“Yep. I’m sure,” Alex said, laughter in his voice.
“Cool. See you in the morning.”
As soon as Isaac’s footsteps retreated down the hall, I half-expected us to pick back up where we’d left off. But then Alex released my arms and took a faint step away from me, perching himself on the edge of the dresser.
I stood in silence waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t even look up. My confidence fizzled. What had just happened? Everything had felt so right and then in a blink, it was wrong again. “So I guess I should get to bed?” I finally said, my voice soft.
Alex met my gaze. There was warmth there, but also a distance I couldn’t quite define. He’d pulled away from me, and I had no idea why. “That’s probably a good idea,” he said gently. “We’ve got a big couple of days ahead of us.”
“Right.” I pressed my forehead into my hands, mortified to be so blatantly rejected. “Got it.”
Alex sighed. “Dani—”
“It’s fine. I get it. I was just feeling . . . and you were always . . . but you’re right. It’s a big day tomorrow. We should focus.”
Alex reached for my arm, tugging me toward him. He wrapped his arms around my back, and I settled in, resting my hands on his chest. “We were always good at this part,” he said, sadness tinging his voice. “But it can’t just be about that.”
The logical part of my brain knew that he was right to stop things. We still needed to have a conversation about what was happening. About what it all meant. About New York and Charleston and what a potential future together would even look like. But standing in his arms just felt so good.
I tilted my head up, willing him to kiss me again. “What if this is what I want?”
His jaw tightened. “This? Right now? This moment is what you want? Or I’m what you want?” He released me a second time, this time walking clean to the other side of the room. “There’s too much at stake for me to do this, without an answer to that question. I can’t go through losing you again.”
So this was the conversation we needed to have? Right here, at midnight in some random hotel room in the Florida Keys?
“What do you want, Dani?” Alex asked again.
“I don’t know,” I said, desperation filling my voice. “Is that what you want me to say? My entire world has been turned upside down the past few months. Everything I ever thought I wanted, everything I spent my entire life dreaming about, it’s all different now. I can’t just make sense of it all right now, here, because you ask me to.”
“That’s not what I said. You take all the time you need. I think I’ve been pretty good about giving you space when you’ve asked for it. We kissed a month ago, Dani, and then we never even talked about it. All I said was that I couldn’t do this”—he motioned between us—“until you do figure out what you want.” He ran a hand across his face. “No matter how much I want to.”
I moved to the hotel room door but turned back, one hand resting on the doorknob. “What do you want, Alex?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “I want you, Dani. You. Us. All of it. I never stopped wanting you.”
The next morning, Alex knocked on my hotel room door just after ten. “Morning,” he said. “You ready to go?”
I nodded, moving aside to let him into the room. “I think so. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
His eyes spoke understanding, but he didn’t bring up our conversation from the night before, not that I really wanted him to. There was too much riding on the success of our day for us to get waylaid by another heart-to-heart.
“I can’t stop thinking about all the things that might go wrong.”
He moved like he meant to touch my shoulder, but then his hand dropped, and he shoved it into his pocket. “It’s all going to work out; I promise.”
There was no way he could actually guarantee as much, but I appreciated his attempts to assure me anyway. “What if we just leave?” I said, yielding to my fear. “Paige has a dress she can wear next week. She doesn’t need this one.”
“Is that really the only reason we’re here today?”
A part of me thought it actually had become my only reason. After my fabric-induced epiphany with Isaac before we left, I’d been feeling more and more sure that I didn’t actually need a way back into fashion’s good graces. But the look in Alex’s eyes told me it wasn’t his only reason. He needed to tell Alicio the truth about Sasha for personal, validating reasons, and I wasn’t about to prevent him from seizing the opportunity. Sasha really was a criminal. If we had the means to stop her? There wasn’t a good reason not to do so.
The plan was for me and Alex to head to the house that afternoon. Alex still had enough claim on the family, he assumed he’d have a place to stay in the house. He had a suite of rooms he’d always used in the past and since he had RSVP’d, he felt pretty sure they’d left his rooms empty for him. Taking me as his date was the easiest way to hide me in plain sight, so to speak, and gave me a legit reason to be sleeping under the same roof as the wedding dress. The fact that we’d run into his family on Christmas Eve and had appeared to be together only cemented the likelihood of my acceptance.
Isaac would be on standby, ready to shuttle the dress off the premises as quickly as I could sneak it away. He’d promised us early that morning that he had a plan for securing transportation that would get him onto the estate with ease, but Alex and I were both doubtful.
Alex’s phone rang and he glanced down, answering the call then turning on the speaker. “Isaac? You’re on speaker. Dani is here.”
“Perfect. Go look out the window.”
We looked at each other, wondering what Isaac was up to, then crossed the room and stepped out onto a small balcony. Below us in the parking lot, Isaac stood in front of a large van, a giant bouquet of flowers painted on the side.
“It’s perfect, right?” he said. “I only had to pay the guy two hundred bucks to borrow it until tomorrow night.”
I shook my head and laughed, but I was hardly surprised.
Alex echoed my thoughts. “I think your brother could convince the Pope to lend him his motorcade if it were truly necessary.”
