by Shayla Black
“Why?”
She still won’t look at me. “Will you please sign Jamie’s papers and—”
“No.”
The last fucking thing I’m going to do is roll over and play dead. Britta’s got another think coming if she imagines for one moment that I’m giving up the notion of being a family with her and Jamie.
Finally, she looks up at me, seemingly fighting tears. “It’s over, Griff.”
“You’re wrong.”
Until this point, we haven’t had a direct discussion about the future I foresee. Between sniffling and coughing fits didn’t seem like the right time. Besides, I thought it might work to my advantage to slide in under her radar, show her I’d changed, earn her trust, then bring it up when her attitude was softer.
Apparently Makaio isn’t as gullible as I thought. And my time to finesse this situation has run out.
Before I can say anything else, Maxon approaches. He’s a safe distance away, like he knows he’s interrupting something. I’m sure he thinks he’s stopping my temper from turning this conversation into all-out warfare.
I might thank him later. Right now, I just want to rip his head off.
“Hey, Britta. Feeling better?”
“Yeah. The antibiotics have really helped.” Her gaze slides over to me once more. “I’m going to grab a little work and do it over the weekend. I’ll be back for sure on Monday.”
I want to snarl. I want to physically stop her from leaving for a romantic weekend with a guy who has a stick so far up his ass I’m shocked it’s not coming out of his mouth. And I’m beyond infuriated that I can’t do a fucking thing to stop her now.
Maxon slides a gaze my way, probably to see if I’ve turned volcanic yet. “Sure. Glad you’re feeling better. See you then.”
“Thanks.” Britta rushes over to her desk, looking relieved not to have to see the rage and disappointment on my face anymore.
I cut my brother a glare. What the hell? I ask him silently.
He tosses his hands in the air. What was he supposed to do? Something to convince her that Makaio isn’t the man for her. Britta isn’t listening to me because she doesn’t trust me. But my brother… She values his opinion. Hell, she asked him to be with her when she gave birth.
But this isn’t his fight. It’s mine. I need to do whatever it takes to end this shit.
And now I’ll have just under two months to do it.
Fuck.
Britta grabs an empty messenger bag and shoves some papers into it. She checks her voice mail messages, then tucks her laptop into the briefcase.
“Have a good weekend,” she says to Maxon.
“Call me if you need me…for whatever.”
I hear his subtext; if she needs him for a big brother, a sounding board, a heavy to kick Makaio’s ass.
She nods, patently refusing to look at me. “Thanks.”
With that, my brother slinks back into his office and shuts the door. The silence between us is almost deafening, except I can hear my harsh breathing. I’d be yelling, but her skittish expression is killing me. And I know Britta. She’d be fighting if she thought she was right.
If she knows better, what the hell is she doing?
“I’m not signing the papers.”
“Do what’s best for your son,” she implores.
“Oh, I am,” I assure her. “You should take your own advice. Don’t marry a blowhole who chose not to take care of you both properly when you needed him. What good is he if he stays with you and doesn’t fucking put you first?”
“I’m not arguing with you about this. It’s my choice. I got by without you during the most difficult three years of my life. Stop insisting I need you now.”
She shoulders her way past me and bangs the door open. The wind catches the heavy wood and slams it shut behind her. She’s gone.
I’m devastated.
I’ve tried to be understanding, be a good guy, prove I’ve changed by listening and coaxing her trust. Fuck all that now. I’ve got to stop acting against my grain. Or I’m going to lose her—and Jamie—forever.
“Griff…” Keeley puts her hand over mine across the table during dinner and drinks the following night, after I catch her up. “I can only imagine how you felt.”
Like shit. Like Britta had pulled the rug out from under me. Like she didn’t care at all.
I’m still angry. I’ve been angry for more than twenty-four hours. The way I feel right now, I don’t know if I’ll ever not be angry.
But the fact she’s gone away with him is killing me, too. Right now, she could be fucking him and not giving me another thought at all.
I swallow a lump of resentment. “I’ve got fifty-six days and twelve hours to change her mind.”
“Well, that gives you time to keep talking to her and showing her you’ve changed—”
“I’ve been doing that.” I beat my fist on the table. “It’s not working.”
“It’s barely been a week,” she argues.
