That Was Then: A Second Chance Romance (Fated Loves Book 2)

by Zee Irwin

  No matter her decision, something in her eyes made me want to hug her in the worst way and fuck the coward in me. This time my arms reached for her and pulled her close. She might have been stiff at first, but then there it was—the moment she melted into me, giving in to me, her arms tightening around me. We locked in a hug with no words, only shadows of the past, and I relished in it until she stiffened and pushed away, taking a few steps back, shoving her hands into her back pockets. Leaving me empty.

  Maybe I needed to concede. Remind myself that I was only there to get closure, tell myself a do-over was only a dream, admit there was nothing left to salvage. Maybe she won.

  Professional, right? I hoped my pulse would stop quickening when looking at her, because I was about to see her daily at work with no way to avoid her. And eating at the edges of my thoughts about her were images of anything but professional.

  “Yes. Okay. See you Monday.” Her nod told me we had reached a mutual understanding.

  It felt good to lay it all on the table.

  We closed the door to the past.

  We moved on.

  Or not.

  For me, the window cracked a little when the door shut, but it would not be enough. I wanted to crash a baseball through the glass, letting in all the air and light so she’d see what existed between us before still beat as steady and strong. I wanted her to climb through the window and land right into my patiently waiting arms.

  15

  The Box

  Cassidy

  I rented the smallest bedroom from Maddie, but it had the largest closet, almost a walk-in by apartment standards. Inside, I could close the door and reach my arms in three directions for anything hanging. I paid Maddie a little extra each month for it, but it was totally worth it. Thanks to organizers from the Closet Store, this space held all the stuff from my life, including the Madden Girl shoebox containing the remaining memories of my former life with Bronson. I knew where it lived, on the top shelf, in the back, under a bunch of other stuff, conveniently hidden from my view yet gnawing at my subconscious day after day. Anyone else wouldn’t see it there.

  I had ignored the box for years. But after Bronson apologized for the past, I couldn’t stop thinking about its contents.

  Taking it down proved a chore requiring a step stool and shifting around a quilt my mother made me, a set of hot rollers, three handbags, and a pair of boots, but I managed. Until my feet slipped off the stool.

  “Ouch!” Ten things landed on top of me, but I still held my tight grip on the dang shoebox. Which meant my hands didn’t protect my landing on the floor. Good to know my priorities.

  Maddie came charging into my room. “Are you okay?” She helped me up, pulling at my elbows. And I still hung onto the box like my life would end without it.

  Not until I saw Maddie’s red eyes had I realized she’d been crying. “No, I’m most definitely not all right. And back at you. Are you okay?”

  She nodded yes. “No.” She sank to the floor and started sobbing.

  I joined her there, finally releasing my grip on the past and placing the box to the side. I hated seeing her crying, and gathered my arms around her. As the waves of sobs stopped shaking her shoulders and she recovered, I prodded her to tell me everything.

  “My grandmother has pneumonia. I visited her in the nursing home two days ago for Christmas, and she was wheezing. The nurses assured me she was on medicine and would be fine, so I drove back here. But now her doctor called and told me she was critical.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry for the news.” I grabbed tissues from my nightstand and slunk back on the floor next to her.

  “I can’t stop thinking about her. Now I don’t know if I should drive back to be with her or not. Daniel has been the sweetest, offering to drive me to New York City, to pay for a hotel, whatever I need. The man is so good to me.”

  I met her boyfriend, Daniel, a few times, an older and sexy as hell lawyer who sort of took Maddie under his wing and fell in love with her. If it wasn’t for him, Maddie might not have landed this amazing apartment, and we might not have become roommates, then friends. I thank him every time I see him.

  “Well, you know what I think. You are very lucky to have landed such a hottie who adores you and would do anything for you.” I could tell right away, the first time I saw him and Maddie together, how much chemistry existed between them. Hotter than an explosion in a science lab. But man, he took his sweet time committing. Once he did, they were almost inseparable.