Minutes later, Isaac was back in the hotel room wearing a blue polo shirt, a florist’s logo embroidered on the breast pocket.
“He gave you his shirt as well?” I asked.
“I had to trade him the one I was wearing,” Isaac said. “No big deal.”
The three of us went over the plan one more time.
“Once we arrive this evening,” Alex said to Isaac, “we’ll text you and let you know of any additional security measures that are in place at the house. At the very least, the gate will be guarded, but with the flower van and a claim of a last-minute delivery, you should be able to gain access.”
“Wear a hat though,” I said to Isaac. “And sunglasses. We can’t risk someone recognizing you and wondering when Random I started moonlighting as a flower delivery guy.”
“Got it,” Isaac said. “So I wait for a briefing on security systems tonight, then tomorrow I hang out here until you give me the signal, I come to the house, you hand me the dress, then I whisk it away to a secure location.”
He made it sound so easy. But there were five hundred variables we weren’t sure about yet. And really wouldn’t be sure about until we were in the house and had determined, one, how much welcome would be extended to Alex, and two, how easy it would be to get to the dress. Then there was the matter of deciding when to make the swap. In the middle of the night? Right before the wedding, seconds before Sasha would be putting it on? Timing was essential.
If Chase’s text was right, and my brief conversation with Sasha had been enough to plant the seed, my hope was that texting her and asking if I could assist her would be enough for her to let me in. It was risky. If Sasha thought too hard about it, she’d recognize the risks of letting me close. But I was banking on the size of her ego. She’d believed me when I told her I thought I’d made a mistake in lea
ving. She loved herself that much, she’d naturally believed I’d want to come back.
When I’d told Isaac of my plan, he’d rolled his eyes. “Oh, gross,” he’d said. “I mean, it’ll probably work, but gross.”
There was always the possibility that she would say no, but my gut told me she wasn’t going to.
“Meanwhile,” Isaac continued, gesturing to Alex, “you’ll talk to stepdaddy dearest and let him know who he’s really about to marry.”
“Do you think he’ll actually go through with the wedding once he knows?” I asked.
“I hope not,” Alex said. “I really hope not.”
After saying goodbye to Isaac and getting an unexpected good luck hug, I followed Alex to a really nice BMW parked in the hotel parking lot. I paused on the sidewalk. “Is this your car?” I had been expecting a rental. I’d ridden with Isaac from the airport in Miami, Alex claiming he had a quick errand to run and would meet us at the hotel. From the looks of it, his errand involved a seventy-five-thousand-dollar luxury sedan.
Alex looked a little sheepish. “Yes?”
I didn’t answer, not even attempting to hide the fact that my jaw was nearly touching the concrete.
“It lives at the summer house,” he said. He hesitated and a flash of something flitted across his face. “I don’t drive it much, but I figured I’d better pick it up before everything went down. I’m not sure how welcome I’ll be after.”
He popped the trunk and I placed my bag inside, then draped Sasha’s replacement dress, safely tucked away in an opaque garment bag, across the top. It was a masterpiece, that dress. With Chase’s help, it had pulled together beautifully. The silhouette of the dress was actually pretty elegant, but we’d glitzed it up with a layer of Las Vegas-style trashy that would have made Liberace proud. It was perfect. Awful. But perfect.
I climbed into the car, reveling in the butter-soft leather and finely finished interior. “So you’ve already been to the house? Do they know you’re here?”
He shifted his weight. “No. The house has several garages. I had moved the car to the one farthest away from the main house. It’s mostly used for lawn equipment. They’d probably forgotten it was even there.”
Several garages? “What have you been driving in Charleston?” I asked. I couldn’t actually remember what kind of car it was, though I’d ridden in it a few times when he’d taken me to the grocery store, and when we’d taken Chase to the beach.
“Oh. That’s my other car.”
I shot him a look. “Seriously?”
“I know it sounds ridiculous. And I’ve been meaning to sell one or the other.”
“The other,” I said emphatically. “Sell the other one and keep this one. It’s beautiful.”
“It was a graduation present from my mother,” he said simply.
I looked over and noticed how tightly he gripped the steering wheel, his eyes hyper-focused on the road in front of him. Was that why he never drove it? Because it was a gift from his Mom? Or maybe that was the reason he couldn’t sell it? I suddenly felt, quite keenly, just how much Alex had kept hidden over the years. The realization felt a little like a punch to the gut. What hadn’t he told me? Why had I never realized how hard working for Alicio must have been for him?
I let my mind wander back to the night we’d gone to see Hamilton. I’d kissed him in the theater, but it had been brief. Heartfelt, yes. But brief. But then, after the show, he’d kissed me on the stairs of my apartment building, and it had nearly been my undoing.
We’d stood hand in hand, me one step above him so that our faces were nearly level. “I loved watching you watch the show,” he’d whispered softly. “It makes me happy to see you happy.”
With sudden clarity, I reframed so many of our experiences in New York through that filter. Alex watching me, happy because I was happy. He’d smiled through the fashion shows and the galas, the highbrow parties in elite clubs. He’d used his influence to get us into places that I never would have had access to on my own. But never because it was truly what he felt passionate about. He’d done it for me. All of it.
