reception had already been broken down, the chairs neatly stacked.
Thankfully of all the people rushing around collecting stray floral arrangements none of them seemed to be related to her. Candy filled a cup and took a seat at one of the permanent tables, closing her eyes at the first heavenly sip, the knots in her shoulders slowing unraveling.
“Candy.”
She turned at the sound of her father’s voice, resisting the impulse to tense up as he settled beside her. “Hey, Dad.”
“Ren still asleep?” he asked. “You two left the reception awfully early last night.”
“He had an early flight.”
“Ah.” Her father’s diplomatic mien fell into place. “I had hoped… That is, he seemed like a nice young man.”
“He is.” She didn’t elaborate, blowing on her coffee to cool it and hoping he would let it go at that.
“I thought there might have been something real there,” he said quietly.
Candy maintained her silence, concentrating on the aroma rising from her cup.
Her father sighed, gazing out over the back yard, watching the hive of activity as all traces of the wedding were erased. “Do you remember when you were a little girl? How you used to tell me everything? You couldn’t wait to tell me about your day. I loved that.”
Candy bit her lip, studying the design on the wrought iron table top.
“I always regretted not being able to walk you down the aisle.”
She looked up then, blushing as she met his eyes. “I’m sorry. For lying.” She grimaced. “You probably figured out I wrote the emails.”
“I did,” he acknowledged. “I suspected you might have written one or two over the years, signing Ren’s name, but I didn’t want to rock the boat by questioning it. I was willing to take any connection to you I could get.” His eyes met hers. “I always regretted the distance between us. Almost as much as I regretted what I did.”
She couldn’t have looked away now if she wanted to. They never spoke about it. Ever. But he toyed with his own cup now, as if building up to saying something.
“It was wrong. It’s obvious now, but at the time I truly did believe I was protecting Laura by refusing to acknowledge the connection.”
She dared ask something she never had before. “Did you negotiate? Try to barter down the price for me?”
He cringed. “There was a problem getting the money. Something at the bank. Wire transfer limits or something. Our K&R insurance only reimbursed us after the fact—which I didn’t find out until someone was demanding money. I could barely focus long enough to hear the excuses they gave why we had to wait. I was losing my mind, so I tried to talk the kidnappers down. It was instinct. Impulse. Negotiating was what I was good at and I would have done anything to get you back.”
She believed him. She’d let her life be taken over by those awful whispers, by nightmares that she had held onto.
“I loved being your hero,” he murmured. “When I lost that, I realized I’d never deserved it in the first place. That was the most humbling part. And the saddest.” He reached across the table to where her hand rested, tentatively placing his over it. “Do you think you can forgive me?”
Candy looked into those eyes—so like her own—asking for forgiveness. What if her father wasn’t the devil? What if he was just a man? A cowardly man, sometimes. A womanizer, often. One who’d made horrible mistakes in his life, but just because the perfect bubble around him had popped years ago didn’t mean he was all bad.
Love was complicated. And for the first time, those words didn’t feel like a cop out.
“I can.” She turned her hand over beneath his, linking their fingers. “If you can forgive me for shutting you out for the last fifteen years.”
Her father smiled. “On one condition—no more fake husbands.”
She gave him a wobbling smile. “Deal. No more lies.”
*
“There you are, darling. I was just looking
for you. Did you speak with your father?”
Candy felt like she’d already been through the emotional wringer this morning, so when her mother appeared out of nowhere while she was making her way back to the carriage house, she flinched, but forced herself to face the inexplicable woman who had given birth to her.
“I did.” Then she swallowed and manned up. “And I owe you an apology too. I’m sorry I lied about being married.”
Her mother pursed her lips—clearly not in the same forgive-and-forget mood her father had been in. “I still don’t understand why you did it.”
Candy grimaced. “Do you remember what you were like at Charlotte’s first wedding? You practically had people checking my teeth like a horse. I said the only thing I could think of to get you to back off and let me make my own choices.”
“Well then I guess I won’t try to introduce you to eligible young men anymore,” Regina huffed. “I was only trying to help.”
“I don’t need that kind of help, Mom.”
“Whether you need it or not, it’s my job as your mother to guide you in life and see that you are presented with the best opportunities, to show you the best way.”
“Your way is never going to be my way.”
Her mother pursed her lips tighter and looked away. Candy started to move past her down the hall, thinking that would be the end of it, when her mother spoke.
“I like being in control of things. That isn’t going to change. You were always my most frustrating child. Even when you were small. Charlotte wanted to please me. Scott could be bribed—which I know they tell you is bad parenting, but it’s so easy how are you supposed to resist? Then you came along and I couldn’t do anything with you. Most children don’t think their parents are full of crap until they’re teenagers, but you looked at me like I was useless starting around age four. So yes, I handed you off to the nannies when I was tired of butting heads with you. And yes, I babied Aiden probably more than I should have because he was never any trouble. But you, Candy. You were always the most like me.”