I looked at him incredulously. “Seriously? What do you think that I’m hiding?”
He at least had the decency to look apologetic. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. Of course you aren’t hiding anything. I just meant you don’t think there’s anything he could twist or manipulate and make it look bad for you?”
“No,” I said. “That’s part of why it makes me so angry. Who does this guy think he is that he can treat me the way he did during our relationship, convinced he was the best thing that has ever happened to me and would ever happen to me, and then do what he did. And then, as his grand finale of our saga, he’s going to try to get me to funnel more money to him because he managed to lose every cent he stole from me.”
Nick nodded like he totally understood where I was coming from and I was glad for that. I didn’t want to try to explain the emotions coursing through me right then. It was entirely possible there would be no way I could explain it. There weren’t words I could think of that properly embodied the miserable blend of emotions and thoughts twisting around in my head.
Some of it I could probably blame on pregnancy hormones. Most of it was completely Justin’s fault. Nick reached out and brushed a lock of hair away from my face, looking into my eyes.
‘I’m glad, really, that there’s nothing he can do to hurt you. But please. Please don’t do something like that without me again.”
My breath caught in my throat and my heart fluttered in my chest at the look in his eyes.
36
Nick
This wasn’t how I was expecting the conversation to go. I hadn’t planned on getting to a place like this when she said she was coming over. In my mind, all I was supposed to do was be there for her. She was going to come over and tell me how things had gone with her meeting with Justin, and I was going to help her decide what we were going to do next. Hopefully, that would include taking the recording of the conversation when he admitted he stole the money from her and using it to press charges.
That was what I envisioned. Maybe we would spend the evening cuddled up on the couch watching a dumb old movie together to get all the negative things out of our minds. And yet somehow, we’d ended up here. It felt like we had reached a point of no return. I couldn’t just ignore what I was feeling, or what I wanted her to know.
It was already out there. I had already said enough that I was giving too much away. There was no such thing as holding back my emotions now. I couldn’t just pretend I hadn’t asked her not to meet with her ex without me. Especially because I knew it wasn’t just that. I wasn’t just asking her not to see Justin, or not to discuss her finances. I was asking her to include me in the major moments of her life.
It was opening myself up, and that made me vulnerable. But in that moment as I looked at her, thinking about what she had just been through completely by herself, I didn’t care. I spent all day equal parts scared and angry. That meant something. That wasn’t something I was just going to feel for client. Or even a friend. Having to go through that kind of reaction to knowing she was seeing him again, particularly after I’d encountered him for myself, made me face reality.
Bryn was sitting in front of me, talking about the meeting with Justin like it hadn’t been such a big deal. She was angry. That was obvious. And she admitted it was uncomfortable to see him and she was happy there were other people around. But there wasn’t anything in her voice or the way she was acting that indicated she understood she had possibly put herself in danger. Or she didn’t care.
I couldn’t deal with that. Not that I wanted her to be terrified or let Justin have any more control over her life. That wasn’t the point. If anything, I wanted her to erase him from her thoughts and move forward in a life where she could feel like he never even existed.
The point was if she could sit here like she hadn’t possibly endangered herself and our child, she might do it again. She might face another situation like this, and not even hesitate to just dive into it headlong without a second thought. I didn’t want to have to worry about that. She didn’t have to deal with things alone anymore, and I didn’t want her to think for a second that she did.
So, here I was. All cards on the table.
“I’m falling in love with you,” I said. “I spent all day dealing with the idea that he could have hurt you, and there would be nothing I could have done about it. And I’m not okay with that.”
There it was. Everything completely out in the open, no hesitation and no ambiguity. I said what was in my heart and what needed to be said. Something I probably should have said long before right now. There was nothing left to do but wait and watch her to see what she would say. In all honesty, that was far more intimidating than even letting the words out of my mouth.
I had no idea how Bryn was going to react. I didn’t know what was going through her mind or what she was feeling. It could have really gone either way, and that sank in more and more as the seconds ticked by. My mind went through a thousand different ways this could turn out. I thought about what she might think, what she might say, what she might do.
It felt like it was taking forever, but it was probably only a few seconds before she reacted. Her mouth still slightly open, she pulled back from me. Turning to look down at the food in front of her for a second like she was trying to figure out what to say, she pressed her hands to the table and stood up.
“I don’t understand.”
The words came out of her mouth like a breath. She didn’t say anything else. I sat there at the table, trying to process what happened as she walked out the door. It closed behind her, and reality hit.
Well, I didn’t count on that reaction. In all the different versions that came to mind, that wasn’t one of them. Just like she said about her conversation with Justin where she could never have come up with the idea that he would try to blackmail her, I never would have imagined her just getting up and walking away.
But her words really stuck with me. I don’t understand. That was all she said. I don’t understand.
