Marietta Hotels 2: An Engagement in Paris

by Rachell Nichole

  Mandy stared at her phone, willing the time to pass. All she had to do was sit here for another few minutes, and it would be too late. By three forty, no matter what she did, there would be no way for her to get from the café beside her favorite bookshop to the steps of the mairie in time.

  She’d sat in this exact chair for almost two hours after walking up and down the pews and aisles of the cathedral. Still her mind was devoid of a way out of this situation. She couldn’t leave her daughter. No matter what happened between her and Julien, she knew that much. But she couldn’t marry him either. Would he forgive her for deserting him?

  She doubted it. That was probably why she’d done it. She did to him just what his mom had done to his father. Left him, in a rather dramatic way. She could have said something sooner. She should have told him marriage was a bad idea, that she held this fear of that kind of constriction. Sure, there was divorce—most marriages didn’t last nowadays anyway—but she’d never been one to go back on her word. If she committed to him—wholly, fully giving herself over—there would be no going back. No out clause or filing for divorce because of something as ridiculous as “irreconcilable differences.”

  And what about everything else? The age difference, his knowing about Sophie before he proposed…It was all too much to surmount. Mandy shook her head. No. If she was completely honest with herself, those issues paled in comparison to the real problem. She’d hidden behind them to hide how damaged she really was. To shield the fact that she didn’t want forever. Not in the way marriage would trap her, at least.

  So she’d ruined any chance he might forgive her. Maybe that was for the best, and maybe she was giving him what he truly wanted—an out. Mandy shifted in the seat, the book she’d bought lying unopened beside her phone. She pushed the button, lighting up the screen. Three thirty-nine. She watched and waited.

  Why the hell did she have to be so emotionally incapacitated?

  Three forty. The immediate relief she’d expected didn’t rush through her. This was what she’d wanted. To be free. To not feel like she was being forced into marriage by her mother and the man she seemed to love too damned much.

  All she felt was empty.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “And Mademoiselle Lachlan?” the mayor’s assistant asked from the other side of the tall marble desk. Grecian columns to the left and right of her would have been beautiful on any other day. But today the grandeur of the mairie seemed to mock him. The large space of the building’s entrance echoed with the sounds of people going to and fro on official business. A door to his left opened, and a happy couple strolled out, holding hands and laughing in wedded bliss.

  Julien gave her a tight smile, praying Mandy was running late. He knew it was futile. If she wanted to marry him, she would be here already. Or she wouldn’t have run off in the first place. How could he have been so stupid?

  “Monsieur?” the woman prompted again when he gave no response.

  “Cinq minutes, s’il vous plait?” He knew five minutes wouldn’t make a difference, but he had to try anyway. He avoided his father’s gaze as best he could. Mandy’s mother and brother were silent. Layla was waiting at the hotel in case Mandy came back there. Her friends from university were out searching Paris. It was a large city, but they’d insisted on doing something. He couldn’t blame them. Feeling powerless was worse than running around in circles.

  He checked his watch again. Four minutes past their appointment time. The French were notorious for being late. Mandy had commented on it a number of times, insisting they leave early to go to friends’ houses, though he’d explained that was rude. Her need to be early had slowed some as she’d grown accustomed to living in Paris. But this was too important for her to be late.

  “How long are you going to wait before you admit it to yourself?” his father asked in hushed French. Julien turned toward his dad and moved farther away from the receptionist’s desk in an attempt for privacy. Tyler and Angela sat on a wooden bench a few feet away, both looking anxious.

  When Julien was closer, his father continued, “She is not coming. I am sorry, Julien. Truly I am. But there is no use waiting for someone who will not arrive.”

  He would wait for as long as it took. Come on, ma belle, don’t let me down. Instead of replying to his father, he walked over to the bench.

  “I’d like to give her a few more minutes. If all she said she needed was time, I want to give her that.”

  A clacking of high heels across the marble floors made his heart surge. Mandy. He whipped around, looking for his bride, but she wasn’t there. His father gave him such a look Julien wanted to shrink. To be anywhere but there. Pierre’s hard gray gaze made him shiver.

