Definitely not a memory she should be indulging in at the moment.
She drew in a deep breath, exhaled it slowly and tried to play it casual. “Hello, Gage.”
“Hi.” He offered her the armful of flowers she hadn’t even realized he was holding. “I brought these for you.”
She looked down at the gorgeous array of tulips and daffodils and irises and daisies. “They’re beautiful,” she said, “but…why are you giving me flowers?”
“Because they’re spring flowers.”
She didn’t see how his response answered her question, but she took the bouquet, anyway. “Thank you.” She dug her keys out of her pocket. “I’ll go put them in some water.”
Gage cleared his throat. “Can I come in?”
She would have expected he would just walk through the door if he wanted to come in. That he’d bothered to ask suggested he might be feeling as uncertain as Megan at the moment.
“Sure,” she said, and he followed her through the door.
“I don’t have any beer,” she told him. “But I could put on a pot of coffee.”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “You take care of the flowers.”
So he made the coffee while she arranged the blooms and tried not to think about how much she’d missed him and how thrilled she was that he was in her kitchen, even if all he wanted from her was a cup of coffee.
“There are even crocuses in here,” she noted, shifting some of the stems to balance the colors in the arrangement.
“What are crocuses?”
She smiled as she pointed. “The purple ones with the yellow centers.”
“Are they spring flowers, too?”
She nodded.
“I told the florist I wanted all spring flowers,” he explained. “Because I remembered that they were your favorites, because you said spring is a time of reawakening, when anything is possible. And because I needed to believe that what I want is possible.”
She set the vase carefully in the center of the table. Her heart was pounding so loudly now she was surprised he couldn’t hear it, but she managed to keep her voice level when she asked, “What do you want, Gage?”
“I want a second chance. For us.”
She didn’t know what had happened to change his mind, and she was afraid to let herself believe that he really had.
“We never had a first chance,” she reminded him. “What we had was an arrangement, an illusion. None of it was real.”
“It was real,” he told her. “More real than I wanted to admit, because then I would have to admit that my feelings for you were real. When you walked out on me—”
“Me?” She hadn’t intended to interrupt, but she couldn’t let the accusation pass without comment. “I told you I loved you.”
“I know. And then you walked out…just like my mother walked out.”
That caught her by surprise, and answered so many questions.
“How old were you?” she asked softly.
“Only a few months, the first time.”
“How many times were there?”
“I honestly don’t know.” He turned to pour himself a cup of coffee that she suspected he didn’t want half as much as he wanted something to do, somewhere to focus his attention while he spoke about things he’d probably never spoken about before. “I don’t have a lot of memories of her being there, but I know that she was, then she was gone.”
“And you were a helpless, bewildered child who had everything yanked away from him.”
He shook his head. “Don’t feel sorry for me. It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t abandoned or alone. My dad was there. He was always there for us.”
“I don’t feel sorry for you,” she said. “I feel sorry for the child you were, and maybe now I understand a little bit more why you always held yourself back, but I don’t feel sorry for you.”
“I didn’t always hold myself back. I tried to,” he admitted. “But I couldn’t hold out against you.”
“You gave a pretty good impression.”
He shrugged. “Years of experience. But even with so much practice keeping my emotions in check, you got under my skin.
“All along I’ve made mistakes, miscalculations, mostly because I assumed that you were like other women. That you were like Beth.”
“Who’s Beth?”
“No one important,” he said dismissively.
“She’s important if you thought I was like her.”
“I was wrong.”
“You loved her,” she guessed.
He sighed. “I thought I did. And I thought she loved me. It turned out that she loved the Richmond fortune.”
Megan folded her arms across her chest. “I never wanted your money.”
“I know—you wanted my body.”
She couldn’t deny that, and Gage’s smile assured her that he had no objection to the fact.
“But that wasn’t why I knew you were different. And it wasn’t until you were gone that I finally realized what truly set you apart from anyone else I’ve ever known—and that’s the way I feel about you.
“At the end of any other relationship, I’ve usually only felt relief. I was never looking for anything long-term. And then you came along and without even realizing what was happening, everything changed for me.
“I looked forward to coming to the lab every day, not because of the challenges the work presented but because I’d get to see you. And sometimes, if I was lucky enough to catch your eye, you’d give me one of those little smiles, and I’d feel as if I could conquer the world.
“I didn’t want a relationship, I wanted a promotion. But somehow, I started thinking beyond my career, and you were at the center of all those thoughts, and that scared the hell out of me.”
She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him make such a speech. She was sure that he’d never been so open about his feelings. And as she listened to him confess to fears so similar to her own, she began to hope.
“And it wasn’t just that I wanted you,” he told her. “It was that you made me look at my life and think about my dreams. You made me realize that I wanted more, and you made me want to be a better person—someone who might be worthy of you.
“I’m not there yet,” he admitted. “But I’ve made a start. I know it’s early days still, but I’m enjoying my new job, and knowing that I will succeed or fail on the merits of my efforts. And I’m confident that I will succeed, because another thing I’ve realized is that I have ambition and pride and I won’t accept any less than 100 percent from myself—at my job or in my personal life.”
She’d known that about him already. But she hadn’t dared let herself believe that he could be so committed to her. And even now, even listening to his words and hearing the emotion in his voice, there was still a part of her that was afraid to trust in what he was saying.
“I’ve never been all the way in love before,” he told her.
