The Bride (The Boss) (42 page)

In the stunned flicker of her eyelashes, and the slowly bleeding edge of her eyeliner as a tear escaped, I saw that she’d been confronted with her worst fear. That Neil really would choose me over her, and that there was nothing she could do to stop him from turning his back on her if he wanted to.

 
I stormed out of the bathroom. My hands were still shaking. I was kind of worried that Valerie might come at me
Dynasty
-style and cause a big public scene, but she was too smart for that.

I was angrier than I think I’d ever been at anyone before. Valerie didn’t have to like me, but why did she feel the need for petty, vicious gossip about me? If she was such good friends with Neil, why couldn’t she be happy that he’d found someone who loved him and who loved her daughter? Why did it have to be such a played-out competition, the ex versus the new woman? There were times I genuinely respected and admired Valerie. Then I felt betrayed when she ruined it all in a single asshole moment.

I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to be jealous of her, or threatened by her. I didn’t want to have an annual falling out with her. And I really did want her out of Neil’s life. He counted her as a friend, but she treated him like garbage. Why did he let her? Because they had a child together? Emma was grown, and Neil couldn’t reasonably expect that we’d still be having joint Christmases when Emma was thirty. All I could figure was that he still felt so guilty over breaking her heart twenty-five years ago, he couldn’t bring himself to build normal boundaries.

But I couldn’t live like this. I couldn’t be around someone so toxic, someone who continually targeted me for passive -aggressive attacks; who made me the subject of malicious gossip at every chance she got, and who was perfectly comfortable slandering someone who was supposed to be her friend in order to do it.

I couldn’t feel any sympathy for her. I just couldn’t. Neil’s sudden waffling on our engagement had one hundred percent to do with her, I was sure of it. Not because I thought Neil was easily manipulated, but because I knew Valerie had the advantage of time to hone her manipulations. I also knew that Neil was at least somewhat aware of them; Emma had told me that her mother had outed Neil to his ex-wife, though Emma didn’t know the truth about her father’s bisexuality. Valerie’s meddling had made Neil furious. There was precedence set for bad Valerie/Neil’s girlfriend behavior, so I had no doubt he would believe me.

I just didn’t want to be that person, though. I didn’t want to ask my boyfriend—hopefully still my boyfriend, if the damage hadn’t already been done—to cut someone out of his life for my convenience. But there was no way I would face the rest of my life knowing I would be fighting with Valerie every step of the way.

I swiped at my lower eyelids with my thumb, hoping the fact that I’d been crying wouldn’t show. I wasn’t about to go back to the bathroom while Valerie was still in there. I lifted my chin, set my shoulders back, and went to fake happy for the rest of the night.

Walking into the dining room, I caught Emma in a moment when she thought no one was watching. Her eyes were downcast, and she pushed her salad around her plate with the enthusiasm people reserved for root canals and paying taxes.
 

I wasn’t the only one faking happy tonight.

* * * *

After the torture of dinner and speeches and watching as Emma painfully tried to maintain her smile despite whatever was eating at her—and hoping it wasn’t really, as Valerie had claimed, discomfort at my presence—I was glad when all the guests had left and the only thing remaining was to make our escape.

“Where’s Emma?” Michael asked, frowning as he scanned the banquet room. “She was just here a moment ago.”

“Probably off to the ladies’,” Pamela said airily. “Well, Valerie, shall we?”

“Are we going as well?” Neil asked, sliding his arm around my waist. I wish I could have felt as confident in his touch as I might have before our fight, but I leaned into him, because Valerie would no doubt be watching for any chink in my armor to exploit.

Michael’s phone rang, and he checked the screen. “It’s my mom and dad. They must have forgotten something. I’m going to take this. If you see Emma—”

“I’ll wander off and find her,” Neil offered.

Valerie and Pamela both gave him a warm goodnight and promises to see us all in the morning. When he left, they shot me cold looks and said nothing more before leaving. So, I guessed Valerie had found a moment to fill her fellow mean girl in on what had taken place in the bathroom.

I waited in the small foyer, casting the occasional look to the hostess who walked around checking on various things she had already checked on a dozen times and impatiently waiting for us to leave. It seemed unlikely that Emma had gotten so lost in the narrow hallway that Neil hadn’t found her yet. Antsy under the increasingly hostile glances from the hostess, I went off to find them.