  “Let it go, Son,” he said.

  Julien shook his head, fighting the tightness in his chest, struggling for each breath. No. He couldn’t.

  “Monsieur?” the clerk asked.

  He pressed his lips into a line hard enough to hurt. “Non. She is not coming,” he whispered, barely able to voice his fears. He closed his eyes and turned back to the bench.

  There would be no wedding today.

  Not for him, at least. Why had he pushed her so hard? This wasn’t what he’d wanted. Yes, he needed her. More than he needed anything in the world except Sophie. But if she wouldn’t marry him, he would take her any way he could get her.

  The realization stunned him. He’d been so sure from the moment he saw her that he had to marry her. That he had to make her his. Forever. But now that didn’t seem as important. He wanted her for as long as he could have her. Marriage or no marriage.

  He took a moment to let that thought soak in, allowing it to calm him. He hoped he wasn’t too late to convince her he would be happy no matter what she wanted, as long as she would give them a chance.

  “Could you all watch over Sophie?” he asked Angela.

  “Of course, honey. I…I don’t know what to say. I raised her better than this.”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I knew she didn’t want this. She was doing it to make me happy, and now I’ve ruined everything. I’ll find her. Please call me if she contacts you first.”

  “Sure.” Angela’s brown eyes, so like Mandy’s, held such sadness Julien couldn’t stare into them any longer. He rushed from the old stone building and down the steps.

  He stopped when he saw Mandy running across the street at the light. She’d come. His belle was there.

  MANDY’S LUNGS BURNED with the exertion of running across the city at breakneck speed. And as soon as she was before Julien, she knew how badly she’d hurt him. He looked shell-shocked. His green eyes were wide, too much white showing. His mouth opened in a small O, and it was quickly morphing into a half smile.

  “You came.”

  Oh, God. The hope in those two words almost killed her. She shook her head.

  “I came because you deserved to know the truth. I can’t get married. I thought I could. God, I wish I could. For you. But Julien…” Her voice broke, tears pooling in her eyes and falling down her cheeks.

  “I know.”

  “What do you mean, you know?” she asked, fighting for breath. Fighting for control of her body, her emotions, when everything seemed to be spiraling into a dark abyss. Control was impossible, and that was why she couldn’t go through with marrying him.

  Julien took a step forward, and she took one back. She couldn’t help it. Her head was so mixed up. All she knew was that she wanted to make the look on his face go away. Take away the hurt she’d caused. But marriage would never be for her. If she let him touch her now, if she relied on his strength as she had in the past few months, she risked losing her resolve. He deserved better than that from her. It wasn’t as if she thought he was manipulating her or would take advantage if she let him get too close, more that she didn’t trust herself to stay strong.

  He needed the truth. If he still wanted her after that, she would count herself lucky. She couldn’t believe how badly she’d screwed th
is up.

  “Well, it’s about time!”

  Mandy gasped as her mother’s angry face came into view. She couldn’t deal with her family. Not while she had to fix things with Julien. If he would let her. She didn’t want to see the depth of disappointment in her mother’s brown eyes. Couldn’t bear to know what Mom thought of her right now.

  “Angela, could you…” Julien implored.

  With another angry glance, Angela nodded and poked Tyler in the back. “Let’s go.”

  As soon as her mother and brother were across the street, Mandy breathed a little easier. “Thank you,” she said, the words a mere mumble.

  Julien nodded but didn’t try to move closer again. She’d never seen him look so uncertain. She hated herself for infecting him with doubt.

  “I am so sorry. I can’t even tell you how much. I—”

  He cut her off. “Do you love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  She took a breath, trying to stop herself from hyperventilating. She’d never let herself get so close to another human being. Never given someone else the knife that could pierce through her heart and turn her to dust. Until Julien. What would her life be like now if he hadn’t walked in late and cocky as hell last May? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “That is the problem.”