  “He would, and I love him for it.” She smiled through the tears. “I can’t help thinking the worst, though. Without my Grandma, if something happened to her, I would be all alone, Cass.”

  “No sweetie, you wouldn’t. You have Daniel, Lily, and me. We aren’t going anywhere. We will always be here for you. Best of friends.” We hugged again. “I hope you know once someone enters my life, it’s hard for me to let them go. You’re never getting rid of me.”

  “Oh, well, maybe the same holds true for Bronson?”

  I pulled away. “I’m not so sure.”

  “Anyway, I’m going to call the doctor again in a while and find out how Grandma’s doing before I make a decision about driving back.” Maddie nodded at my shoebox. “Okay. Now you. What’s in the box?”

  I brought it over between my legs. “It’s stupid. A bunch of memories of Bronson. I don’t even know why I kept this stuff all this time.”

  “I know why. He was a significant part of your life for a while. So you held onto some things. It’s understandable. But why are you breaking this out now?”

  I had questioned why, after all this time. The contents inside could put an already delicate situation with Bronson into another realm. But something about his coming clean to his father, and apologizing to me, made me long for a cleansing, too.

  “I guess I’m a sentimental person and have a hard time getting rid of anything.”

  “You want me to go through this stuff with you or leave you alone?”

  “Stay. In a minute, I might need emotional support.”

  I rolled my neck, cracked my knuckles, and took a deep breath, then plunged in. The lid came off. Turning it in my hands, my unmistakable handwriting with the extra flourishes appeared, my hearts on the i’s, swirly crosses on the t’s, and flowers drawn all over. I wrote Mrs. Bronson Maxwell fifty different ways in at least six colors. I must have had more time on my hands back then, because this amount of artistic scribbling didn’t happen on a whim.

  “This is Bronson, from the night I got the Slugger tattoo. We look so—”

  “In love?” She supplied.

  It kind of shocked me, seeing it immortalized in a snapshot after all this time.

  Maddie took it and gave it a thorough exam. “Aw. You two made a gorgeous couple. And with Slugger permanently etched on your body, you might as well be with him.”

  I nabbed the photo out of her hands and put it behind me. “That’s not helping. And if you can’t behave, then you can go,” I warned.

  Maddie laughed, and I reached in for the next item. His brown cashmere scarf. My hands adored the fabric, soft and aging with time. I brought it to my nose and inhaled the smell of him, still present even now, his cologne a faint scent but filled with vivid scenes of Bronson wearing it the entire winter we were together.

  I passed it to Maddie, and she smelled it. “Mm. Bronson smells scrumptious.” She took the scarf and wrapped it around my neck. I didn’t flinch. My cheeks didn’t flush with the cashmere brushing against them, and the hairs on my arms didn’t stand at attention from the zing zapping through my body. It didn’t make me miss him at all. And I was totally lying to myself.

  Moving on, because if Maddie weren’t here with me, I’d crawl into a little ball on my bed with the scarf wrapped around my neck and breathe in his essence all night.

  She set aside the BU baseball cap and the signed baseball. She didn’t touch his old toothbrush, but raised her eyebrows at it. Under the scarf, laid a bag
of movie tickets and concert tickets and brochures to all the dates he took me on. I will concede he took me to quite a few. Bronson Maxwell worked hard to treat me well back then.

  “Wow, the man enjoyed taking you out, and from the look at the prices on these stubs, he enjoyed spending money on you.” Her eyes bugged out. “Three thousand dollars for a pair of front row seats at a Metallica concert with backstage passes?”

  I shook my head. “He bid and won it from a charity auction. All wonderful memories for sure, but my favorite was simply hanging out with him, especially at my parents’ place. Being with him meant everything.” I would not cry. Oh, shoot. I already sensed the wetness overtaking my eyeballs.

  Maddie reached in the box, pulling out the next batch of items I kept.

