The wedding is romantic, but long, as weddings are. The afternoon reception is, of course, a grand affair. The guests are seated in a huge marquee, with enough place settings for four hundred people. There are six courses, a speech between every course.
Ted and Hank deliver the best men’s speeches, being the only people not involved in the very convoluted love story that has brought Jonny and Becky together. In fact, the very nature of their relationship makes it very difficult for the two men to reference it, so they just tell some funny old stories about Jonny’s teenage and college years and leave it at that.
As the wedding party disperses for a couple of hours to relax in their rooms before the evening reception, I pack up my things and prepare to leave. I catch up with Hank as he heads upstairs. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Have fun tonight, behave yourself.”
“Wait, stay, I have a room.” He checks we’re alone. “You don’t have to go yet, right?” Snaking his hand around my waist, he pulls me into a nook and pecks me on the lips. “Pretty please.”
“You are incorrigible. But I could do with a nap after last night’s shenanigans.”
I follow him up to his room. “I have a surprise for you.”
He’s all excited. “In your room? Did you put a bow tie on your dick?”
“No. damn it, remind me to get them for our wedding.” Our wedding? He says these things sometimes, the man is a conundrum. Pulling me into his room, he locks the door behind us. “This is for you.”
“It’s a dress. Why do I need a dress?”
“Becky asked me to ask you to the party tonight.” He lifts his hands. “I swear this is nothing to do with what happened last night. She and the girls organized the whole thing. They knew inviting you to the ceremony would be tricky, but they wanted to make sure you knew how much a part of our group you are.”
I gulp back my joy. “Really?” The dress is beautiful. Green silk, lined. It has to have cost a pretty fortune. “I don’t know what to say. Except that you guys have gone and bought me more clothes, you really need to stop. I …” I stop myself. Say the thing. Tell him.
“Say yes. Be my plus one tonight. Dance with me. It doesn’t feel right when you’re not there.” Oh, he is on form tonight if he wants to make me cry.
He takes my hand and leads me into the shower. “Wait.”
“I know, you can’t get your hair wet. I do pay attention.” He grabs the shower head, waits until the water is perfect and rinses my body in warm water. Then he grabs the shower gel and soaps me from head to toe, paying special attention to areas which, in his opinion, need more scrubbing than others.
Why he thinks my breasts are so dirty, I have no idea.
Once I’ve been rinsed off, he towel-dries me and pulls me onto the bed.
“What is all of this?”
“You have been an angel. You have put up with my family, my friends and their bizarre lifestyles and love triangles, my total incapacity to know how to be in a relationship without making you cry. Tonight it’s all about you.”
He spreads my legs and places a warm, hard tongue on my clit. My breath hitches. Nobody has ever done this before, made it all about me.
As we step out of our room a couple of hours later, there’s a commotion in the corridor. Ted, Claire, Jen, Becky and Jonny as well as several other guests are gathered in front of one of the bedrooms.
“Yes, yes, yes!” screams a female voice, followed by a crash, a bang and several moans of pleasure in a much deeper tone.
“Whose room is this?” asks Hank, raising his eyebrows in admiration. We’d just been doing something similar a few doors down. Had anybody heard us too?
“It’s Holly’s room. It’s been going on for twenty minutes, unbelievable. Half my family have walked past here for one reason or another, she’s hardly discreet.” Becky is fuming, this is not the day to steal her thunder. Holly and whoever is in there with her are in serious trouble. As the passion inside the room comes to a crescendo, Holly’s cries became louder and louder and frankly a lot more vulgar until a male voice cries out, “Bail out!” Becky and Jen look at each other.
“Holy shit!” says Jen, cringing, “He’s doing that, on her.”
Becky screeches, “Fucking Hell, Chad! Holly, stop that immediately!” The sound of scrambling and cursing can be heard from inside. A straggly, out of breath Holly opens the door.
“Fuck off Becky, I’m busy.” She sees the crowd and tries to close the door, but Becky steps forward, wedging her foot in.
