Shopping for a Billionaire's Wife (28 page)

“He told me about Grandma Celeste and your wedding, too.”

She looks like I slapped her. “He
what
?”

“I’m sorry your mom did that to you.”

Tears well up in her eyes, pouring over her lower lids, streaking through her blush.

“I ruined your wedding, just like my mother ruined mine.”

“No. Not the same at all.”

“I made you come up with that cockamamie scheme to run away from me.”

“You did.” I have to agree.

She chuckles, wiping the tears with a Grind It Fresh! napkin. I take the opportunity to shove a chocolate macaron in my mouth to stop myself from saying more.

“I suppose,” she whispers, “I could give you a bunch of reasons for why I made your wedding into such a production—” 

“And invited the person who bullies me most in the world to my own wedding.”

She swallows hard, nodding. “And that. But nothing would explain away the pain I’ve caused you, honey, and so all I can do is ask you to forgive me.”

I frown. “Did Daddy put a new microchip in you?”

She gives me a patented Mom look. “You use sarcasm to avoid your feelings.”

“No, I use
food
to avoid my feelings. You have me confused with Amy.” 

She sniffle-cries. “Oh, Shannon.”

I lean over and hug her. Mom squeezes tight.

“I don’t really have a tattoo,” she says, hot breath filling my ear. “I just knew that was Kari Whitevelt from Foked and made a scene to throw her off to help you.”

My laughter plumes out of me as if my heart were a sage stick and we’re performing a cleansing ritual.

Which we are.

“Excuse me,” says a man’s voice from behind me. He pulls at the metal-backed chair where Amanda was sitting a few minutes ago. “This seat taken?”

It’s Declan.

Mom raises her eyebrows and her eyes roll up to watch him.

“This is the famous Grind It Fresh!,” Declan says, eyes darting with a calculated approach, surveying and absorbing, letting no detail go unnoticed. 

“Yes.”

“Coffee’s really that good?”

Except when it feels like a thousand liquid needles in my stomach, like now.

“Yes.”

“I suppose I should give this a try.” He walks away from me and Mom, my eyes eating up the long lines of his legs. He’s dressed casually, in dark jeans and a form-fitting dress shirt in a deep purple. This isn’t his normal look. Marcello has left his mark on Declan, and maybe Evie has, too. 

I like it. I’d like it more if he didn’t feel so remote, so untouchable, right now.

While he’s at the counter, probably interrogating the poor barista on P&L sheets and marketing conversion rates, Mom leans toward my ear and says, “You have to make up.”

“Of course we’ll make up.”

“You said some harsh words to him, Shannon.”

“So did he!”

“Was he right?”

I drink more of my coffee and borrow a little time.

“Yes,” I admit grudgingly. “Only a teeny, tiny bit.”

“And do you think you were right?”

“Yes! More than him.”

“Uh uh. No, honey. Don’t play that game.”

“What game?”

“The ‘who’s more right’ game.” 

“You and Dad
invented
that game, Mom!” 

“Learn from my mistakes.”

“I would need three lifetimes.”

She gives me a long-suffering look that she has no right to give me. If we’re casting long-suffering
anything
, I’m the one who should hold that power. Not her.

“Let me play the role of the wise woman for a minute here, Shannon.”

“Goody. Pretend play.”

She lets out a long sigh. “Go ahead. Get in your digs. I deserve them.”

Mom does. She
really
does, so why am I starting to feel bad?

“Okay. I’ll stop. Go ahead. Give me your best wise woman advice.” I’m sure the next words out of her mouth will involve an order to go have sex with Declan, or to let him buy me fancy jewelry, or to get started on grandchildren.

To my surprise, she says: “Let yourself imagine he’s right.”

“WHAT?”

“I said ‘imagine.’ Let yourself
imagine
he’s right. That doesn’t mean he
is
right.”

Before I can lambaste her over this terrible idea, Declan’s back with a tray of three coffees, each the perfect order for us. He remembered my favorite and Mom’s as well.

We have so many cups of coffee in front of us, we should start a newspaper.

