The Trouble With Love (27 page)

“Okay . . .”

He dropped his hands and looked at her. “Did I hear you right? You’re going to North Carolina for Thanksgiving?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “That’s right.”

“And you’ve known this since Saturday.”

She shrugged.

He let out a harsh laugh. “It’s Tuesday, Emma. I’ve been with you almost constantly since Saturday night. Did you forget to mention it?”

“
That’s
why you’re mad?” She went to the sink and mechanically began rinsing out wine glasses. “I didn’t think it mattered. You’re headed to Florida to see your parents. It’s not like my trip was going to interfere with your schedule.”

His hand found her elbow and he pulled her around. “So, what, you weren’t going to tell me at all?”

She turned off the water with more force than necessary and turned to face him fully, her sleepiness fading as her anger rose.

“I don’t have to report to you, Cassidy. You’re not my boss anymore, remember?”

“I’m not talking from a professional place here, Emma, I’m talking about us, as—”

“As what? Boyfriend and girlfriend? We’re not
dating
.”

His aqua eyes flickered in confusion. And something else that was gone before she could name it. “Then what are we doing here, Emma? Fucking?”

It was her turn to flinch, which put her on the defensive. “What’s this really about? Are you mad that I didn’t tell you I was leaving town for Thanksgiving? Or are you mad about the fact that I’m going to North Carolina to see my
father
?”

Cassidy swore softly. “You have to admit, the man hasn’t exactly done great things for our relationship.”

She rubbed her eyes tiredly.

“Are you going to tell him that we’re seeing each other?” he asked.

She glanced at him, and he laughed at the answer he saw on her face. “Right. Of course not.”

“It’s just . . . it’s complicated, Cassidy. These past couple weeks have been great, but we’ve never dealt with what happened back then, not really.”

He spread his arms to his sides, his expression confrontational. “Okay then, Emma. Let’s deal with it. Where should we start?”

She licked her lips. “I don’t want to do this now.”

He stepped closer. “Have you ever stopped to think there’s nothing to
do
? That maybe there’s nothing to deal with? We were two idiotic kids who got in an epic fight the day before their wedding and called it off without listening to the other person. Maybe we chalk it up to immaturity.”

“I listened to you!” Emma said, yelling now. “What was it that I was supposed to hear? That you didn’t know that I existed when my father basically bribed you to ask me out? That you readily agreed only because you thought you’d be getting to date my sister, who was the one you really liked?”

His face shuttered, and Emma pressed on.

“I could have gotten over that. I really, really could have. But you can’t blame me for stumbling over the part where you proposed twenty-fours after my father told you he’d only pass his precious company onto
family
. A company you wanted. Did my father get that part wrong, Cassidy?”

“Look, the part about Daisy . . . I said it back then, and I’ll say it again: Daisy and I were sort of friends. We had several classes together, she was friends with my ex-girlfriend, we ran in the same circles. I didn’t know her well, but I thought she was cute. Something you should take note of
as her identical twin
.”

He stepped closer. “You can’t get mad at me for not falling in love with you before I knew you existed,” he said quietly.

“But I knew who you were!”

“The whole school knew who I was,” he snapped. “And, no, that’s not an ego trip. It’s just the way it works when the soccer team is the defending national champ and I was a starter. Okay?”

“And I was a nobody,” she said.

“Don’t,” he pointed a finger. “You’re above that little game. Emma, I swear to you that when I asked you out that day in the bookstore, it was because I wanted to. By then I knew that I was asking out Emma. Not Daisy.”

She tried to go back to washing dishes but he pulled her around again. “Would you just listen to me, damn it! Apparently we
do
need to talk this out, because you’re obviously not over it.”

“We did talk it out, and it didn’t do any good! I’ve already heard all this. Next you’ll be trying to tell me that it was only coincidence that you proposed the day after my dad dropped his little bomb. That you’d been planning on it for weeks.”

“I had been planning it for weeks!”

“You can’t prove that,” she said quietly.

“I shouldn’t have to, Emma! God
damn it,
I shouldn’t have had to prove to the woman I was about to
marry
that I loved her. You were supposed to believe me. You were supposed to
know
.”

