Pushing off the bar into a standing position, Lachlan gives me a long, pointed look. “No you don’t. But does she deserve to be miserable?” With that parting comment, Lachlan walks toward the exit. Just before reaching for the door, he turns around and looks at me. “8:15; got it?”
***
The chance at seeing Kye again was all I needed to instantly sober up. After quickly paying my tab at the bar, I head back to my hotel suite and rush to my carryon bag and take out a small black ring box I have had for seven years. I lie down on the bed, but and tried to figure out what I was going to say to Kye to get her to really understand how much I love her; how much I have always loved her. As I lie there, I think about all the major ways I had fucked up. I hadn’t been honest with her about the assignment that Mathers wanted me to do because I was selfish enough to want nothing between us to change. I had also put successfully completing the assignment above her feelings when I purposefully hurt her with the whole. “You wouldn’t fit in” line I threw at her at the club that night. That was wrong and would have hurt anyone, but with what I now knew that Kye had been through with her high school boyfriend, Zandoville, and Christien, I know that it must have completely devastated her. Zandoville and her high school boyfriend made her feel like a piece of meat who didn’t deserve the chance to say no; then Christien made her feel like she was only good enough when things were easy, and as soon as things become too difficult he showed her that she wasn’t worth the effort.
Then there was me. I could only imagine what I had put her through over the years. To her it must seem like I played her seven years ago then, when something better came along I cut and ran. Then we run into each other seven years later, after I finally wear her down, she lets me back in, only for me to once again tell her she isn’t good enough. On top of that I accuse her of having an affair with her son, while in actuality it is a girl she thinks I slept with less than twenty-four hours after we made love. I fucking suck so bad. I know I suck and she knows it, even if I haven’t done everything she thinks I have, my doing things half-assed has hurt her time and time again.
I slowly rise from the bed and open up my luggage to get the small ring box that I have had for almost seven and a half years. Holding it in my hand, I walk over to the dresser and silently stare at my reflection. I know that this ring is in no way a guarantee that I will get Kye back. However, even if I the ring won’t get Kye back; even if I have killed any feeling she has for me, she still deserves t o know that my heart is hers and has been, since the day I met her.
***
It is 8:09 and I am standing outside of the Magnolia Ballroom, with a case of nerves worse than any I have ever had before. The nerves added to the queasy feeling of being sober after close to three months of being almost constantly drunk, are less than ideal, but I know this may be my one and only shot at getting to find Kye, and I wasn’t about to mess it up.
I drawl in a long jagged breath, open the door, and walk into a veritable Who’s Who of international politics. Making a quick calculation of who I see here tonight brings me to at least five young European royals; three male and two female, several U.S. senators, both from on the houses, and Connor and Lachlan’s father and mother; one of the most popular vice president and his wife. Formal gatherings like this are nothing new to me. An invitation to my family’s New Year’s Eve gala was one of the most sought out invitations in Texas, so to find myself actually feeling awkward and unsure of myself is a new experience for me.
As I look around, I can’t help the sense of dread that begins creeping into my soul. I cringe as my words come back to haunt me once again. “Look Babe, did you really think that we were going to last? I mean, you’re a good lay, but you wouldn’t really fit in with my family and friends back home.” Those words cost me so much, and now seeing the circles that Kye moved in, even if only for business, fills me with fear. What if she laughs in my face and tells me I am not good enough for her now?
Just as I turn around to leave, a distinguished looking older gentleman stands on the stage and clinks his glass right in front of the microphone so that it will get everyone’s attention. I see an older woman, with dark hair and eyes that looks strangely familiar, even though I know I have never seen her before in my life.
After clearing his throat, the older gentleman began speaking. “I am happy that each of you could be here tonight to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. You know, it was in this city that I met my daughter twenty-six years ago, when she was adamant about playing with my two youngest sons despite their bodyguards being rather strongly against it.” As the crowd chuckles, I get a better look at the man’s face and freeze. He is the informant that Mathers wanted me to help by finding his daughter! Oh my God! Did Kye actually know who she was? I couldn’t believe that I could have kept from having to be involved in that whole Catherine debacle just by talking to Kye. The weight of my regret almost brings me to my knees.
The informant continues on. “While Kyliana and my sons were in Oxford, they started some new traditions with the friends they made there. One was having these guys sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ So here they are, the Jagged Pill.”
I had to have heard him wrong. His daughter’s name is not Kyliana. It can’t be. Then the front man for Jagged Pill, Ethan, opens his cockney mouth and makes all my worst fears come true. “Kye sweetie, you know that we love singing on your birthday. Hell, we chased you down seven or eight years ago when you pulled your little disappearing act! As they started singing, I realized how much I had hurt Kye and took her for granted. Hell, not only did I hurt her on her birthday, I hadn’t even known it was her birthday! She had wanted me to meet her friends and celebrate her birthday and I had thrown it all away. I can’t see how she will ever forgive me for the pain I have put her in, recently or seven and a half years ago. That knowledge almost has me leaving. The only reason I stay is because I know within the depths of my soul that I will die without her.