And now, I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what she could have meant by that. I’d spoken as clearly as I could and thought there was no ambiguity, absolutely nothing wishy-washy about what I said. Yet, it seemed to baffle her, to confuse her so much she wasn’t even able to come up with a response.
I stared at the door for several seconds after Bryn left. I briefly considered following her, but I stopped myself. I wasn’t going to do that. Chasing her wasn’t the right choice at this point. What romantic comedies and sweeps week stunts on sitcoms would lead us to believe aside, chasing after a woman when she has walked out of a room didn’t seem like a good idea.
If Bryn wanted to talk to me about what I said, or respond in kind, she would have done it right then. There would be no need for a confusing exit. Which meant there was something else behind the sudden departure. I needed to respect whatever thoughts were going through her mind and her obvious need for space. I would just have to let her come back to me.
Which she didn’t. Two hours after she left, I was still waiting for Bryn to come back. Half an hour after that, I thought I heard somebody in front of the house, so I anticipated her knock on the door. It didn’t come. I didn’t have anybody to cuddle on the couch with, but I figured that didn’t have to mean I had to completely forgo my plan for watching cheesy old movies. If nothing else, it kept me at a good vantage point to open the door when she got back.
I woke up to various cramps on the couch, my neck hurting, and the sun starting to come up. Bryn wasn’t there. There was no message on my phone from her. No missed calls. No email. Not only had Bryn not come back to my house after leaving, she had made no effort to reach out to me at all.
Unfolding myself from the uncomfortable position, I went to my bedroom and fell back to sleep. By the time my alarm went off later in the morning to wake me up from work, I was considerably cranky. If I had tried to come up with a worst-case scenario for what would happen after I told Bryn I loved her,
it still probably wouldn’t have ranked up with this.
There were definitely ways it could have been worse, but I tried not to be a doom-and-gloom type of guy. Granted, Bryn was starting to stretch the boundaries of what that meant for me.
This was ridiculous. Even if she didn’t feel the same way about me, at least she could have had the decency just say something. She could have taken a few minutes to gather her thoughts, figure out how she would broach the issue, then come back to talk to me like an adult. I figured at this point, I deserved at least that much. Not just because of our professional arrangement, and not just because I thought we were on our way to forming at the very minimum a friendship.
I deserved for her to be up-front and honest with me because we were going to be parenting a child together. She might be putting that out of her mind in favor of only thinking about herself right now. But the reality was we were linked for the rest of our lives. That baby coming needed both of us and I didn’t want to think we had a lifetime of awkward exchanges and tense custody agreements ahead of us.
At least, that’s what I was coaching myself to focus on. If I let myself think any more about how I really felt, it might push me over the edge. Every word I’d said to Bryn the night before was true. I was falling in love with her. Completely, irreparably, indescribably in love with her.
There was absolutely nothing I could do about my feelings. Now that they were out in the world, both of us knew about them and there was no going back. Her reaction hurt. It also infuriated me. From the moment I got to work that morning and throughout three cups of coffee and trying to focus on the work in front of me, I grumbled and swore under my breath. I was ready to give her a piece of my mind.
37
Bryn
I barely even processed that I’d just walked out of Nick’s house until I was most of the way home. My brain was going in so many directions, I was on complete autopilot when I got in the car and started driving. He shocked me with his declaration. It was the last thing I expected to hear come out of his mouth that night.
He was protective of me, sure. That was to be expected. We were friends, at the very minimum. And the attraction and chemistry between us was undeniable. But that didn’t mean I would have ever expected him to open up like that to me. Especially not after the day I’d had and talking to him about my meeting with Justin.
That whole encounter had thrown me off so much. When I left the park, I was rattled and emotionally exhausted. It was a difficult thing to understand, and impossible to describe, but somehow, he seemed to know what I was feeling. Or at least be able to emphasize with me. It was comforting and reassuring just being there in the house with him.
That was all I thought it was going to be. I knew he wanted to see that I was doing alright and that I got through the meeting safely. He wanted to hear what we talked about and know what was really going on. Like I said, he was protective of me. He wanted me to be safe, both physically and emotionally. He was also protective of our baby and worried about how Justin would react if he found out.
None of that added up to me expecting him to tell me he loved me.
After leaving his house, I spent the rest of the evening thinking through our interactions. From the very first moment I’d walked into his office all the way through until I walked away from him. I tried to tumble it all through my mind again and again, picking out every little detail. I went over every conversation I could remember, everything he’d said to me.
No matter her how many times I went over it, and how much I remembered, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. When could he possibly have fallen in love with me? At what point in the tangled, dramatic few weeks we spent together did Nick realize his feelings for me were changing and they were becoming something like love?
Even more importantly, why would he want to?
His success bore repeating. possibly several times over. After all, Nick was a millionaire. Possibly even a billionaire. He didn’t need to work. Everybody in Charlotte knew that. But he did anyway. He spent his days working because he was driven to. It showed his integrity and his character. He wasn’t just going to sit around and do nothing because he had all the money he would ever need.