“Don’t you close that door on me. Tell Chad to get dressed, then he can get out of my house and out of our lives. What were you thinking?”
Holly opens the door wider, a set of straps barely covering her assets. “I was bored, and you were getting all the attention. I wasn’t planning on keeping him.”
“Well, thanks a fucking lot,” says Chad, opening the door fully, in only trousers and socks, dressing himself as he storms off.
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” shouts Becky.
We all stand there in the hallway, nervously awaiting instructions from our hosts.
“What are the straps for?” asks Claire.
“Not here, Claire. Not today.” Becky grabs her husband’s arm, whispers sweet nothings in his ear, acting more like his sweet wife than the bridezilla she’d been a few minutes ago.
“But is it any good?” she asks Jen.
“I couldn’t possibly say,” she replies, glancing nervously at her brother. Hank and Ted walk away and Claire and I hold back, desperate to know. “Fucking incredible, and that parachute, ingenious.”
I am starting to see why Chad is so very popular amongst the ladies of this group.
Chapter Twenty-One
Caitlyn
By the time we get downstairs Becky has calmed down and is happily chatting away to friends and family. The Happy couple are invited onto the dance-floor to open the ball, then the ushers and bridesmaids join them. Holly doesn’t make an appearance. She’ll be persona non grata tonight, anyway, knowing Becky.
It’s lovely, just waltzing around on a warm summer’s night. Hank’s dance lessons with his grandma paid off. One arm tightly wound around my waist the other holding my hand in the air, he whisks me around that dance floor like the slightly less dirty bits in dirty Dancing.
“You know, you look so beautiful in that dress, it’s going to be almost a shame to rip it off you later.”
“Me? Look at you. Damn, Enrico Baresi, that bowtie is doing things to me you couldn’t even imagine.” I play with his curls, it’s my favorite move, just before I pull his head down to mine and kiss him.
Except of course we can’t. Because I am a secret. I shouldn’t even be here, on the dance floor. Becky might have made an exception, inviting me to spend the evening, but for all intents and purposes I am just a friend. And Hank’s employee.
The Baresi parents’ eyes bore into the back of my head; Nonna is surely scowling and remembering past loves. If she had to suffer then so do we all, apparently, even if we aren’t in 1950 anymore.
Hanks’ arm slides tighter around my waist, pulling me to him. His semi-hard cock pushes against my body. I gasp for breath, pushing away the desire to rub against him, but he spins me around and does it himself.
“You’re such a tease, Baresi,” I say. “You’re going to get us in trouble.”
“Do you like it when I’m bad, do I need to be punished?” he whispers in my ear, before letting out a frustrated moan. “You weren’t complaining earlier on.”
I sure hadn’t been. If he hadn’t made it all about me earlier, he might not be such a horny devil right now. He’s thirsty as hell. “Stop it.”
“But I love you,” he says, whirling me around once again.
“What?” I throw my head back, stare into his eyes. Did I just hear him right?
He puts his forehead on mine. “I said I love you because I do. You get me. You get my friends, even when they’re thoroughly misbehaving. Even my
sister refers to you as the sister I never had, and she’s already got several sisters-in-law.”
“I…” I don’t quite know what to say.
“I don’t have a lot of experience in this kind of thing, but aren’t you supposed to reciprocate or something, or have I got this whole thing wrong?”
“No.” I laugh and stretch up towards him, on my highest tippy-toes. “I love you, Enrico Baresi. I’ve loved you since you lay down next to me and showed me the stars.”
“You have?” The delight in his face is reward enough for allowing myself to open up to him a little. I’ve not been entirely truthful, and we are going to have to talk about things, eventually, but here, now, tonight the man who holds my heart has proclaimed his love for me. This is not the time or place for bringing down the mood.
“Of course. You just needed more time to work it out in your head.”
Our lips meet. Everyone around us evaporates, just Hank and I melding together. I melt into him as if the warmth of his body thaws my ice-cold heart.