“You okay?”
I looked up, heat flooding my cheeks as if, just by looking at me, Alex had been able to follow my train of thought. “I’m fine,” I managed to squeak.
“We’re almost there,” he said.
“Right. Okay.” I rubbed my hands together, willing my nerves to settle. “Let’s do this.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Alex
We pulled down the long, pebbled driveway that led to Alicio’s home on the remote Florida island. He’d always called it the summer house, but I’d spent just as many of my summers growing up in Manhattan as I had lounging around the Keys. It was more like Alicio liked the idea of a summer home more than he did the actual use of one. Though I had to admit, it did make a great backdrop for a wedding.
Dani craned her neck, looking out the passenger window at the looming mansion. “Wow,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
We pulled to a stop just outside the front door and climbed out of the car. The house was beautiful. The kind of beautiful I appreciated. It had a more subdued grandeur than Alicio’s home in Manhattan. Natural wood and stone, large windows, earth tones. It blended naturally into the lush landscape of the island, the beach just yards beyond the edge of the finely landscaped grounds. I should have wanted to go inside but I held back, feeling a familiar tension spreading through my shoulders and neck.
“You okay?” Dani said.
I forced a smile. She would hate knowing how uncomfortable I was. “Sure. You ready?”
We headed up the neatly manicured pathway to the front steps. We’d left our overnight bags in the car—best not to look too presumptuous when first arriving—so my hands were free. Free, and trembling. Before I could shove them into my pockets, Dani reached out and took one, squeezing it gently, before lacing her fingers with mine.
I glanced at her, catching her eye, and she smiled, just slightly. “You look like you could use a little steadying.”
Without dropping Dani’s hand, I rang the front bell. A long moment later, it swung open.
“Deliveries for the wedding are to be taken to the—Oh.” Alicio’s long-time housekeeper Elaine shot me a dour look. “Alexander. I didn’t expect you,” she said.
“Hello, Elaine.” I offered her my best smile. She’d always liked me, but there was no telling how much the family’s overall discontent with me had trickled down to those in their employ. “Can we come in?”
She backed up and opened the door wide, motioning us into the entryway.
“This is my girlfriend, Dani,” I said, proud that I hadn’t hesitated on the word girlfriend.
Dani reached out and shook Elaine’s hand. “Hello,” she said.
“How are you?” I asked. “I hope everything is going well for you.”
She shrugged, crossing her arms across her chest. “Things are fine.”
So I was on her bad list. Might as well get right to it then. “Right. Well, I was hoping we could use my old rooms tonight. Will that be a problem?”
She furrowed her brow. “You’re staying? For the wedding?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “I did RSVP that I was coming. And I ran into the family last week in New York. They know to expect me.”
“Oh. I saw that, but, well, it’s just that Victor told me not to expect you.”
“Because I didn’t think he’d actually show.” Victor descended the stairs and stopped in front of me, narrowing his eyes as he looked from me to Dani. Instinctively, I pulled her closer, putting an arm around her waist.
“You remember Dani,” I said pointedly.
Victor looked her up and down in a way that made me uncomfortable. I could only imagine how it made Dani feel. “Right. So, an ex-employee, and an ex-stepbrother. Tell me why you’re here again?”
“My mother didn’t divorce Alicio, Victor, she died. It’s not the same thing.”
A shadow pa
ssed over Victor’s eyes at the mention of my mother and he looked to the floor. When he looked back up, his face had softened somehow. “I don’t understand why you would even want to be here,” he said. “Because of Mom. After what Sasha—” He shook his head.
“I’m not here for Sasha,” I said. “But the rest of you are the only family I have. I came to support Alicio.” It was the truth, though not in the way I’d implied. I did want to support Alicio. And telling him of Sasha’s deceit was the very best way I could think to do it.
Elaine cleared her throat. “The pool house is free.”
Victor nodded. “Fine. But you better not cause a scene. There are a lot of important people coming to this wedding.”
“Should I add two more for the rehearsal dinner?” Elaine asked, her question aimed at Victor.
“That won’t be necessary,” I said before he had the chance to answer. “We’ve been traveling all day and don’t want to impose on plans already made. We’ll be fine seeing everyone at the wedding tomorrow.” Traveling all day was a stretch. But attending the rehearsal dinner would be too dangerous for Dani. The less Sasha saw of her the better. At least until Dani was ready to make her move.
We were silent as I led Dani through the house and out the rear door, just beyond the kitchen. The back lawn and patio had been transformed into a wedding wonderland. Several large tents filled the space, their sides open and tied back. It looked as though the ceremony would take place in the smallest tent, while the other two were set up for the dinner and reception. Several workers were busy constructing the centerpieces on the tables. They looked like giant, leafless trees draped with cascading flowers and what looked, from a distance, like peacock feathers.
“Wow,” I muttered under my breath.
“Oh, just wait,” Dani said. “There’s an actual peacock here somewhere.”
I paused and looked her way. “Are you serious?”
“Absolutely serious. For the photographs. I had no idea there were people who rented out peacocks until Sasha asked me to find her one.”
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