His voice sounded ravaged and tortured, like the words were torn from the darkest part of him, and Emma wanted to believe him. Desperately.

But she couldn’t. Because if it wasn’t true she’d risk spending the rest of her days desperately loving someone who didn’t love her back. Not really. For a girl who’d always lived in her sister’s shadow, who’d always been second best, his word wasn’t enough.

Cassidy watched her face, and then she watched his shoulders slump. “You don’t believe me.”

“I want to,” she whispered.

He shook his head. “All this time, I thought our past was about temper more than anything else, but it was more than that, wasn’t it? You didn’t love me enough to trust me.”

Emma’s heart twisted. In all the times she’d relived that night, it had never occurred to her that she wasn’t the only one who hadn’t felt loved enough.

She wasn’t blameless in this. She’d always known that, but she hadn’t realized that the damage she’d inflicted on him was just as real as the damage he’d done to her.

Emma shook her head. “We can’t do this, Cassidy.”

He shifted closer, his hands closing around her face. “No. No more vague, noncommittal answers. If you don’t want me, you’ll have to say so, straight out. If you don’t want
us,
you’ll have to say that, too. If you want me to leave, I will. But you have to say the words.”

Emma made a little whimpering noise and she closed her eyes.

Then she realized that was exactly the cowardly kind of behavior he was calling her out on, and she forced herself to meet her eyes.

“Say it, Emma,” he commanded, even as his eyes pleaded otherwise.

Emma’s hands came up to grasp his wrists.

Then she did the only thing she could think of that would allow them both to move on from this web of pain they’d snagged themselves back into.

“I want you to go.” Her words were quiet. But firm.

He released her as though she’d burned him. Probably because she had.

He rubbed a hand over his face, looking stunned, before disappearing into the bedroom. He came back with his wool coat.

“Have fun with your family,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion.

“You, too,” she said in a monotone drone.

He reached for the doorknob, then turned back. “One last thing. You’re the one that told me to get lost that night. So I did. But our friends seem to have it in their heads that I somehow left you at the altar. Jake said they have this vision of you standing there on our wedding day, waiting for a groom that never showed up. Why is that? I can understand if you needed to save face, I’ve just . . . wondered. Wondered what happened after I left you in the parking lot that night.”

Emma crossed her arms and looked at her toes.

It was time to end this. Once and for all.

“After . . . our fight, I went home. Daisy drove me. And I climbed into bed and cried for hours, feeling so awfully, horribly bad for myself. I’d spent most of my life feeling like the duller, less sparkly version of my twin, and knowing that you’d thought that, too . . . it was a bit like a knife in the gut, you know? I’d clung so hard to the fact that you’d chosen
me,
and then there was all this evidence that you’d chosen me for the wrong reasons.”

He opened his mouth, but shut it just as quickly, letting her finish.

Emma shook her head and gave a little laugh. “It took me until about two a.m. to come to my senses.”

She glanced up then. Met his eyes. “I was still hurt. Horribly so. And I was unsure of everything except the fact that I loved you.”

His eyes flared.
 

“I figured that it was one doozy of a fight, but that it would blow over in the morning after a good night’s sleep. . . . I thought you’d forgive me for losing my temper and throwing that ring at you, because we were getting
married,
Cassidy. I thought it would take more than a southern belle’s fit to break that.”

“You told me you never wanted to see me again,” he whispered. “I believed that. You told me to leave. So I did.”

“I get that,” she said, her voice small. “I understand. But I thought you’d come back. I was so sure of it. It’s why I got up the next morning and let Daisy put cucumbers on my eyes to reduce the puffiness, and let the makeup artist apply a thick mask of foundation to disguise my red nose and blotchy cheeks. I thought you’d come back,” her voice broke.

“Emma.” He reached out a hand, but she stepped back.

“I waited until an hour after the ceremony was supposed to have ended. I waited even after all the guests left. I waited until Daisy wrapped me in a huge fleece blanket and
literally
dragged me into Daddy’s car.”

