REMEMBER US: A Billionaire Romance (Part Two) (6 page)

Harley

It was all a ruse.

I remembered that now. I left him, told everyone it was because of his lies about Margaret, about their short-lived marriage when they were seventeen. As if something like that would convince me to walk away from the love of my life. I was angry all right. But not enough to do more than yell and scream for a while. I wanted to hurt him, I did. I wanted to hurt him the way it hurt me to find out the way I did. I mean, who wants to go to the county clerk to get their marriage license just to find out that their significant other had lied about his past?

But I would have understood after he explained it to me.

They were nineteen. Margaret was being pressured by her father to marry the son of a prominent businessman—a client—who would have brought millions into her father’s law firm. It was a business deal, and Margaret wasn’t about to be used as a pawn in her father’s games. So she went to Xander while he was attending Stanford and asked him to marry her. It was in name only. They never lived together and never shared as much as a kiss. But the marriage license protected her from her father’s plot almost in the same way it threatened our own marriage.

It was nothing, just as he’d said.

But it was also a symptom in the disease that was Grant Wallace.

“The flowers were a nice touch.”

Xander chuckled, his mouth against my head so that the heat of his breath spread and pressed against my skull.

“I thought it would be something someone desperate to get a woman’s attention would do. Not me, of course…”

“Because you know I hate flowers.”

“But no one else knew that, except maybe your folks. But I guess all your dad saw was that I’d hurt you.”

“He was trying to protect me.”

He kissed the top of my head again. “I know.”

“It was comforting, seeing you sitting in your car in front of the house though.”

“Yeah?”

“I thought about inviting you in a few times in the middle of the night. But I was afraid someone might see.”

“They were clearly watching. Otherwise, I don’t think they would have gone after you like they did.”

My thoughts darkened, turning to that morning. I’d been expecting something like that…it was like there were monsters hiding around every corner I turned. But I never expected it to come like that.

“Do you remember?”

“I remember getting out of bed that morning. Calling Philip before I got dressed.”

Xander’s arms tightened slightly at the mention of my ex-boyfriend. He hadn’t thought that was a good idea, but Philip was the only person I could think of—the only person I knew—who might be able to help us. Philip was a high school history teacher in Dallas now. But his father was a politician. There were connections there that were incredibly helpful in our situation.

I craned my neck to look at him. “He said to tell you hi. I remember that, too.”

Xander kissed the tip of my nose. “Consider me told.”

“I remember grabbing my fanny pack, fastening it around my waist. I grabbed my keys and my cellphone. Then I was on the sidewalk, half expecting to see you somewhere behind me.”

“I had a meeting.”

I closed my eyes, the morning playing out behind my eyelids. I could actually feel the sidewalk under my shoes, the earbuds in my ears. I remember thinking an inability to hear was probably a bad idea, but I couldn’t jog without music. But I couldn’t remember much beyond that.

“Did they ever talk to the person who hit me?”

“No. In fact, they kind of suggested it was a hit and run.”

“Suggested?”

Xander shook his head. “I called the police a couple of times, but they refused to give me much information because I’m not technically family. And Philip told me that his contacts thought it was unrelated.”

“How could it be unrelated?”

“That’s what I said. But he wouldn’t talk about it with me.”

“He still doesn’t trust you.”

Xander shrugged. “Probably because I’m the one who dragged you into all of this. I wouldn’t trust me either.”

All of this.

All of this?
I’m always confused, I think. But here’s the thing: Xander stumbled onto proof that Grant and his law firm were involved in some pretty shady real estate deals. It wasn’t anything new, really. Xander had known for years that Grant skated on the thin line between legal and illegal or immoral for years. He didn’t bat an eye at this until he had a customer tell him some interesting facts about a new building going up downtown. It was owned by a corporation out of Sacramento. Legally. In reality, the real owners were a group of men out of the Middle East who were doing everything they could to avoid the restrictions placed on businesses based in their part of the world—preventing them from doing work in the United States. And then Xander learned that Grant was working with other such groups, groups with ties to terror groups. It was all based around real estate and seemed innocent enough. But the more Xander learned about the deals, the more he realized just how deep Grant was in the whole thing. And how deep his mother was.

He tried to talk to her about it, but she was in love with Grant—had been for thirty years—and she wasn’t about to listen to Xander on anything that made Grant look less than the hero she always felt he was. And then he realized that Margaret was involved in some way, too.

That’s when he went to the FBI. Not long after that was when I found out.

He asked me to leave him because he was afraid Grant would find out what he was doing. And that’s exactly what happened. Grant confronted him three days after I moved out of the house.

But we had a plan.

“You don’t remember who was behind the wheel of the car?”

“I don’t remember the car at all.”

“How did we get ourselves into this mess?”

I shrugged—even as I snuggled closer to him. He tightened his grip on me, his hands moving slowly down the length of my arms.

“We’re going to be okay,” he said softly. “One way or the other…”

“I know.”

I crawled to my feet and pushed the rollaway shelf out of the way again. In the safe were two simple gold rings, a man’s and a woman’s. I sat back down in his lap and lifted his hand, sliding the ring onto his left ring finger.

“This is why I came up here,” I said, as he took my ring and did the same. “I had to make sure this memory was real.”

“It is, baby,” he whispered against my lips. “You are my wife.”

“And you are my husband.”

He picked me up and carried me downstairs, wrapping his body around me as we settled back under the sheets on our bed. I closed my eyes, the emotional and physical exhaustion of the night finally catching up to me. As I slowly began to drift to sleep, I let my mind wander. At first, all these different thoughts moved through my mind, mostly memories of the last three years that were still slowly coming back from that damaged place in my mind. And then my mind’s eye kept going back to tonight, to the conversation I had with Jonnie in the bathroom.

There was something about the way she’d been looking at me.

She knew about Grant, and she knew what Xander had been up to. She answered his calls, planned his days. She’d guessed that something was wrong. It was my decision to let her in on some of the details, just enough so that she would stop asking questions.

Maybe that hadn’t been the right choice.

As sleep played at the edges of my consciousness, a new memory began to play out in my mind:

I was jogging down Third Street, thinking about the day’s activities. Philip had arranged for me to meet with this FBI agent. He was working undercover at the
Times
as a lifestyles reporter. We were hoping everyone would think we were talking about the mural at the community center. I was so close to finishing, I could already see the completed work in my mind’s eye. I couldn’t wait to get back to it. It was probably the best thing I’d done in my short career. And then I heard the squeal of tires. I looked over my shoulder and…

…and I saw the face of the person who ran me down.

~ End of Part Two ~

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