If you close your eyes and flatten your feet against the ground, with your spine straight and your hands splayed on a smooth, sturdy surface, you can take a deep breath and feel how connected you are to all the parts of the world. Think about it. Every item touches every item (unless you’re flying). It’s all about degrees of separation. As long as I’m in contact with the floor, which touches iron girders, which touch other structural pieces that reach the foundation and the dirt, which goes on to reach the ocean, which carries the current of that touch all the way across the vast seas to another piece of dirt— 

You get the picture.

In the space of touching every part of the earth with your seeking heart, you can find yourself more readily.

“Shannon.”

His voice seeks, too.

“I’ll get going now,” Mom says primly, giving me a half-hug that feels like we’re in some weird Duggar cult. “I’m so glad we made up.” She gives Declan a weird smile. “I would hug you, but my hoo-haw is burning.” She walks slowly across the casino floor and disappears into a walkway to our resort. 

“Was that code for something?” he asks me. “Her hoo-haw is her—”

“Right.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“No. You don’t.” Awkward topic aside, the fact that he’s talking to me is astounding. Steve and I had a few fights that were bad. Steve gave me the silent treatment for days afterward.

Having Declan talk to me an hour after I slammed a door in his face is surreal.

I feel like I’m in seventh grade again, except now I know what sex feels like and my acne’s gone. My skin buzzes with that kind of tension that comes from conflict with another person. You’re just not quite right with them, and it’s as if the air between you is charged with atoms that can’t figure out how to coexist without making you itchy and numb.

I suppose the best way to start is to say:

“I’m sorry.” His voice is so sincere it cracks a little.

He beat me to it. “I am, too,” I reply. “I shouldn’t have slammed the door, either.”

He gives me a shy smile. Shy isn’t a word I would ever use to describe him. In that little grin, I see his five-year-old self. It’s adorable and heartbreaking at the same time.

“At least I knew where to find you once I cooled down.”

“I came here to try to talk it out with Amanda, but Mom found us.”

He stands. “Should I leave you alone? I thought—”

“No. Please,” I beg. “Stay.” I don’t have the words to explain how his presence is the only way I feel rooted to the earth. Fully. It’s the difference between a plant that grows in a container and one that grows in a wildflower field. 

I’m
that
different when he’s with me, in spirit or in form. With him, I’m connected to every part of the world. 

The chair legs scrape against the tiled floor as he resumes his seat, next to me, our knees touching.

We’re okay.

It’s going to be okay.

“I don’t know how to fight with you,” he says in a hushed voice. “I’m not good at this.”

“And I am?”

“We’re both really, really bad at this, aren’t we?” 

“Of all the things we could be bad at, I’d pick this over any other.”

“Can you imagine if we were really bad at sex?” he says in a conspirator’s voice, a light joking tone that is meant to knit back the loose threads of the tapestry of our romance.

I close my eyes and giggle. I try to imagine it. “No. I
literally
can’t imagine it.”

“Me either.”

“You know what else I can’t imagine being bad at?”

“What?”

“Making up.”

His shoulders relax.

“But I don’t take back anything I said.” My words make him nod slowly, his hands on his knees, eyes cast down as he thinks.

“Me either.”

“We’re at an impasse, then.”

“At least you didn’t use the word
standoff
.”

I start to shake, my cup of coffee a slight blur as I say, “What are we going to do about this? I can’t keep arguing about this. You have your ideas about money. I have mine.” 

“This has nothing to do with money.”

“It doesn’t?”

His head shake is imperceptible, but I see it. “No.”

“Then what?”

“Power.”

“Money is power.”

“Yes, but power is power, too. And I think we’re both trying to figure out how to exercise it.” His hair brushes over a wrinkled brow, the lines creased from tension. “Our relationship is an incubator. A hothouse. A petri dish.” 

“You’re so romantic.”

“We’re complete beginners at this, Shannon. Both of us. We’re trying to figure out the very early stages of how you weave two disparate people together into a single entity that shares a life.”

“We’ve been together for more than two years. I live with you.”