In the hall that led to the bathroom was a small, empty coat room. From inside, I heard Neil’s voice and…Emma? Crying?

I stood with my back against the dark paneled wall and listened to Emma’s sobs, muffled in her father’s jacket.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she sniffled. “Daddy, I don’t know what to do.”

My heart broke for her. She had last-minute jitters. That was totally normal, wasn’t it? It seemed to be, in all the movies.

“Emma, you love—” Neil muted “horrible” from his sentence. “—Michael. From the first time you brought him home, I could see that.”

“Is love a good enough reason to marry somebody? You loved Mom. You loved Elizabeth. Look how those ended up,” she reminded herself, in the guise of arguing with him.

There was so much pain in Neil’s voice when he spoke again, I wanted to burst into the room and hug him. I didn’t, of course; this was Emma’s moment with her father. But it was difficult to hear Neil work through this moment with his daughter, as difficult as it was to know that Emma was unhappy on the eve of her wedding.

“You are not me, Emma. No matter how alike we are. I’ve made stupid mistakes in my past. You’re much smarter than I am.”

“You don’t like him,” she protested.

“But you do.” He made a noise of helpless frustration. “My sweet girl, do you really believe you could cancel this wedding right now and walk away from him forever?”

“I don’t want to walk away!” She protested through audible tears. “I just don’t want anything to change!”

Neil didn’t answer right away. I imagined the two of them standing, staring miserably at each other, until he said, “I understand that. Too well.”

“You don’t want to get married to Sophie?” she asked, and my heart lurched. I almost turned and ran. I didn’t want to hear his answer, unless it was going to be the one I wanted to hear. And if it weren’t… Well, I wouldn’t know, unless I heard it.

“I want to marry her. More than I wanted to marry Elizabeth, to be perfectly frank. I don’t feel like there’s an expiration date on our relationship. I don’t feel…pressured,” he said, and the knot in my chest, that had cinched up tight a moment before, untangled a little. “But that doesn’t mean I’m sure that everything is going to be all right once we are married. And I’m afraid, Emma. I’m as nervous as you are that something will change, that we won’t be the same people we were before we were married. But I’m not willing to lose her now because I’m afraid that I might lose her later.”

Emma’s breath was a shuddering sob. “Do you want me to marry Michael?”

Oh, Neil. Please, please answer this one correctly,
I prayed.

“I do. I want you to marry Michael.” Surprisingly, he didn’t sound pained or resigned at all, but earnest. He even went on, “He’s very smart, he has a successful career ahead of him, but most importantly, he treats you well and he loves you. I can see that every time he looks at you.”

“Daddy…” Emma’s voice was nearly a whisper. “I can’t—”

She was going to tell him. And it was going to destroy him.

“We can’t… I’ve been seeing everyone. Specialists. They all say I can’t have a baby.”

A rustle of fabric told me that he’d swept her up in a hug. If it hadn’t, the sound of his voice muffled by her hair would have. “Oh, my sweet girl. I am so, so sorry.”

“I can’t do this to him!” Emma was sobbing hard now. “I can’t take that away from him. He wants children so badly… I can’t condemn him to…”

Neil shushed her tenderly as she cried, and I knew he was probably giving her the best dad hug in the history of dad hugs. “Does Michael know?”

“He knows,” Emma said through a stuffed nose. “We’ve been trying for a while. We knew there were going to be difficulties, but now, the fertility doctor thinks that even with IVF…”

“So, you get a surrogate. Or you adopt. There’s no reason the two of you can’t have children.” He sounded almost relieved at finding it a fixable problem. “You’ve talked to him about this, haven’t you? About your fears regarding getting married?”

“He says I’m being stupid.”

“You are. I love you with all of my heart, Emma, but there are times when you couldn’t see your way out of a telescope.” He managed a grim laugh.

“You’ve been with Sophie too long, you’ve picked up her talent for insane metaphor,” Emma said in usual, dry humor.

“Michael knows you’ll be unable to have children. I think it’s wonderful that you two were responsible enough to find out before going ahead with the wedding. But you know now, and you both still want to get married. I think that gives you your answer.”

