Fated: An Alpha Male Romance (22 page)

Her voice trailed off but she didn’t have to finish her sentence. I felt as though all my thoughts had just been involved in a head-on collision.

“Then, he opened his mouth,” she went on. “He’d believed that since I’d allowed him to take so much from me over the years, I would just
give
you to him. After that, something inside of me snapped. I told him to get the hell out of your room and he charged after me. I’d never fought harder in my life. Eventually, we ended up in the kitchen and…well. As you know.”

I walked over to her. “Didn’t you ever explain any of this to the district attorney?”

“That story is what got me my thirty-five year plea deal. They claimed that it was my word against the dead man’s and then began to call my past into question. They claimed that John threatened to end the affair and so I killed him in a jealous rage. His wife had even said on the stand that she’d known about the affair and he’d agreed to leave me. If we’d taken it to trial, I was facing life without parole.”

I began shaking my head and pacing the room. Everything that I’d believed and had held onto
for the past couple of decades was untrue. My mother hadn’t made the choice to no longer be a part of my life. It was because she’d chosen me, as well as herself, that she’d landed in jail. She’d been trying to protect me, not get rid of me.

“Mom, I have to apologize to you,” I said, standing directly in front of her. “I can’t tell you how angry I was for so long because I’d assumed that you never thought the entire thing through. That instead of killing him, all you’d had to do was walk away from him. I was angry for so long.”

“And you had every right to be,” she explained. “You were six. You weren’t nearly old enough to make sense of any of it and I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want even the possibility that something like that could have happened to you in your head. Also, I knew that Dad would take good care of you. After your grandmother died, I went off the deep end and he tried so hard to pull me back but could never do so. I saw you going to live with him as a blessing in disguise because at that time, I was so all over the place that he was your only hope. And, Dr. Stewart, I can see that I wasn’t wrong. Honestly, it’s my greatest gesture as your mother — making a hard sacrifice just to give you a fighting chance.”

I initiated the hug this time, squeezing her and apologizing for all of the years I’d spent hating her, and for the fact that I’d never gone to visit her.

“So, you got out early for good behavior?” I asked, my lips pressed into her hair.

“I got some time shaved,” she replied. “The brunt of it was what was revealed during my parole hearing. John’s wife came forward in support of my parole. She talked about how he’d abused her and that she’d found horrifying pictures of their children in their attic during a move.”

I squeezed her even tighter and continued to apologize until she held me at arm’s length, tears in her eyes.

“Well, now that we’ve got that settled, I’ve got years to make up for,” she said. “First, we’ll have dinner and then you’ll tell me all about the special woman in your life.”

Another head-on collision crashed in my head. “Shit.”

“What’s wrong, Ethan?” she asked.

“I think I made another mistake.”

“What mistake is that?”

“The woman in my life,” I explained. “I didn’t fight for her. She wasn’t only thinking about how her family would treat her; she was also thinking about how they would treat me. And…I didn’t even try to fight for her. I was so focused on her independence that I didn’t realize that I
could
fight for her.”

She held my face between her hands. “Ethan, what are you talking about? What did you do?”

“Her name is Alexandra,” I answered. “She’s beautiful, she’s intelligent, and she’s amazing.”

“Ok. So, what’s the problem?”

“She’s getting married to someone else.”

I expected more questions to follow, but instead, she seemed to think for a minute.

“When’s the wedding?” she asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Then, we’ve got packing to do.” She walked to the kitchen entrance. “Carl, how do you feel about taking an impromptu trip?”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Ethan, honey, you just realized that you could fight for the woman who loves you. You have to go and do just that, and I want to be there to help you do it.”

“Go where?” Carl asked, a metal spoon covered in red sauce in his hand.

“To New Orleans,” my mother nonchalantly answered.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” I asked. “Just like that?”

She bumped me in the side. “I finally found me a good one.”

As I watched them haphazardly throw a suitcase together, I called Alexandra’s number. After two rings, it went to voicemail so I texted her to give me a call. It didn’t surprise me when a message came back saying never to text her phone ever again, and that my number would be blocked. The exact message read: “I shall forewarn you that any further texts to this phone will be futile. You are being blocked from here forth.”

It had Roderick written all over it.

I called Gia.

“You came to your senses?” she answered.

“Yes,” I answered, the smile from my dinner with Tayler and Kellen making a reappearance. “I can’t get through to her, though. Roderick’s got the phone.”

“And he and my father have her on lockdown,” she added. “I’ll have access to her at the wedding though.”

“I’m in Florida, but I’ll be flying in tonight.”

“You may not get to her tonight.”

“Gia, this may be a huge favor to ask but…”

“Say no more,” she cut in. “If I have to, I will stall that wedding longer than it takes Patti Labelle to sing Amazing Grace. If you don’t make it in time to object, I will. No holy matrimony will be taking place tomorrow and I’ll make damn sure of it.”