“I didn’t know,” he whispered.

Her laugh was small. “Which part was unclear? The sobbing voice mails? The dozens of crazed text messages?”

Cassidy’s eyes closed. “You called me.”

“Like a hundred times.” She hugged herself, lost in her own world of wretched memories. “I begged, Cassidy. I’m not letting you off the hook for using me to wiggle into my father’s company, but I didn’t let myself off the hook, either. I apologized over and over, and I would have done so in person, but you didn’t even give me that chance. That is not the action of a man in love.” She shrugged. “So I did what I had to do. I fell out of love with you.”

Or at least I tried.

He swallowed.

“And I can’t go back,” she said with a small smile. “I’m not doing that again. If you care at all, let me go. Please. Let me heal.”

He stared at her for several painful seconds. Then he moved toward her, smiling sadly when she flinched. His head dipped to hers; his lips brushed her cheek, softly. Sweetly.

“This isn’t over, Emma.”

Then he was gone.

Emma told herself that she was glad. This what she wanted—that being by herself was safe.

But she didn’t feel safe.

She felt
lonely
. Painfully, heartbreakingly
alone
.

And then she did what she should have done a long, long time ago.

She curled up on her bed and cried.

Chapter 28

Alex realized his mistake about halfway through his flight from LaGuardia to Fort Lauderdale.

There was no reason for the epiphany. No grand gesture, no moment, no strike of lightening. There was no sharp realization that he’d been a complete idiot.

There was only a deep, unshakable sense that something was
wrong
.

That his life was off course. And that the only way to right it would be to get Emma back. And not just into his bed, or into his life in the peripheral sense of the past couple years.

He wanted Emma as his. And he wanted to be hers.

He loved her. Fiercely.

Perhaps he’d always loved her.

But that wasn’t going to get her back. He needed . . . something.

Not a gesture, because that seemed cheesy, but then, with their past, it would take more than a conversation. He could maybe reach the thirty-one-year-old Emma, but he was also dealing with the twenty-four-year-old Emma who’d waited for him for hours in a white dress.

Christ
.

Only when the lady in the seat next to him on the plane gave him a glare did he realize he’d spoken aloud.

Alex didn’t apologize. His frustration had been well earned. The lady could deal with it. Besides, she had her romance novel to read, where people didn’t deal with this kind of bullshit. Or perhaps they did. He’d never read one.

All he knew was that he needed a plan.

Alex spent the next hour trying to figure out how to undo seven years of damage.

By the time the plane landed . . . he had nothing.

The next four days were an odd mix of dodging his mother’s unsubtle demands for grandchildren and letting his father win at golf, all while eating turkey, more turkey, and then turkey leftovers.

He loved his parents. Of course he did. But when they dropped him off at the airport on Sunday afternoon with instructions to call them if he changed his mind about Christmas, he was more than ready to get back to New York.

To get back to Emma.

His plane was delayed. Then delayed again.

And when he got back to his apartment at midnight that evening, it was cold and lonely.

Alex dropped his keys on the table by the door, ditched his computer bag and his suitcase, and then, before he realized what he was doing, leaned against his front door and slid down until he was sitting, elbows propped on his knees, back against the door, realizing that in the span of a week he’d gone from blissfully happy to fucking miserable.

Alex pinched the bridge of his nose and instructed himself to think. He was the most rational person he knew, save Mitchell. He could figure this out. He could write out an action plan, and come up with a nice speech, and—

Fuck it.

He didn’t have a clue. Not a goddamned clue.

Shifting, he pulled his cell out of his back pocket and started a group message.

He might not know what the hell to do . . . but he had something that a lot of dudes didn’t: a set of guy friends who’d been in his shoes. Good men who’d landed great women but had taken a seriously fucked-up path to get there.

Granted, none of them had left their woman at the altar.

But Mitchell had pursued Julie because of a
bet
. Jake had spent three months trying to
publicly
best Grace in a battle of the sexes. And Sam . . . well, Alex didn’t know what the hell had gone on between him and Riley except for the fact that it had taken Sam a
decade
to get his girl.