As I look around the room, I see Kye seated at a table in the center of the room. As ‘Happy Birthday’ ends, I start to make my way over to Kye. When I am about twelve feet away from Kye’s table, Ethan starts talking again. “Usually our egos won’t let us play back up. But tonight we are going to play back up to a couple of mates that I think you know.”
Just then Seamus and Cian kiss their mother and leave to go up on stage. I hear a commotion behind me, and like the rest of the room I turn around to see Tiarnan, in full dress uniform, walking into the ballroom. I hear Kye’s gasp, and I know she is like everyone else and doesn’t know what is going on.
Tiarnan only pauses briefly at Kye’s table; long enough to give her shoulder an affectionate squeeze, then proceeds to the stage. Once he gets there he picks up his own microphone. “Well, I know that everyone is surprised to see me, but my brothers and I decided we were going to sing a special song to our mother for her birthday, because she has saved each one of us.”
With that, the band begins to play Kenny Chesney’s You Save Me. The boys have the song broken up into parts, but at the end of every verse, Tiarnan sings “Mama you saved me.” I look over and I see Kye is balling. I start to go to her to console her and offer her a shoulder to cry on when Cale’s voice stops me. “No man let them have this. This is the first time Kye has heard him call her Mama, and not Mamacita. Let this memory be about them and that.”
When the song is over, the boys all rush off stage to hug Kye, and tell her how much they love her. I stand to the side, out of site in order to give them a minute, when I hear a commotion coming from the back of the ballroom. I turn around to see Christien, followed by his bodyguards; make his way to Kye’s table. By the time that he reaches Kye’s side, all the boys have stood up and backed away from her. Christien looks at her a long moment, then drops to one knee. “Kyliana, when I met you nine years ago; you were nineteen years old and I was twenty-two. Even though we were both so young, I knew then that how rare and wonderful you were, but circumstances came betw
een us. Please marry me and give me the chance to love you and make you fall in love with me again?” After saying this, Christien pulls out a ring with a large sapphire and an intricate, filigree gold band. “I know your birthstone is an Aquamarine, but I wanted the best so I got a Sapphire.”
After a long, tense minute in which I died a thousand deaths thinking she would say yes, Kye finally stood up and quietly asked Christien to follow her outside. I stood there a couple of minutes, trying to get the fog to lift from my brain so I could decide what to do, when Tiarnan’s voice sounded from beside me. “Are you really going to let him waltz in here and take her? I hadn’t thought so before, but maybe he does love her more than you do!”
Well that got the fog to lift almost instantaneously. “The fuck he does! He could love her with everything he has for ten lifetimes and never love her as much as I do in this moment alone!”
That drawls a smile from Tiarnan. “Well then, what are you standing around here talking to me for? Go make Mom a happy woman! Just know if you hurt her again, there will be a line of people waiting their turn to kick your ass, and I will be at the front of that line. Now go!” I quickly turn in the direction that Kye and Christien went to do just that.
34
“All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.”
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Kye
Damn and hell! What in the hell is Christien thinking? Over the years he has asked me countless times to take him back, but this is the first time that he has ever asked me to marry him; and in front of everyone like that, what the hell was he thinking? After standing in shock like some statue for what seemed like eternity, I finally got my mental bearings about myself and quickly usher Christien out the ballroom door.
Once we get out in the hallway, I unleash all kinds of hell on him. “What are you thinking? Do you really think that I am going to just forgive and forget you fucking some whore the very night that we got engaged, all because I couldn’t give it up to you that time, really what the fuck are you thinking? Just how far do you have you head shoved up your ass?”
At that, Christien’s face crumbles. I can tell that something that I said is killing him. “Couldn’t give it up? Couldn’t give it up? Kye, I loved you; with all my heart and every fiber of my being. When you started screaming the second I touched you something inside me just snapped. I couldn’t handle it, and when I went to drink the memory of your screams out of my mind, she was just there. Shit, she had been coming on to me for months, so after so many beers and the echo of your screams in my mind, fucking Sable didn’t seem like such a bad idea. You have got to believe me that was all it was; a quick fuck to try to get me to forget.”
I quickly turn to face the opposite end of the hall. Oh my God, Zandoville had been trying to screw with my life longer than even back then? As much as I want to tell Christien just how stupid he is to have slept with that, that rest stop whore, I know that isn’t what I need to focus on right now.
After taking several long, deep breaths; I am calm enough to answer him. I can only hope that he really listens to me. “Christien, what you did hurt, I can’t deny that. But it isn’t why I can’t marry you. First, you don’t really love me. You love the illusion that you have shaped me into in your mind. The fact that my birthstone wasn’t good enough for you proves that. Aquamarine wasn’t classy enough, so you had to use sapphires.
But the most important reason that I can’t marry you is that even though I love you Christien, I am not in love with you, and I won’t take away your chance to find true love.”
Almost instantly I am spun around, and Christien looks more devastated than I have ever seen anyone look. With a tear rolling down each cheek, he softly asks me; “Why? Why can’t you be with me? You were with Toby; you didn’t seem to find anything wrong with taking away his chance for true love.”