Her heart stuttered in response to the implications that he could be all the way in love now—with her. “I certainly never gave a relationship my complete focus or attention,” he continued. “Because I was scared. You were right about that. After my experience with Beth, I was even more cautious. I was afraid that if I let myself love someone, I would be hurt.
“But I’ve realized there’s something that scares me more than opening up my heart—and that’s the possibility of losing you forever. And that’s why I’m here—to tell you that I love you, to give you 100 percent of my heart, and to assure you that if you’re willing to take a chance on me, I will do my damnedest to ensure you never regret it.”
He loved her. Her mind spun, her heart soared. She wanted to throw her arms around him and tell him that she loved him, too, but she only said, “Do you realize that you told me more about yourself in the past ten minutes than you did during the entire course of our fake engagement?”
“Was it too much? Did I scare you off?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t too much, and I don’t s
care easily.”
“You used to tremble when I kissed you.”
Her lips curved. “Not because I was scared.”
He lifted a brow, then tipped her chin up with his finger and brushed his lips against hers. Softly. Sweetly. Longingly.
She trembled; he smiled.
“I missed you,” he said, and with those words, the scattered pieces of her broken heart began to reassemble.
“I missed you, too,” she admitted.
“I love you, Megan.”
And the jagged edges of those broken pieces knitted together, and her heart swelled until it filled her whole chest.
“I love you, too.”
His arms tightened around her. “Do you love me enough to make it for real this time?”
She swallowed. “Make what real?”
“Our engagement.”
She stepped back, shocked. “Do you really mean it?”
“I really mean it,” he assured her. “In fact, I’ve got the ring to prove it.”
He pulled the box out of his pocket.
Her breath hitched when she recognized The Diamond Jubilee logo on the top. Then he flipped open the lid, and her eyes filled with tears.
“That’s not my ring.”
“It is if you want it.”
If she wanted it? There wasn’t anything she wanted more. But she had to ask, “What happened to the other one?”
“I took it back,” he told her. “Aside from the fact that you never wanted that ring, I didn’t want you wearing a ring that had symbolized a false promise.”
Instead he’d chosen a modest round cut diamond set on a simple gold band—the exact ring she’d originally picked out.
“Does this prove that I’m serious?” he asked.
She nodded, her throat too tight to speak, her newly healed heart pounding hard and fast.
“This time, it’s just about us,” he told her. “I have no ulterior motives or secret agendas. I’ve finally realized what I want, and more than anything, what I want is to spend my life with you.”
“I always knew what I wanted,” she told him. “Even if I wasn’t willing to admit it. And what I want is to spend my life with you.”
He slid the ring onto her finger. “Do you remember how we were going to tell your mother that we wanted a long engagement?”
She nodded.
“Well, I don’t want a long engagement,” he warned her.
“You want to be married before next year’s most desirable bachelors list is published, don’t you?” she teased.
“Way before then.” He wrapped his arms around her, held her tight.
She snuggled into his embrace and smiled, secure in his arms and in the knowledge that she’d finally found where she belonged.
Epilogue
Three days later, after a quick, simple ceremony, Megan and Gage walked out of the courthouse, hand in hand.
They were followed by her mother and Ashley and Paige and his parents and Craig and Tess and their four kids. While Megan couldn’t—in good conscience—get married without her family around her, she knew she would go insane if she let her mother plan a big, fancy wedding. Instead, she’d put Lillian in charge of setting up an intimate family dinner to celebrate the occasion, and her mother had happily made the arrangements.
Other than Lillian, Megan’s biggest concern had been Ashley’s response to the hasty nuptials, because she knew her sister was still hurting over her own broken engagement. But Ashley was genuinely thrilled to witness the union, though she did take Gage aside before-hand to warn that he would answer to her if he ever did anything to dim the stars in her sister’s eyes. Gage assured her that he wouldn’t, and because she could see the same stars in his, Ashley believed him.
But the biggest surprise had been seeing Paige wipe tears from her cheeks after the ceremony. Of course, Megan had always suspected that her cousin was the biggest romantic of them all, and she sent up a silent prayer that both Ashley and Paige would someday find partners who made them as happy as Gage made her.
As if he could read her thoughts, Gage squeezed her hand gently. The hand on which she now wore a simple gold band nestled against her new engagement ring.
She looked up at him and smiled. “I still can’t believe it—first we were engaged, then we weren’t, and now we’re married.”
“Are you sorry that we did it so fast instead of having a big fancy wedding?”
She shook her head emphatically. “Definitely not. And now we can move straight to the honeymoon.”
“I would like nothing more than to take you away to somewhere with lots of sunshine and warm, sandy beaches, but I can hardly ask for a couple weeks off from a job I only started a couple weeks ago.”
“I don’t need to go anywhere,” she assured him. “I just need to be with you.”
“In that case, I’ve got a plan.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that. The last time you came up with a plan, it was about a fake engagement.”
“You’ll like this one,” he promised.
“What does it involve?”
“Just you and me, a long weekend and the keys to the house in Lake Placid.”
“I think I do like that one.” She wrapped her arms around him. “In fact, it sounds like an absolutely perfect plan.”
ISBN: 978-1-4268-4635-9
THE ENGAGEMENT PROJECT
Copyright © 2010 by Brenda Harlen
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*Family Business
†Logan’s Legacy Revisited
**Reigning Men
**Reigning Men
††Back in Business
**Reigning Men
‡The Foleys and the McCords
‡‡Brides and Babies
The Engagement Project Page 18