I’d heard too much, so I slipped quietly from the hall, walking on the balls of my feet so my heels wouldn’t make noise. I went out to the curb and climbed into the backseat of the Maybach to wait. Emma emerged from the restaurant first, her arm through Michael’s. She was all smiles now, as though she’d never doubted. Neil came out after them and stopped Emma for one last hug. It went on for a long time, and when he let her go, he watched her walk away.

Tomorrow was going to be so hard for him.

“Everything okay?” I asked, when Neil got into the car.
 

Tony shut the door behind him, and Neil took a moment to get settled in and buckle his seat belt before he answered with a vague, “Everything is fine. Emma just has a touch of nerves.”

He didn’t tell me everything. He didn’t betray Emma’s confidence. Not even to me. I admired that so much, and I could never tell him.

I leaned my head on his shoulder and hoped my contented heart could send some sort of telepathic message to him.

“What were you and Valerie talking about in the bathroom? Pamela said she thought you might have been arguing,” he asked absently as we pulled off, past Michael and Emma in their car.

My stomach turned. “I don’t know where she got that impression. It was something or other about the wedding.” It wasn’t a lie. I didn’t know how Pamela had overheard us from the alley, and we had been talking about the wedding—just not the one Neil assumed we were talking about.

“She’ll still be planning the bloody thing a week from now.” He made the statement with genuine affection, and I felt the most horrific stab of hatred toward her. But I couldn’t say anything to Neil, not when he was so stressed out. My anger at Valerie was an infection killing off any shred of niceness in me. I had to let off some of it, or I would fester until I burst like a gangrenous leg. But there was no one I could talk to. Holli had been my only close friend, after I’d lost so many work friends when I’d been blacklisted at Porteras. Valerie was Emma’s mom, so even after the wedding, I wouldn’t mention it to her. I couldn’t say anything to anyone. It was a terrible, lonely feeling.

“I was thinking,” he began tentatively, picking imaginary lint from the knee of his trousers, “when Michael said what he did about Emma. That he knew from the moment he saw her…”

I wanted to brace myself, to believe that what he would say next would be, “I didn’t feel that way about you.” But he wouldn’t. Because I knew it wasn’t true.

“I had to talk myself into my first marriage. I thought I was going to break Elizabeth’s heart the way I broke Valerie’s. And I did. I may not have been technically unfaithful to her, not physically, anyway, but I was in love with another woman the entire time I was married to her. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Elizabeth, I did.” He paused. “But I loved you more.”

He’d met me once, for a few brief hours. And loved me for six unrequited years. And that scared me as much as it touched me. “Neil. You have to understand something. Every day, I worry that I’m not living up to the expectations of the man who spent six years building me up in his mind.”

“It must be an awful pressure.” He reached for my hand, and squeezed it. “But you don’t meet my expectations. You exceed them. Every day, I fall more in love with the Sophie who found me again. Not the Sophie from that airport seven years ago.”

I had to ask now. I couldn’t hold it back any longer. “So why are you being so weird about getting married? When you proposed to me, I thought, ‘no one is ever going to love me as much as this man does.’ And then in one conversation, I couldn’t be certain of that anymore.” I swallowed, warning myself off asking, desperately not wanting to bring Valerie’s machinations into this. “Has someone said something? Expressed disapproval or—”

“Of course they have. Sophie, I’m a fifty-year-old billionaire marrying a twenty-five-year-old. Everyone has expressed concerns.” A slight smile touched his lips. “But it’s not them. It’s this fear…that perhaps I want you too much.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Do you remember why I was in LAX?” he asked, after a pause.

“Yeah, you had some interview with a Japanese car company guy. And you couldn’t rent a crew for your jet in time to make the meeting.” I wracked my brain for some detail I had possibly missed.

“During the layover, I got a crew. I didn’t take the flight that was delayed. I could have left at any time after three o’clock that afternoon. But I took a risk and rescheduled the interview.” His laugh was hoarse, and hollow. “I chose a funny, strange woman I met in an airport over an interview that ended up establishing
Auto Watch
as a hard-hitting example of auto journalism, on a scale I’d never hoped it would achieve. I knew how important it was. And even back then, I picked you.”