Текст книги "Sweet Sinful Nights"
Автор книги: Lauren Blakely
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” rang out from a nearby slot machine as coins splashed into the metal bucket. A guy in a Hawaiian shirt working the one-armed bandit shouted a triumphant yes!
Brent and Mindy walked through the slot machines while she made her afternoon rounds through the casino
“I get that you’re pissed—” Mindy began.
Brent held up a finger. “Correction. Was pissed. I was pissed last night.”
Mindy nodded, and pressed the Bluetooth in her ear, listening for a few seconds, then returned to the conversation. They strolled past a machine crooning “Pure Imagination” as a cartoonish Willy Wonka presided over the slots. “Fine. You were pissed last night. And now you’re resentful and kind of catatonic. Am I right?”
He huffed, but nodded.
“Then get ready for some tough love, my friend.” She stopped at an empty Cleopatra machine, parking her hand on the queen’s golden headband. “This is what you need to realize—and none of this is to belittle what you’re feeling. But sweetie, you don’t get to be angry. You don’t get to own this feeling of resentment.”
He narrowed his eyes and shot her a look. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not denying your role in this loss. I’m not saying it isn’t painful, or shocking, or sad. I get that you lost something you didn’t even know you had lost,” she said, speaking in a thoughtful, teacherly tone. “But I’m giving you a couple hours, maybe a day, to feel all those things on your own. And then your job is to be there for her. You don’t get to own this hurt. It is hers. She went through it.”
Mindy’s words were iced water splashed onto him. They were the stark reminder that he couldn’t co-opt Shannon’s grief or pain. His was a fraction of hers.
“So what do I do?”
“Be the man she needed you to be ten years ago. The man who doesn’t walk away when you hear that shit didn’t go in your direction.”
“I didn’t walk away,” he said, trying to defend his actions. “I told her I needed time to deal with it.”
Mindy nodded a few times, acknowledging him. “Fine, you needed time. You needed space. I understand. It was a shock. Well, you had your time and you had your space. Now man up, and be who she needs. That’s all you’ve wanted,” she said, slugging his arm. “You have wanted her to need you. You’ve wanted her to want you back in her life. Now she does, and you walk away at the first bit of bad news?”
“I didn’t—”
She held up her palm. “Talk to the hand. You can say you didn’t walk away, and maybe you didn’t, but I bet it feels like that to her. Think back to Boston. Rewind to ten years ago. You hated it when she wouldn’t give up her career for you,” she said, her voice rising as she sent him back in time. “And what did you do in response then? You walked away from her. Now, you hear another thing you don’t like, that she lost a baby, and you do the same. You walked away again. You can finesse it all you want, and say you needed space, but the net effect is the same.”
Her words shamed him. They knocked him out of his stupor of self-loathing. He had wanted so badly to be everything she needed, but when push came to shove, he’d let pride, and fear, and a million other things stand in the way last night.
“Shit,” he said, heavily. “I’ve fucked up.”
“No. You haven’t fucked up,” she said, pressing her fingers to his cheeks and turning his frown upside-down. “You just took a step back. Now, take some steps forward. This time, instead of walking away, walk back to her. Be there for her, and for yourself. I know it’s hard and I know you’re feeling this loss too in a new fresh way. But feel it with her, not against her. Talk to her about it. Don’t run away. Don’t hide. Face your fears with her, and tell her how you feel,” she said, squeezing his shoulder. “And move through it together.”
“I need to see her right away.”
“You do.”
Brent cycled back to their last few conversations, trying to figure out where she might be. “I think she’s on her way back from L.A. Should I, you know, do that thing where I show up at the airport with a sign that says ‘I love you?’”
Mindy clutched her belly and laughed deeply. “God no. That only works in the movies. Besides, you know she’s a private person. She wouldn’t like that. All she wants is you. Not a sign. Not a gift. Not some cheesy love song dedicated to her. Strange as it may be, she wants you. So give her you.”
“Can I borrow your phone for a second?”
Mindy dug into her pocket, and handed it to him. He dialed Shannon’s number. It went straight to voice mail.
* * *
Her grandmother slid a mug of tea across the counter. “Have some.”