How ridiculous it seems now, as I dance with the man who loves me, that I had sworn to never fall in love again. Laughable. No bad boys, no relationships that wouldn’t ever work and yet on the very day I’d caught the plane I’d met someone who would become both everything I want and simultaneously, in so many ways, epitomize everything I hoped to avoid. Yet love prevailed.
The most precious of moments, our first ‘I love you’ should be magical and yet as we dance and kiss on the most romantic of occasions, a thundering smash brings us out of our reverie.
Everybody turns to look.
Guillermo Baresi crashes his fist on the table a second time, sending several glasses hurtling to their deaths. Mama tries as best she can to mop it up with serviettes, but he lifts a hand and she backs away. The waiters will do it. Those who serve. People like me.
The scowl on his face is monumental. That of an angry, bitter man.
His children do not kiss their employees in front of hundreds of his friends and neighbors. His children do not bring shame upon the family name. But here he is, throwing a childish tantrum in front of the world and that’s okay because he’s the boss.
The fact that everybody else’s grown children are sleeping with each other, sniffing coke in the bathroom and selling their lives on reality TV is neither here nor there.
There are rules, and we have broken them. Somebody will have to pay.
Hank looks over at his father, then back at me. What are we going with right now? Defiance? Regret? I’m ready to follow whatever lead Hank wants to take. He takes my face in his hands, looks deep into my soul and plants the most sensual, overtly passionate kiss on my lips.
Defiance it is then.
“Basta!” Out of the corner of my eye, I spot Guillermo Baresi barreling towards us, arms flailing. I pull away from Hank. He looks up, swipes his arm around me, pushing me behind him. Instinctively protecting me.
“Papa, you’re embarrassing yourself,” he says, looking down at his angry, red-faced father. I grab Hank’s hand and he holds me so tightly, his thumb rubbing my palm, reassuring me. My heart is beating out of my chest, and everybody is staring at us. I hate it, I hate being so visible and I’m starting to regret ever coming. I could have changed the outcome of this, with one little conversation. I could have made this all better, but I didn’t. What have I done?
Guillermo replies in Italian and Hank ripostes with a gesture that I know to be offensive. It gets heated, both of them shouting at each other in Italian, arms waving, voices raised. “We should just leave,” I say, but nobody hears me.
Becky, however, is never ignored. Neither are her parents. Forces of nature to equal any warring Italian families, they make short sharp shrift of the incident, calling security to accompany both Hank and his father out of the ballroom. His hand is ripped from mine as two hefty men in black suits suggest, rather forcefully, that they take this outside.
Hank’s mother is waiting outside in the car. She doesn’t utter a word to us, insisting to her husband that they leave immediately. Dust flies into the air as they speed away and we stand on the gravel driveway, rather lost after such a heated moment. Both bursting with adrenaline and no way to bring us down.
“I have something I need to tell you,” I say to Hank.
“Not right now. I need to think.” He turns to me. “You were right, cutting off meant cutting off my family too.” Wealth, families, it just brings people pain. I hate it, I hate it so much.
“Please, I really want to talk about this.” He doesn’t listen he grabs my hand and heads for the car.
“I’ll drive,” I say. “You’ve had a couple of drinks. I’ll come back and get our stuff tomorrow.” I reach into my purse, grab my keys. Everything will be better tomorrow. Our minds will be clearer, we’ll be able to talk.
They say your memory deliberately takes away the details of an accident. You don’t remember because the trauma is so extreme. But as I lie there, every second of that truck hitting my car is etched into my mind. The crunch of metal on metal, the sensation of flying. The thought that flashes through your mind as your car careens into another and then another, ‘people don’t get out of this type of accident alive’.
There is shouting. But it isn’t me. The glass in my driver’s side window is gone. I can see people rushing around, other cars have stopped. It doesn’t hurt. I just can’t seem to move. People are talking, calling emergency services.
“She came out of nowhere,” says a man. Is he the truck driver?