“Christien, I have told you this before. Toby was my best friend, and only my best friend up until six months before he died. We decided to try being a couple so that Seamus would have a more traditional home life. But even that was wrong. I know that now.”
“What about him?” Christien asks. There are some things we just know. The sun rises in the East, and is going to set in the West. The moon goes round the Earth and I know Wyatt is standing behind me when that question is asked. That is how strong I feel and felt his presence. I slowly turn around and lock eyes with Wyatt. The emotional intensity in his gaze is more that I have ever seen, and at that moment I know that I will love him forever; but sometimes love isn’t enough. I have to walk away from him; now!
Before I make it two steps toward the exit, Wyatt grabs me around waist and pulls me close to him. “Kye, please. There is so much I have to say to you that I don’t even know where to begin. All I know is that I can’t get it all out if I have to waste time chasing you down. Please, just give me five minutes, five minutes and if you want me to I will leave and never bother you again.”
I slowly turn back around. If five minutes will get him to leave me alone, fine. “Ok, five minutes.”
Wyatt grabbed both my hands and pulled me as close as he could without our bodies touching. Out of the corner of my eye I see Christien slowly turn and walk down the hall to leave. I feel for him, I truly do, but I know he doesn’t love me the way he thinks he does. He just has to give himself a chance to really fall in love.
When Wyatt starts talking, all thoughts of anyone else leave my mind in a cloud of dust. As I look into his silver eyes, I can honestly feel each word he says in my soul. “Kye, since the day I met you, I have been in love with you. The deep, hopeless kind of love that leaves you incomplete without the person you love. Just like an amputee victim, I have felt you with me even when you weren’t there. Kye, I am so, so, so sorry I hurt you. If I could take it back I would, but I can’t. All I can do is swear to you that I will never doubt who you are as a person again, and I will never intentionally hurt you again either.”
“Why did you do it in the first place?”
Wyatt bows his head for so long I don’t think he is ever going to answer. When he finally does, I am shocked to see tears in his eyes. “Kye, the honest reason is that I was scared. Seven years ago I fucked up. I was asked to find the daughter of a Middle Eastern informant that had gone AWOL. I didn’t have a lot of information to go on, but General Mathers thought that the girl you saw me with was her. I was trying to get the necessary information to verify that she was the informant’s daughter without sleeping with her so that I could identify her scar. I am guessing that you had the scar covered by your tattoo and you dad didn’t know about the tattoo?”
I slowly nod my head. “About eight months before the mess with Christien, a bunch of us went out and got tattoos. Some of the European tabloids had taken to calling us the Royal Rat Pack, and one night we all decided to embrace it by getting crowns with the initials RRP hidden inside the crowns. The guys all got big manly crowns on their arms, but I got a little dainty princess crown to cover my scar. Daddy Samee did always call me Prenses, the Turkish word for princess, so it all just fit.”
Wyatt nodded his head. “I get that. I always thought that tattoo was beautiful, Darlin’ Princess. Funny, I just didn’t realize how much that name was just right for you.”
Looking at him tentatively smiling down at me makes me want to melt. It takes everything I have to not fall into his arms. I need something to make me stay away from him. With that in mind I go on a fishing expedition. “Fine, let’s agree for arguments sake that the only thing between you and Blond Slut #1 was an assignment. Why did you say what you did to hurt me so badly?”
Wyatt takes one hand through his hair, but the other one still hold mine like it is his only life line. “I panicked, simple as that. I almost had the information I needed to say that she was his, well you, and I wanted it done and dusted. I came by your apartment the next day, but
you were already gone. I have beaten myself up about it for the past seven years. But to be brutally honest, because I want us to always be honest with each other, for a long time I kind of blamed you too. I blamed you for not sticking around long enough for me to fix things between us.”
That pisses me off. “How in the hell could you blame me for leaving after you said I was a “good lay” but that I probably wouldn’t fit in with your friends and family back home?” By the end of the question I have jerked my hand away from him and have turned my back to him.
Wyatt walks up to me and is so close I can feel his breathing on my neck. “Darlin’ Princess I shouldn’t have blamed you, even unconsciously, but now I know that was the only way that I could think that you would forgive me if you shouldered some of the blame, it made it easier to think that we had a chance of getting back together, of you forgiving me. Then when I found out that you had two sons, I was completely devastated. Those sons should have been mine, and it was my fault they weren’t. Mine! Do you know how that killed me? The only way that I could survive that guilt was to vilify you. Make you undeserving of the love I have always had for you.”
Taking a deep breath, Wyatt turned me around and stared at my tear stained face with his own tears quietly falling. “Please Kye; I know that I have fucked up more than any man has a right to fuck up, but please give me a chance. Give me a chance to shower you and our children; the three we already have and anymore we are blessed with, with the love that only you have ever been able to rouse in me.”
As I stand there, looking in the silver depths of the eyes that have always and will always haunt my dreams, I know that he loves me. Always has and always will. But even as I bask in the love I know he has for me, the fear of being thrown back into the darkness of the abyss I have lived in for the past seven years without his love is too much to take. If I can find the courage to take a chance taking one more chance, everything I have ever wanted is mine for the taking.
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