He wanted to do something meaningful. He saw more in investing than just people trying to generate wealth. To him, what he did helped people to achieve their dreams. It created the types of lives they wanted to live, enabling them to build families and leave legacies.
Nick Freeman was nothing short of amazing. And then there was me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of a reason why he would fall in love with a freelance website coder whose track record only showed a truly terrible taste in men.
I woke up with the same thoughts and questions running through my head. Lying on my back and staring up at the ceiling for a while, I waited to see if my mind had come up with any sorts of brilliant insights while I was sleeping. That was something I’d read about one time, that dreams were just your brain’s way of distracting and entertaining you while it dealt with more important things.
I didn’t know how much of that I really believed, but it made sense at least to an extent. If my brain wasn’t having to focus on all those things it had to do all day while I was awake, it had the opportunity to really focus on major things.
It was somewhere in the middle of my second hour of drifting in and out of sleep and avoiding really tapping into my feelings by waxing poetic and philosophical about my brain that I forced myself to face reality. Not just that my stomach was rumbling with hunger and I needed to get up to eat. Or that there was work ahead of me for the day.
As I forced myself up out of bed and went into the kitchen for a cup of decaf coffee, I had to come to terms with the truth that I had definitely reacted to Nick and his revelation in a bad way. Not even just in an ambiguous way. An actually actively bad way.
Part of me was tempted to pick up my phone and call him, but I stopped myself. That wasn’t enough. This was another one of those situations when my mother’s voice showed up in the back of my mind, and I knew she was absolutely correct. If she were here, she would tell me this was a face-to-face situation. Sometimes in life, phone calls just won’t do. Breakups, invitations to special events, bad news, and apparently apologizing for walking out on a man telling me he loved me.
All situations that warranted going to the effort of actually talking to him.
Getting down the coffee, I let out a sigh and went to the bathroom for a shower. Much like my deep thought session in bed that morning, the shower was one of those points in the day when I could do a lot of procrastinating. It was the perfect opportunity to keep avoiding the uncomfortable and potentially disastrous conversation ahead of me.
Just because Nick told me he loved me the day before didn’t mean he was still in a warm-and-fuzzy mood. I knew I wouldn’t be. If I had been the one who had opened up to him the way he opened up to me and he had just gotten up and walked out of the house, I would be furious. That was no reason to believe he wouldn’t feel the same way.
To stop myself from whittling away the rest of the afternoon in the shower, I made the water just too cold so I would get out fast. I got dressed, made myself presentable, and left. My original plan was to head directly to Nick’s office. Then I remembered what Minnie told me about raising her sons.
A brief detour brought me first to the florist to pick up some flowers for Nick, then to my favorite donut shop. That part might have partially been because I was starving.
One of the two bakers who co-owned the shop was behind the display case when I walked in. He stood up, wiping glaze off his fingertips on to a bar towel hanging from his belt loop. He grinned at me.
“Hey, Bryn,” he said. “Need a little afternoon pick-me-up?”
“Yes, but I’m actually going to be getting a box. Probably a dozen,” I said.
“Pregnancy working you hard, isn’t it?” he asked.
“If only that was all I was trying to deal with right now,�
� I said.
“Well, I just finished up a couple of new batches and stocked the display case. What sounds good to you today? I’ve been working on a few new flavors and just introduced a couple of seasonal options,” he said.
I walked up to the glass display case and leaned over to look at the meticulously arranged rows of pastries. From shimmery pink icing covered with multicolored sprinkles to decadent Boston cream just starting to ooze out of the back of heavily ganache-covered rounds, they all looked delicious.
“Do you have something that says, ‘I’m sorry I rebuked your declaration of love’?” I asked.
Anthony tilted his head to the side and looked up for a few seconds. “Fresh strawberry with cream filling?”
“Okay. How about ‘I think I might feel the same’?”
“Death by chocolate all the way,” he said. “And let’s just throw in a few more flavors to cover any of the other emotions that could come up in that conversation.”
A few minutes later, I parked near the investment firm. Clutching the box of assorted filled and ring donuts in one hand, and the bouquet of daisies in the other, I took a deep breath and walked up to the office.
I didn’t even get the chance to prepare myself or come up with what I was going to say as I walked down the hall to Nick’s office. As I approached the last door to the building, I saw that both he and Peter were standing in the lobby. They looked up at me, and Nick’s eyes went wide.
Bracing myself for however he was going to react to me showing up, I opened the door and walked inside.
38
Nick
Bryn was just full of reactions I wasn’t expecting. After spending the better part of the workday fuming over the way she’d acted the night before and the fact that I hadn’t heard from her, there she was. I would have been pleasantly surprised just to get a phone call from her. At least it would have been a step. This was more than a step. This was a full-blown gesture.
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