I couldn’t understand how anyone couldn’t love her sister.

“Thank you, Gia.”

“No, thank
you
,” she replied. “I can’t wait to see how happy you’ll make my sister.”

We hung up just as my mother and soon-to-be stepfather appeared.

“Ready?” they asked.

I nodded and we headed out the door.

Alexandra

I wanted to throw up all over this god forsaken dress. In reality, it wasn’t an ugly dress, but because of who I’d be standing across from while wearing it, it was putrid. I was disgusted by the cameras in my face and the people fussing over my hair and makeup. I wanted to punch the director in the face at his insinuations that I was possibly carrying Roderick’s child, but he could spin it to look like I’d gotten pregnant right after the wedding. To make matters worse, my father wouldn’t allow Gia or Grandma Evelyn into the backroom where I was getting prepped, and I desperately needed them to balance out all of the crazy.

Every time I thought about a lifetime with Roderick, it made me want to check in to the nearest infirmary. On the contrary, when I thought about facing a life without Ethan, it made me want to accept my fate with Roderick. It was also a fate that I was willing to accept to preserve Ethan’s medical license, practice, and image.

“Alexandra, if you keep frowning like that, you’ll mess up your makeup,” my mother scolded, sweeping a powder brush over my face.

“I don’t care, Mother,” I answered.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t care what I look like. I don’t care about any of this.”

She pulled a chair up in front of me. “What are you talking about? That it doesn’t matter what you look like, as long as you get to marry Roderick?”

I rolled my eyes for the first time in what felt like decades. “Oh, you just do not get it.”

“Then, explain it to me.” I was surprised at the harshness in her voice. “Explain to me what I just don’t get. Does this have anything to do with the doctor? Ethan?”

“Somewhat. Mother, I don’t love Roderick.”

“Marriage isn’t always about love, Alexandra. Sometimes, it’s about security. The best option for the success of both parties.”

I had no idea what planet this lady lived on, but Roderick and my father had to be among its congressional elite.

“I’m in love with Ethan, Mother,” I revealed.

The brush suddenly stopped flitting over my face. “What?”

“Ethan’s the man that I would marry in a burlap sack in the middle of a burning building if I had to.”

She looked at me as though she was actually listening. “So, why are you marrying Roderick?”

“Isn’t that what you guys want?”

“Well…yes. We want you to be well taken care of, but,” she looked around the room, “excuse me, but I would like a private moment with my daughter.”

The flurry of people around us looked up and she repeated the request until they made their way to the door. Once the last patron had left the room, she set down the makeup brush.

“So, you actually do love this man?” she asked. “This wasn’t some kind of, I don’t know, sexual fling?”

My mouth gaped as I’d never before heard my mother utter the word “sexual.”

“No, it’s not,” I answered.

“Well, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Wait…what? You guys are completely against me being with anyone but Roderick.”

She put away the brush and delicately stroked a finger across my cheek. “I’m sorry, honey.”

I didn’t hide my confusion. “About what?”

“About all of this. Sometimes, when we get older, we forget about the things that happened in our younger lives. The things that we wanted. Then, we turn around and push on our children those same things we didn’t want for ourselves.”

She searched around the room and then found her purse laying on a table in the corner. She retrieved it, opened her wallet, and pulled out a small photo from behind a hidden flap. It was a photo of a handsome young man who looked to be in his mid-to-late teens.

“I didn’t land myself a doctor,” she said, tracing her thumb over the photo. “We were still fairly young when we met.”

I was growing even more confused each minute that passed. The young man in the photo looked nothing like my father.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Timothy Welling. I met him at a fair. He was a worker there. He worked that machine where you would hit it to try to ring the bell at the top. It was a job that he took on every summer to help his family out. His mother was disabled and his father was pretty much a rolling stone.” She pointed to the picture. “Look at those eyes. He had some of the most gorgeous eyes I’d ever seen. I remember the first time I laid eyes on him, he was putting up those big, fluffy teddy bears that people could win if they actually hit the bell. He was holding a pink one that was probably half my size back then. When he looked up at me, the world stopped, Alexandra. Everything just crashed. Then when he smiled, I was taken. So, I sauntered over to the booth and did what any sixteen year old girl would do: I pretended that I wasn’t interested.”

Watching her tell her story, my mother’s face was the complete opposite from what I’d seen at the banquet. She was animated, happy, and even her skin had flushed. She looked like me talking about Ethan.

“I’d already met your father by then,” she went on. “My parents would allow him to take me on dates and it had taken a lot of begging to convince them to allow me to go to the fair and do something fun for a change. The minute I laid eyes on Timothy, I realized that something was very wrong with the relationship that I had with your father.”