“Not the same. The stakes are higher now that we’re marrying. We aren’t fighting over which toaster to keep, or whether you’ll do my laundry. This is about whose emotional reality takes precedence. Whose emotional reactions dictate behaviors. And we’re just realizing—both of us,” he adds in a rush—“that the relationship we thought we had is more layered than we ever expected.”

A chill runs through me. A timbre, a rattle in his throat, the way the words come out so full of sadness—it makes me feel connected to all the emptiness in the world.

This is not a happy feeling.

“What are you saying?” The words come out of my mouth like I’m talking around a mouthful of molasses. The depth of emotion in his voice could go one of two ways. 

His eyes move with precision, from left to right in a parabola, finally settling on my hands, which he grabs, both of mine in both of his.

“I’m saying that you take me places I didn’t know a heart could go. You feel so well.”

“I
feel
well? You’re using ‘feel’ as an action verb? You say that like it’s an accomplishment. It’s not. It’s a curse.”

“It’s a superpower.” 

“Stop.”

“It is,” he insists. “And I forget that you feel differently than I do.”

“I am a separate human being,” I say with a small smile. 

“Not what I mean. You open me up to emotional experiences—an inner life—that I don’t realize is there.”

I frown.

He looks around. “Like this place. I’ll bet you can look at the clerk at the coffee shop for three minutes and tell me her emotional state.”

He’s right.

“Don’t you
feel
people when you walk into a room?”

“That’s illegal, Shannon.”

“That’s not what I meant! I’m talking about walking into a meeting and picking up on the emotional inner worlds of all the faces sitting around the table. Their cues about what they’re really thinking and experiencing on the inside.”

“That sounds like a form of psychological torture.”

“Welcome to my world.”

“That’s what I mean.” His hands are dry and hot, smooth and patient, ready to hold mine for as long as it takes to make me feel fully rooted.

“Declan, I can feel you pull away from me when we’re at odds. It’s a physical sensation that sends me into a state of being that really is a form of psychological torture. It’s brutal and distressing and leaves me feeling like I am clawing for air. Like I’m suffocating from the inside out.” I can’t stop crying, my breath coming in little spurts, a sudden torrent of emotion piling on, taking over.

He’s horrified.

“Jesus, Shannon, I had no idea.” His sigh comes out like staccato notes being played against his ribs. “I would never cause you that kind of pain if I knew.”

“N-n-now you do.”

Those bright green eyes disappear beneath his eyelids, his long black lashes kissing the hollowed space above bone. He reaches for me, then moves his chair over, arm around my shoulders, hand soothing me by rubbing up and down the length of my arm.

“I’m here now,” he murmurs. “I’m not going anywhere. We can fight and you can slam doors and I can yell and you can make up a world in your head where you turn me into a big old jerk, but I’ll always come back to you and try to talk everything out. I can’t not do that, Shannon. Being with you has rewired me.”

“Me, too.”

“You can’t get rid of me. Even if you do resort-cheat on me.”

I sniffle-laugh. He grabs me and hugs me so hard. So beautifully hard.

The physical distance between us has been bridged.

Things fell apart.

And now the center does, in fact, hold.

Chapter Eighteen

A few hours later, after we go back to the suite and I fall asleep in his arms, I awaken to find Declan pacing in the other room, on the phone, murmuring a low, indecipherable string of words. He hangs up, calls Grace, and recites a bunch of numbers and the names of banks.

Must be some big account.

I stretch, my body sore from the unexpected nap, my calves screaming from all the high-heel wearing I’ve been doing. Rumpled and dazed, I stand in the middle of the suite like a little kid who has woken in the middle of the night and isn’t quite sure what to do to get back to bed. 

“Hey, sleepy,” Dec says, tapping his phone’s screen and tucking it in his jacket pocket. He pulls me into his arms just as someone knocks on the door.

We put two feet between us and I give him a look that says,
You didn’t
.

After that fight, the last thing I need is a giant teddy bear, or jewelry, or a rare meerkat, or whatever Andrew’s lavishing on Amanda.

The door opens. It’s a staff member holding a tray with two coffees in it. That’s it.

And they’re from Grind It Fresh!

Declan tips the delivery person and hands it to me with a flourish.

“Not quite Tiffany, but...”