“I don’t even like tea, and you know that. But you always try to give me tea,” Shannon said, but she said it with a smile. She knew why her grandmother was offering tea. It was Victoria’s comfort beverage.
“It cures all troubles,” she said in an over-the-top wise woman’s voice as she picked up her mug of green tea and knocked some back. Shannon was parked next to her on a stool. She’d stopped by on her way home from the airport, grateful that she was always welcome and didn’t have to call first. Besides, her phone had chirped its last breath in Burbank. She was snagging some juice for it at her grandmother’s in an outlet on the wall.
“Then I better drink some after all,” Shannon said, and took a hearty gulp. “Because I have a lot of trouble.”
“Tell me what brings you here.”
Shannon didn’t mince words. She was straightforward, revealing the key details of her epic argument with Brent, laying it out for the woman who had been her parent for the last eighteen years. “I guess I never thought it would unfold like that. I imagined a million other scenarios but not that one. And I know I should have told him sooner, or tried harder to find him. And I understand why he’d be upset,” she said, running her finger absently along the mug. “I just wish there was something I could do. I left him a message, but I haven’t heard a word from him all day.” She took a beat then asked the hardest question of all. “Is it over?”
“Is he dead?”
Shannon flinched, taken aback by the question. “Grandma!”
“Well? Is he? Answer the question,” she said sternly.
“No. Of course not.”
She shrugged happily. “Then find him. Talk to him. Say you’re sorry for not telling him sooner, say you love him, say you want to be with him. As long as he’s not gone, you can keep making up with each other. We live and we love and we hurt each other. We don’t always say the right thing, or do the right thing at the right moment. Sometimes we need space, and distance, and sometimes words fall from our lips that shouldn’t have been said. Sometimes they seem untenable, and sometimes they are,” she said, then reached across the counter to take Shannon’s hand. “And we always hurt the ones we love most. If we didn’t love so much, it wouldn’t hurt so much. But you keep going. You keep loving. You keep working on that love every day. The only time you won’t have a chance at making up is when one of you is gone. Since he’s still here, it’s not over. Not in the least. So love him. Show him that you love him.”
“I do. I do love him.”
Victoria parked her palms on the counter, and gave Shannon a steely-eyed glare. “Then go get your man back.”
“I will,” she said, and a small grin formed on her face as the words show him echoed in her head. She didn’t have enough time to show him what she’d started working on for him yesterday in San Francisco, but she could line up the pieces. As her phone lit up again, she opened the list she’d made.
Then she saw a notification for a voicemail.
CHAPTER THIRTY
He waited.
For an hour.
Then another.
Outside her building, with a bouquet of sunflowers in one hand, his phone in the other. He’d stopped by his house to grab it from the utensil holder inside his dishwasher, then he made a pit stop at a flower shop on the way. He’d been taught never to show up empty-handed for a woman.
In some ways, flowers were just flowers. They were an ordinary, average gift. But since Shannon had photos upon photos of sunflowers in a personal and private album, they obviously meant something important to her. They were more than flowers to her. He hoped this bouquet was more than just an average I’m sorry gift.
That it said he was trying to understand the woman he loved.
Since he’d arrived and parked his bike at the curb, he’d sat on the steps and answered emails from earlier in the day. He’d called her again, and encountered her voice mail once more. He’d paced back and forth in front of the building. At this point, he probably looked like a stalker, and he hoped her neighbors wouldn’t call the cops or neighborhood watch on him. Nobody seemed to care though that he was hovering around the entrance. A hipster with huge headphones had nodded hello on his way upstairs. A brunette with a yoga mat had walked by on her way into the lobby. Some dude in a Buick parked by the curb had even glanced over at Brent a few times, giving a cursory hey there nod.
Brent paced up and down the block to kill more time, his phone clutched in his hand. He reached the corner, turned around, and headed back. The guy was still in his car, his arm hanging out the passenger window, watching Shannon’s building.
A bit too closely for Brent’s taste.
The guy had been there for twenty, thirty minutes now, looking like he was reading a book, but he kept glancing up, scanning the street as if he didn’t want to miss anything.