“So, what happened to him?” I asked. “Why’d you end up with James Miller instead of Timothy Welling?”

She faced me. “Timothy and I fell deeper in love with each moment we spent together. Unfortunately, I got the bright idea that I would tell my well-to-do parents that I was in love with and wanted to marry a man that had little to nothing to his name. I made the mistake of thinking that they would understand that I was in love because I’d assumed that they’d also been in love, but my mother put the brakes on that immediately.

“Alexandra, I proudly walked across our immaculate foyer with Timothy’s hand in mine. I was wearing designer labels from head to toe; the stitching in his clothes barely held the pieces of fabric together, and he looked as though he’d spent the last several hours on a construction site. I noticed none of it. All I ever saw when I looked at Timothy were those eyes of his. And his gorgeous smile. To be honest, the only reason I even remembered what he was wearing was because my mother had pointed it all out as she’d had him tossed, literally, from our home while banishing me to my room.

“Later that evening, she sat next to me on the edge of my bed and said that same rubbish to you that I just spewed. She said that marriage wasn’t about love and that if I’d married Timothy, he would have only led me on a path to ruin. Then she said that if I wanted to retain the prestige with which I was familiar, I had to marry someone from the same background.”

A head peeked in the door to see if the wedding prep party was permitted to return, but my mother shook her head and they eased back out. I, on the other hand, was thoroughly intrigued by the Romeo and Juliet-esque story.

“What happened after that?” I prodded.

“At seventeen, I accepted James’ marriage proposal,” she replied. “It was the high society event of the year. The months before the wedding, my mother ‘prepped’ me to be a wife while constantly reminded me that my relationship with your father wouldn’t be about love. Love was fleeting; James would give me a good life. Beautiful children. And by all means, he did. But, I’d still felt so empty that I snuck out the night before the wedding and went in search of Timothy. As far as I’d known, he’d had no idea about my getting married and I just wanted to know that he loved me. I felt like, no matter what my mother said, a foundation could be built out of love.”

Her head fell and a curly ringlet partially hid her face.

“I didn’t find him,” she said. “The house that he’d lived in stood vacant. The next day, as fate would have it, he was part of the wedding catering crew. By the time he spotted me in the wedding dress, the ceremony had already taken place. I was already Mrs. James Miller. He’d been holding a platter of braised sea scallops and I turned around when I heard the platter drop to the floor. We stood watching each other for what felt like an eternity and I could feel the pain that I saw on his face. The shock. The total betrayal. I started towards him, but he shook his head and backed away. After that, I never saw him again.”

She heaved a sigh and then pinned me with somber eyes. She probably had no idea how much her story sounded like what had happened between me and Ethan, which made me wonder if Timothy had been her true match. Grandma Evelyn had talked about the pain of seeing an impending crash but not having the ability to do anything to stop it. She had to have seen that with my parents, which was probably why she’d been so adamant about not letting it happen with me and Gia. I was looking at myself a few decades into the future and the misery on my mother’s face was unmistakable. It was misery I never wanted to experience.

“I didn’t realize that you loved him,” she seemed to be apologizing. “I thought that it was just a fling. Another circumstance of your grandmother’s meddling. The day of my wedding, she’d pulled me to the side and said something about the mistake that I’d made since Timothy had been my true match. I’d brushed it off as voodoo talk. Now, I think I get it. Ethan is to you, what Timothy was to me. The only difference was, where my father had been passive as my mother pushed me into a union with James, I can’t stand by and let the same thing happen to you.”

I walked over to her. “Then, why were you guys so hard on Gia? Gia married for love.”

“Gia is as frustrating as they come,” she said with a laugh. “Gia is, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, who I’ve always wished that I could be. Good Lord, I’m jealous of my own daughter. If I’d had Gia’s spunk, I would’ve told my mother to ‘kiss it’ and run off with Timothy. I could have spent the last thirty years as a happy woman. With you, Alexandra, I saw a lot of myself in you. I felt like if I could mold you just right, then you’d be proof that I hadn’t made a complete ass of myself by going along with the plans my mother made for me. If you could find happiness with Roderick, then I could justify that I hadn’t completely screwed up my life by choosing your father.”

Like I’d always imagined, I’d been their little robot. A clone of them both. They’d literally tried to mold me into what they wanted like some sort of research subject.

“So, you’re encouraging me not to marry Roderick,” I clarified.

“I’m encouraging you to follow what’s in
your
heart, not mine or your father’s.”

She then went back to powdering my face as though our entire exchange had not taken place, and nodded when the prep party peered in a second time. They filtered back into the room to continue fussing over my hair, dress, and makeup. I took a deep, steadying breath. There was no longer a chance for me and Ethan, but there was still a chance for me, Alexandra, on her own for the first time.