  “This was his prized collection of rare baseball cards. He was nuts about this collection. Wouldn’t let anyone touch them and spent money on autographed cards, protected behind clear covers and only handled with white gloves. With the Maxwells’ money, he could buy rare cards, and he also had a connection with someone who would find the rarest cards on the market for him.”

  I watched her handling them, but I couldn’t touch the cards while she inspected each one. “Oh. My. God. A Mickey Mantle? Willie Mays? Girl, you could have sold these cards ages ago and made a fortune. You could sell them today.” She took out her phone and Googled the value of a Satchel Paige rookie card, and I swear her face turned white.

  “These are worth a small fortune.”

  “I know. Bronson was so obsessed with these cards, and if it was possible to be jealous of them, then yeah, I was sometimes.”

  Maddie finally reached the bottom of the box, to my personal rock bottom of guilt lying in wait. “What is this?” She dumped all the pieces onto the floor. Like a puzzle, Maddie fit the pieces together, as if magically creating a ticket that would undo the past five years and send me on a ride back in time with Bronson again.

  “A Babe Ruth card—and torn to shreds? Did you rip up a Babe Ruth? Cass! Collectors would kill you, and even Babe Ruth would turn over in the grave seeing this.”

  “A 1933 Babe Ruth worth half a million dollars? You think I’d do a thing like that? No, it wasn’t me. It was some maniacal girl the night Bronson broke up with her who took all her vengeance against him out on this card.” Yes, I tore it up. Not in half and in half again, but tiny little pieces. Maybe the exact number of pieces of my heart he left on the floor.

  “I figured he’d find out, and he’d look through his collection one day, noticing these were missing. He’d put two and two together and come after me for the cards. Then I would lash out at him and tell him everything I should have said the day he left me. I was so stunned the day Bronson had broken up with me, I threw a pillow at him and didn’t know what to say. So instead, I said it to Babe Ruth’s face as I tore it to shreds.”

  “Oh, Cass, I’m sorry you went through that pain.” She reached for the last puzzle piece and found the place for it, looking confused. “There’s one piece missing in the bottom right-hand corner.”

  We searched for the box. We got up, brushed off our clothes, and scoured the floor. Not another piece in sight. “I must have thrown it out or vacuumed it up back then.”

  Maddie ran to the kitchen and returned with tape and a piece of paper. She transferred the puzzle pieces to the paper and made the card look whole again, except for the missing corner. I knew it bugged the heck out of her logical, symmetrical mind with one piece long gone.

  “Well, I guess when I show this to Bronson, he might blow a gasket.”

  “What? Cass, I’d think twice, if I were you. This could totally upset the balance of your fate with him. Who knows what he’ll do when he sees what you did to this card.”

  Forget our fate. There was Karma to consider, and I was a firm believer in that bitch. “No, I’m showing him. I’ve carried around this guilt about it all these years. Now Bronson and I are on good terms, and since he apologized to me, I need to come clean about this.”

  I made my mind up. And nothing Maddie said for the rest of the night could change it.

  Sleeping all night with his fragrant, velvety scarf still wrapped around my body, I swear the ghosts of Fate and Karma both visited me in my dream. I woke up, still unconvinced by Fate’s involvement, but I did not need Karma haunting me.

  16

  The Mess of Matilda

  Bronson

  Cassidy plagued my mind when I cut myself shaving, when I overfilled my coffee mug, and when I stopped at a green light and endured the jack-offs with horns honking behind me. And Matilda was the furthest thing from my thoughts when I walked into my new makeshift office in the marketing department’s boardroom.

  The sight of the vice president of marketing sitting on my chair with her back to the door and her feet up on my credenza irritated me. Shit. Through Christmas and making up with Cassidy, I forgot about the hot mess of Matilda.

  “Ahem. Can I help you?”

  She turned around, smiling and holding my Boston U baseball MVP of the Year award. “Welcome home, Slugger.”

  “Don’t fucking call me that.” As if not irritating enough to contend with first thing this morning, she used a nickname Cassidy claimed long ago, and I had allowed no one else to use it since.