“I can’t be sure another eight weeks like the last one will get me any closer to making her and Jamie mine for good.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” Keeley shakes her head. “After what you put Britta through, you can’t rush her. What did you think was going to happen, Griff? That you’d pop up in her life again and she’d be so damn happy to see you that she’d break off her engagement and glue herself to your side forever? That finally telling her you love her after failing to say it three years ago would thrill her so much she’d drop to her knees, kiss the ground you walked on, and forgive everything?”
When she puts it like that, I feel sheepish. “No.”
Well, not exactly. But as I shift in my seat, I realize that she’s closer to the truth than I’d like.
“I don’t know her, so I’m not sure what it will take for her to believe that you’re not the same selfish bastard you once were. For me, it’s about actions. They do speak louder. Words are cheap. So are promises. But what you do now, how you treat her, whether you put her first…that’s important. I’d bet money she made note of the fact that you were there during her illness and Makaio wasn’t.”
“It didn’t change anything.”
“Not that she admitted to you. But you haven’t let her sort anything out. You haven’t been patient.”
Fuck patience. It’s beyond time to be ruthless.
I need the right plan.
I don’t mention that to Keeley just now. She’ll only try to talk me out of it in some circular argument I can’t win.
I give her a noncommittal hum. “So what will you do when you see my brother again?”
“You don’t want to talk about it, I see.” She gives me a humorless laugh, and I know better than to think this subject won’t come up again during our next conversation. “If I see Maxon again. He hasn’t even tried to call me since I came back to the island. It’s been two days.”
“Trust me when I tell you he hasn’t lost interest. At all.”
“You keep saying that. What is he waiting for?”
I grin. If someone’s going to be coupled up soon and it’s not me, I’m glad it will be my brother and this amazing woman.
“What was that you said about patience a minute ago?” I raise a brow at her. “Don’t worry. It won’t be much longer.”
“Just because I see him doesn’t mean we’re going to wind up happily ever after. Stop grinning at me like that. I’m serious.”
“So am I.” My smile deepens. “And you’re wrong. It couldn’t happen for two nicer people.”
The phone in my pocket vibrates. I’m pretty sure I know who’s calling me at nine p.m. on a Saturday night. When I look at the display, sure enough…
“Hey, bro,” I say to Maxon.
Keeley snaps to attention and points at my phone. That’s him? she mouths.
I nod.
“Hi,” he says in my ear. “You with Keeley?”
“Uh-huh.” No way I’m letting her in on my conversation with m
y brother and potentially ruining his big surprise.
“Is she all right?”
“Uh-huh,” I answer without looking Keeley’s way.
“You can’t talk? Is that it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But you’ll have her there tomorrow night and you won’t tell her a thing?”
“Uh-huh,” I promise.
“All right. You’re saying you’ve got everything under control and it’s taken care of on your end?”
“Uh-huh.”
Maxon breathes a sigh of relief in my ear. “Great. Yeah… I’ll talk about business to throw her off track. So I got a phone call from our potential buyer’s rep about an hour ago. She’s arriving in Maui on Monday afternoon. She wants to preview the Stowes’ place on Tuesday.”
“That fast. It sounds like the buyer is really interested.”
“That’s the vibe I’m getting. But we need to go out there and make sure the house and grounds are looking their best tomorrow morning.”
“Sure. If not, we’ll come up with a strategy then.”
“To snag this mysterious buyer or our reluctant women?”
I laugh at my brother. “Yeah.”
He’ll know I mean both.
“You got it.”
We ring off, and Keeley looks ready to ask me a million questions. I cut her off. “Business call. We already have someone interested in the Stowe estate.”
I fill her in, minus the speculation about who the buyer might be. She listens with half an ear, finishes her wine, then pleads exhaustion. I think she’s just sad that Maxon didn’t ask to talk to her.
Back at my condo, it’s close to ten, but I’m nowhere near ready for bed.
I feel sadness settle over me. It weighs as much as a goddamn elephant sitting on my chest, suffocating me. So when Keeley shuts her bedroom door, my options for distraction are limited, but deep down, I’ve made up my mind.
I’m going to torture myself.
It’s not the first time…but I’ve indulged in this self-inflicted agony thing more than a few times in the last thirty-nine months. The previous time, I swore it would be the last. Obviously, I was full of shit and I’ll probably hate myself for this later. But I’m like an addict. Relapse is just a matter of time.