It reminded him of a cop on a stakeout, only the guy didn’t reek of cop. Something about the guy rubbed Brent the wrong way. It was hard to say what it was, but as he neared the Buick again, he held up his phone as if he were answering a message. Instead, he snapped a few pictures of the license plate and the car, and then zoomed in on the guy’s arm, covered in ink.
He tucked his phone away as he reached the open window. “How’s it going?” he said casually.
“Good,” the guy grumbled. He had a baby face and looked young enough to be carded if he were at Edge. Brent continued along the block, and turned around again at the corner. As he returned, the Buick was no longer idling at the curb. The guy had pulled out into traffic, and was driving away.
Probably just some neighborhood guy. But Brent didn’t like the idea of anyone hanging out outside Shannon’s building for too long. Except for him. Call him a hypocrite, but he knew his own motives. Trusted his own motives.
Then he stopped thinking about anyone but Shannon when her number flashed across his screen.
At last.
He answered in a nanosecond.
“Hey, babe. I’m at your building. Hanging out outside. Looking like a stalker, or maybe like a caged lion in a zoo pacing back and forth. You want to put me out of my misery and make me just look like a man who’s waiting for his woman so he can tell her how much he loves her?”
She laughed, and he savored that sound, the sweetness of it, the way it threaded through him. He wanted to bottle it up and keep it close to him forever. “I can definitely make you look that way. And I got your message. My phone died after my flight, so I didn’t pick it up till a few minutes ago. But I’m glad you’re there because I’m on my way to see a stalking lion who I love, too.”
* * *
After she hung up, she listened to his voice message one more time on speakerphone as she drove. “My phone is in the dishwasher, so I’m calling from a friend’s phone,” he’d said. “I just want to say I love you madly. And I’m on my way over to your house because I’m not walking away. I’d never walk away, and I did a bad job saying that last night, so I’m trying again right now, and I want you to know that I’ve meant everything I’ve said to you in the last few weeks. I will do whatever it takes for you.”
Best. Message. Ever.
As she neared her street, she made one more call to a friend of his, the guy who ran the Luxe. He agreed to help with her project, and so she had everyone lined up. She ended the call as she turned onto her street, the kernel of hope expanding inside her, blooming into something bigger, something full of possibilities. She kept her eyes on the road, but peered up ahead, so damn eager to see him. She spotted him, outside her building, his tall strong frame coming into view. He was pacing as promised, aviator shades on, brown hair glinting in the late sun, and that grin she adored flashing at her. Her heart was fighting its way out of her chest, racing to him, knowing they’d somehow fix the mess they’d made.
Because he was waiting for her.
It was that simple.
She yanked the wheel in a sharp right, the tires squealing as she pulled along the curb and cut the engine. In seconds, she was out of her car, and rushing over to him. He held a bouquet of sunflowers in his hand, and the sight of them made her breath catch.
“Hi,” she said, as he took off his shades and met her gaze.
“Hi.”
Then he wrapped his arms around her, and she did the same, grasping his waist. The flowers pressed against her back. His sunglasses clattered to the sidewalk. “I’m sorry I left last night.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” she said.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when it happened.”
“I’m sorry you had to find out like that.”
He lifted her chin with his fingers, raising her face. “I guess we’re both sorry.”
She flashed a rueful smile. “We say that a lot don’t we?”
He nodded, but kept his arms around her. She was glad he didn’t want to let go. She wanted him to hold her.
“Maybe because we fight a lot,” he said softly. “Maybe that’s just too hard a habit for us to break.”
“I think it might be. I just want us to keep coming back together.”
He sighed into her hair, and tugged her close again. “Me, too.”
“I’m glad you didn’t walk away,” she said, looping her hands tighter around his strong waist.
“I came back. I told you I would. I meant it, Shan. I’m not ever walking away from you. As long as you’ll have me, I will always be here.”
She wrenched back to look him in the eyes again. “You,” she said, as she ran her hands along his shirt, “are all I want. When you left, all I wanted was to see you again. For you to come back. To open the door and find you. And here you are.”