  She crossed the room to me, running a hand down her smooth black mane of hair then traced the length of her torso and curves, smoothing her black dress. “Someone’s in a mood.”

  I avoided her advances when she came too close. “Let’s keep things professional.”

  I had no intentions of starting things up with her again. There had been a time when Matilda was useful, coming off my frustration from breaking up with Cassidy and moving across the ocean to London. When I began work at Chick In Bun International, the advances of the older woman had been flattering and exactly what I needed, a good distraction, avoiding all thoughts of breaking up with Cassidy. When Matilda got the promotion to VP of U.S. Marketing and left London, I moved on. Period.

  “I thought I made it clear this was over long ago,” I grumbled at her, but she still took up space in front of me. I also couldn’t forget the week-long corporate retreat for the executives in New York City two years ago and the shenanigans she pulled, all attempts at getting me in bed with her. Had I known she would become an obsessive witch over the years, I would have warned my younger self against her. She was an attractive woman, in a high-maintenance, fatal attraction sort of way. But she didn’t do it for me.

  I set my things on the desk and started taking items out of the storage boxes. I had my stuff from London delivered here to the marketing department boardroom while my office on the top floor underwent renovations. The decision had nothing to do with Cassidy.

  “You can’t be serious? Admit it, we had fun fucking around when you first landed in London.”

  “That was then.”

  “But this is now. And here we are, together again.” She placed the MVP award on my desk, leaning over on purpose and showing her cleavage. I ignored the way she trailed a finger along the neckline of her exposed cleavage. The only neckline I wanted gaping at me was Cassidy’s, until then my eyes averted. “Don’t you think we can explore a more exclusive arrangement? You’re back in Boston now and I could be very good company”

  I huffed, moving the MVP award back into the box. “When I said we’re done, I meant it. Now, if you don’t mind, I think we both have work to do.”

  Taking out the binder of Tater Spud acquisition marketing ideas from my bag, I pointed. “I read through these, and none of them captured the essence I expected for the acquisition launch. Gather your team together this morning and start over. I want fresh ideas by the end of the day.”

  “You cannot be serious. We don’t have time. The launch is set for Valentine’s Day. The video team we hired is beginning production next week.”

  I bailed on the conversation, holding the door open for her. “Don’t waste time here then.”

  Stormi
ng out of my makeshift office, Matilda yelled at an intern who approached her for a signature on something. After she slammed her office door, I regretted the decision to locate my office down the hall from her. This was exactly the shit show I didn’t need on my first morning there. What I needed was a triple-shot espresso.

  Cassidy suddenly appeared by my side, two coffee cups in hand, both emblazoned with the Starbucks logo. “That must have been a fun conversation.” She handed me one cup.

  “What’s this?” I sipped. Ah, the unmistakable taste of strong espresso.

  She shrugged. “A peace offering. Welcome back.”

  I jolted, not from the triple shot entering my bloodstream but from a scream and a crash sounding from Matilda’s office. “What the . . .?'

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t go in there if I were you. Matilda’s wrath is something we all try avoiding around here. But hey, you do you, Bronson. Maybe you’ll have better luck with her than the rest of us.”

  More crashes came from Matilda’s office, and I made a mental note to speak with HR later about her. We didn’t need an executive here throwing a tantrum. How unprofessional and rude.

  Cassidy walked away, taking up residence at her desk directly in the line of sight from my makeshift boardroom office. Okay, so the decision to locate here may have some perks after all. If I could handle the wrath of Matilda, at least the sight of Cassidy would make it all worthwhile.

  The first morning of seeing the former love of my life sitting twenty feet away from me weakened my knees right along with my senses because out of fifty women on this floor, my nose picked out her vanilla citrus scent. I knew her perfume well since I was the one who bought her the first bottle of it. I chose it in particular because it embodied her. Vanilla for sweetness, and citrus for the sunshine she brought into people’s lives.