I can’t stop thinking that Makaio might not have been making love to Britta an hour ago. He might be doing it now. Or maybe he’s doing it again. And there’s not a fucking thing I can do to stop him.
With a curse under my breath, I pour myself a few fingers of Lagavulin 21. I’m old enough to drink, and my Scotch better be, too. I swirl it in my glass. It burns going down.
Am I really going to do this?
I toss back the rest, enjoying the fire blazing its way down my throat and into my belly.
Yeah. I really am.
I make to pour another few fingers of the booze. Oh, fuck it. The shit’s only five hundred bucks a bottle. I grab it by the neck, take it with me into the bedroom, and decide to stop procrastinating.
It’s time for the ultimate pain I can inflict on myself. Tonight, I’ve got an added bonus. I swiped the CD Keeley left me out of Britta’s car and brought it into my bedroom. I set the bottle on my nightstand and start the next unfamiliar tune on the disc. According to the case, it’s called “For a Lifetime” by a band called Lustral.
The song is chill. It’s got a sense of…waiting. Like something is about to happen. When the background singers come in and chant the title a few times in something just above a whisper, the tune shows its gravity. I can’t stop listening.
I also can’t stop my feet from moving forward, into my closet, up to my safe. I scroll through the combination and push aside all the papers I keep and my stash of ready cash. I reach for the black velvet box in the back and lift the lid.
Yep, it’s still sitting there. Two carats of princess-cut diamond in rose gold with sparkling pavé clusters set in the thin band to resemble little flowers.
I’ve kept it for nearly four years.
The minute I saw it, I knew it belonged on Britta’s finger and that I was the man who needed to put it there.
At the time I saw it, we’d only been dating a bit more than three months. We had only been having sex for two weeks.
Winter was about to tip into spring, and on a gorgeous day, I took a drive to Wailea with my top down. Britta’s mother was in town, and I was supposed to have dinner with them later that night. I parked at an outdoor mall and eyed an Italian place for lunch. As I headed that way, I walked past a jeweler’s window. This ring glinted and dazzled. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
A voice in my head told me to buy it for Britta. She’s too young, I told myself at the time. She’s not ready. Hell, I wasn’t, either.
But that voice insisted if I walked past the ring, I’d be making a mistake. So I spent a small fortune on it. And I held on to it, all through the spring, when I felt as if I really got to know Britta. Through the hot summer, when we seemed to forge something deep, so I asked her to move in and she said yes. Through the early fall, when I truly began picturing what it might be like to live with and love this woman for the rest of our lives. With some help from friends and neighbors, I threw her a surprise party for her birthday in October. It was too crowded to pop the question then. But a month later? I thought proposing to her and hearing her say yes would be the perfect birthday present to me.
Damn, I had this great plan… I told her I wanted to take a sunset beach cruise for my birthday. She bought the tickets. Unbeknownst to her, I hired a string quartet. I had a speech planned with a private dinner for two afterward where I fully intended to finally tell her that I loved her and wanted to marry her. And I reserved a swanky suite, along with champagne and dessert.
Perfect.
Except it never happened.
Six days before, I found out about Maxon’s secret deal with the Asian prince and lost my shit, ripping our business apart. Ironically, my brother had broken up with Tiffanii the night before when he discovered she’d been cheating with both a pilot and a wealthy playboy. I walked out on Britta, leaving when I had no idea she was pregnant.
November first was the worst day of my life, hands down. Every person and thing that made me happy was gone in the blink of an eye.
With that thought, I strip and get in bed, ring in one hand, bottle in the other. I swallow down another mouthful of the burn while I rub the precious metal between my fingers and imagine her wearing it while I’m making love to her, while she’s got on nothing else but the symbol of my possession.
I’m harder than fuck.
The song rolls on. She sings that the world she clings to is the one where she’ll walk beside me and she wants to show me what it feels to be complete. She’s been waiting for me for a lifetime. Yeah, I feel like I’ve been waiting for Britta that long, too. The background singers add a panty, breathy vibe. It’s sensual. And if I toss a little more booze into my system and close my eyes, I can almost imagine Britta beside me.
Yeah, that’s her hand wrapped around my cock. That’s my ring