He set the bouquet on the ground, then cupped her cheeks in his palms. He gazed at her, his brown eyes full of passion, full of love. “I told you I won’t make the same mistake again. I won’t lose you twice.” He brushed his thumb along her jawline. “Last night floored me. You have to know that. It shocked me to the bone, and I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t know how to feel about everything, but one thing I know is true is that I am in love with you. That’s never going to change, so whatever happens, I want to figure it out with you.”
His words tugged at all her heartstrings. His hands on her face were the reassurance she’d always sought. They were comfort and protection all at once. “I want that too. I want you here with me. Life is better with you, even if we’re dealing with something hard. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I’ve been through enough to know that whatever comes our way we’ll get through it. And hey,” she said, her lips quirking into a small smile, “that’s my specialty. Maybe that’s what I can help you with. Getting through things.”
He nodded solemnly. “I’ll take it. I need it. I barely knew what to say last night. I left so I wouldn’t say something else that was wrong. Last time I said everything wrong.”
“So let’s say the right things now. It’s my turn. When we started seeing each other again, you said you weren’t going to let me go. You were damn insistent. You made it clear I was yours, come hell or high water.”
He grinned proudly, and nodded. “I did.”
“I feel the same about you. I belong with you, and you belong with me. You and I are fire. We always have been. And sometimes we burn with how much we love. Sometimes we hurt each other. But I will do whatever it takes for you. Just as you will for me. I lost you once, and there’s no way I’m going to let that happen again. Got it?” She poked him in the chest. “You are mine.”
He smiled wide and broad like the sun. “And you’re mine.”
She cast her eyes to the bouquet. “I see you brought me something.”
He bent down and picked up the flowers. “I had this plan to get a skywriter and say King Shmuck says he’s sorry and please take him back, and then have a Mariachi band play ‘You’re the One That I Want’ after you came through security. It was that, or the flowers.” He made a nervous face, one that was clearly deliberate. “Did I pick okay?” he asked.
She laughed and grabbed his arm again, not wanting to let go of him. “I think you did okay, Nichols. You did more than okay. You noticed I like sunflowers, and yellow, and sunshine.”
He held his hands out wide. “Help a man out. I have no idea what your sunflower obsession is, but I know they matter to you, and you matter to me, so I want to know.”
Her laughter erased itself and so did the smile on her face. She turned serious. “You want to know? Even if hurts? Even if you won’t know what to say?”
“Yes. I do.”
She tipped her forehead to her car. “Take me for a ride. I’ll show you.” She handed him the keys, and let him drive.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The grass was spongy under his feet, and the early evening sun cast golden shadows across the headstones.
The oaks and elms rose stately and green, their lush leaves forming canopies. Flowers burst to life everywhere, some wild, many in bouquets laid on the ground. It was an odd juxtaposition—all that verdant life in the midst of those markers of death. But that was what cemeteries were for—for the living to remember the dead. With her hand in his, they neared her father’s grave.
As the simple stone came into view, he saw yellow. So much yellow.
“My grandma was here this week. She brought those,” Shannon said gesturing to the sunflowers along the headstone.
He read the etching. Thomas Darren Paige. Loving father. His throat hitched, and he swallowed it away as he wrapped an arm around her shoulder.
“I bring them here, too,” she continued.
“They’re beautiful,” Brent said softly, as they stopped a few feet from the grave. “It’s a beautiful way to remember him.”
“They’re not only for him,” Shannon said, looking up, meeting his eyes.
“Who are they for?” he asked, but he knew the answer. In a flash, everything made sense. He inhaled sharply, walloped once again by something unexpected.
“I like to think he’s with my dad. Somehow. That my dad is looking out for him. That they keep each other company in the great beyond.”
He swallowed roughly, and spoke softly. “I believe that.”
“I started to bring the flowers when I came back from London. I was struggling and I needed to find a way through all that sadness. I’d been pregnant and utterly confused, and then in mere hours, I became not pregnant and completely empty. I wasn’t just sad. I was hollow, and aching. I felt the loss every day for the first few months. I felt it like it was this hole inside me. I didn’t know what to do,” she said, holding her hands out wide, showing the helplessness she must have felt. “I talked to my grandma about it, and it’s not as if I was trying to compare what I lost to what she lost—she lost a son she’d raised and loved for thirty-six years. I lost a son I never knew. But she told me that remembering the person who was no longer here was what helped her the most to heal,” Shannon said. Huge tears welled up in her green eyes, and he couldn’t help himself. He bent his head to hers and kissed them away.