Me, was it me? Had I come out of nowhere? I’d gotten confused, trying to find the house. I’d been there a few times, admittedly, but I still wasn’t used to America, to driving on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car. Is it my fault?
“Are you okay?” a woman is talking to me. I look at the woman. Am I awake? A burning smell irritates my nose.
There are sirens. Someone is still shouting. Be quiet. Am I in trouble, has somebody called the police? I might have been driving on the wrong side of the road.
“Ma’am you’ve been in an accident can you tell me your name?”
Is he going to arrest me? I don’t want to go to prison.
“Caitlyn Walsh, her name is Caitlyn Walsh.” Hank. I look down, he’s holding my hand. It’s all bloody. He’s hurt. I look at his face. No, he’s fine.
People are shouting behind the police officer. Are they angry, am I in trouble?
Hank is here, he will tell them not to arrest me. I close my eyes. I can rest now that Hank is here to save the day.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Hank
Bashed-up cars litter the street. An impromptu junkyard. The sound of steel cutting through steel makes my teeth hurt. They are trying to get Caitlyn out. My face hurts from the airbag, but I don’t even care.
A cop pulled me from the car, sat me here. “The firefighters are going to cut her out. Don’t move.” He leaves me here on the street. I don’t want to, I won’t leave here until I know she’s okay. This is my fault; all of it, making her drive, forcing her to stay at the party tonight when she wanted to go home earlier. My family, my problem. She should never have to have been involved. I wanted to show the world that I was in love, show off my beautiful girlfriend, but instead I led her into the crocodile’s mouth.
“Caitlyn.” I try to stand, but it’s like wading through water. My whole body is shaking; my legs give way once again.
“Sir, you need to sit down, you can’t help her. Do you have someone you can call?” I look down at my phone. Who? My family? No way. This is his doing.
I call Ted. “Tell them to take her to Gacilly,” he says. “They have the best ER.” I tell him to stay at the party, I’ll keep in touch.
They slowly lift her out onto a stretcher, and the cop allows me over. I just want to pick her up and take her away from all of this, make it better. That’s my job.
“Are you her next of kin?” asks the paramedic.
“Yes
.” And she is mine.
I walk alongside them as they speed towards the ambulance. “She was very lucky. The car took the brunt of the hit. There are no visible broken bones. Several cuts and bruises. My colleagues at the hospital will check for internal injuries, and we’ll need to do an MRI.”
We get in the ambulance and they wheel her in. Mask over her mouth, connected up to machines, an IV in her hand, she doesn’t look lucky. My heart is as broken as the woman before me. How could this have happened?
Her hand clenches mine. “Caitlyn.” She opens her eyes, tries to get up. “No, no, you need to lie down. We’re going to the hospital, honey; they’re going to make you better.” Her heartbeat increases, her eyes widen in fear.
The paramedic pushes me aside. “Caitlyn, you need to breathe.” He takes deep breaths. “That’s it, deep breaths.” The beeping slowed. He moves away; lets me back in. “Positive affirmations. Deep breaths, huh?”
I nod. “I love you so much.” I close my eyes. Baresis don’t cry. Might as well be a family mantra. We get up, we get on with it. Hammered into my brain since forever. I choke the tears down. I can cry later. Positive affirmations. “I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Caitlyn
“Cait.” Hank’s voice is muffled. “Jen, call the nurse she’s waking up. Cait, can you hear me?”
I open my eyes. Hank is looming over me, my hand in his. A sense of calm fills me, whether it’s him or a certain quantity of morphine I’m not sure. Nevertheless, I’m good.
We’re in the hospital. That particular mix of pine and chemicals.
“You okay?” It comes out rough, like I’ve swallowed sandpaper. I rub my throat and he hands me a glass of water, helping me lean forward to drink it.
“No. But don’t worry about that, or anything else. Let’s just worry about you.”
He has reason to worry. My body feels like one huge bruise. I lift my hand to my head. “Don’t touch it,” says Jen from behind him. “Stitches.”
The Billionaire & the Princess Page 14