“And so I did the same,” she said, sharing more of the story. “I thought it would just help me deal with the initial awfulness. That kind of grief upends your daily routine. It makes it hard to get out of bed. This helped though,” she said, and her voice was soft, but steady. He could hear her strength in it. He could sense all her resilience, all her survival. “And soon, the pain lessened. Time did what time is supposed to do. The pain didn’t feel so raw or so new or so fresh anymore. I was able to do my job, and live my life, and not be seized with sadness every second. But I’d still come here when I was in town, and I’d leave more sunflowers, and soon I realized I wasn’t leaving them for the baby anymore.”
“You weren’t?”
She shook her head. “They were for you,” she said, and a new shock reverberated in his system. But it wasn’t the horribleness of last night; it was something else. It was shock mixed with a strange sense of hope. “They reminded me of you and how I felt for you. I was leaving them here as a way to remember that I wasn’t alone. That even though you didn’t know, you were a part of it, too. Sunflowers always reminded me of you.”
“Why?” he said, his throat dry as the desert, choked with emotion.
She didn’t answer with words at first. She answered through touch. She pushed up the sleeve on his right arm, revealing his ink—the black sunburst he’d had done with her in Boston, when she’d told him it fit his sunny disposition. “Because you were like the sun to me. You made my days better. You were my warmth and my happiness. And I wanted to remember that the baby was as much you as he was me. That we were in it together, even if we weren’t together.”
His heart stopped. His breath fled his chest. His life narrowed to a before and an after. To that moment in time. It marked the man he was, and the man he was becoming. The man he could be for her. That second, those words became the epicenter of his life. “I never knew how far and deep it went when you said I was like the sun to you.”
She ran her fingertip over his sunburst, her touch electrifying him, even in the intensity of this kind of admission. “You were all my sunny days, Brent. You were always so happy, and so upbeat, and you never let anything get you down. And you gave all that to me. You turned my days around when I met you.”
He closed his eyes and swayed closer to her, trying to take that all in, to digest the enormity of what she was saying. Of how she’d never let go of him through all the years. Of how she’d included him in her life, the good and the bad, even when he’d had no clue where she was and vice versa.
“I thought you hated me,” he said softly, trying to process this.
She shrugged, happily. “I thought I did, too. But I never stopped loving you.”
“I never stopped either. Not once. Not once through all the years.”
Then it hit him, with the clarity of a thousand suns. There was life and death, and the thinnest thread separated the two, by the edge of a razor. Life was for the living, and for the loving.
He dropped down to one knee for the second time ever. He had no ring. No plan. No speech. He grasped her hand in his. “Marry me.”
She blinked, a look of utter disbelief on her face. “Are you proposing to me in a cemetery?”
“I am,” he said. Hoping. Praying. Wanting that yes.
“You’re crazy,” she said, but she was grinning wildly.
“Am I?”
“You might be. You did put your phone in a dishwasher. Was it dirty?”
“Yes. It was full of my filthy, dirty messages to you. It was about to combust from the hotness.”
She laughed loudly, clasping her free hand on her belly. “Brent, you’re ridiculous.”
“And that’s what you always say when I make you laugh. You say I’m ridiculous. That’s another reason why you should marry me now. Because I make you laugh, and I always will. Because I make you happy, and I promise to make that my greatest mission for the rest of my life. Because you make me so damn happy. Loving you is the best thing I’ve ever done. I love everything about you—your body, your heart, and your mind. I have been in love with you for more than a decade and I’ve barely spent any of those years with you. Let’s pick up where we left off and spend our whole lives together. Let's do what we were supposed to do ten years ago. Let's do it now.”
“Now?”
His eyes lit up with mischief. “Vegas, baby.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“Think about it,” he urged. “Everyone comes here to get married. We live here. This is our town, babe. This is our place. Let’s make it ours.”
She held out her hand and tugged him up. “Vegas, baby.”