  He clasped his hands together. To stop from wringing her neck? She couldn’t blame him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I wasn’t prepared to fall in love. I wasn’t ready. I shouldn’t have let it happen. But I did, and now everything’s a mess. I’m a mess.” She wasn’t explaining this right. She couldn’t seem to find the right words, but she tried again anyway. “I know you need the wedding. The marriage. That kind of security. And I understand. But I can’t have it. It doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to you. I know it’s not entirely sane, but where you see security, I see suffocation. I see me losing everything I am. And I don’t want you to hate me.” Mandy stopped trying to calm down, stopped trying to be reasonable and make sense. She let go of everything she’d been holding in the past few months and allowed it to cascade over her in a wash of anguish.

  JULIEN LUNGED FORWARD and grabbed Mandy around the waist as her eyes rolled back into her head. He swept her up into his arms and carried her to a nearby bench.

  “Ma belle!” Mandy’s body slumped against his, but her breathing slowed to a more normal pace, and her eyelids fluttered up.

  She sniffled, and he wiped her face with the sleeve of his suit coat. “I think I just had a full-blown panic attack.”

  “It would seem so. Are you all right?”

  She nodded but made no move to get up from his lap. He’d never seen her so raw and vulnerable. But did that mean he could forgive her? He didn’t know.

  “What do you mean, you don’t want me to hate you? I could never hate you.” Not even for abandoning me, he added silently.

  “I’m the wrong person for you, Julien. I’m too old, too unconventional, too terrified to commit. Why can’t you see that?”

  “That’s crap, and you know it.”

  “What if it’s not? What if in five years or ten, you look back and realize Sophie and I ruined the life you could have had? You’ll hate me. You’ll hate us. I can’t let that happen.”

  “Stop,” he said, anger swamping him at the force of her words. “Stop it right there. You don’t get to decide that for me. Or for us. You and Sophie are the best things that have ever happened to me. And that’s never going to change.”

  Her face said she didn’t believe him. What would it take? How could he convince her she wasn’t the wrong one for him? She was perfect. She was his everything. Why couldn’t she see that?

  “I am sorry too,” he said. “I didn’t realize you felt so strongly about being a few years older than me.”

  “Eight is not a few.”

  “Details,” he said, waving his hand. “I knew you said yes to marriage for me, because I need it. I just thought your reservations and fears about this would be the same as your worries that you would be a bad mother before Sophie came.”

  Could he trust that she would stay, even without marriage? What if he was setting himself up to be shattered the same way his father was? Worse, what if he was setting Sophie up for the same kind of horrible childhood trauma he’d had? If Mandy agreed to work on things, he would say yes. He knew that. But she had to get the stupid notion that she was wrong for him out of her head. She had to see that being older didn’t mean anything. Not to him.

  But the fear of letting her stick around, having her permanently in his life, in his daughter’s life, just to have her wake up one Sunday morning and decide she’d had enough and disappear in an hour and never be heard from again…He wasn’t sure he could bear it.

  “Oh, poor Sophie,” Mandy said.

  “She’s at the hotel with Layla. She’s fine. And she’ll continue to be fine if we can figure this out.”

  A fresh well of tears sprang to her amber eyes, clenching his heart. He hated that he’d made her cry. Hated that they were in this position.

  “I have to be sure.”

  She nodded. “I know. Baby, I do. I just don’t know what to do.”

  “It was so easy for her to pack one suitcase and leave forever. What’s there to say you won’t do the same thing?”

  “You.”

  “I wasn’t enough for her.” He tried not to sound pathetic, he really did, but it was as if she’d plunged a knife deep into him, bringing all his childhood fears and damage to the surface.

  “Well, you are for me. You and Sophie are enough. Sophie is my baby. Mine. And I will never leave her the way your mother left you. That woman was an idiot.” At his expression, she smiled a little. “Sorry, but she was.”

  “So you’re not running away from me?”

  “No. I was never running from you. Not really. I was running from the institution of marriage. I know it’s just a piece of paper to some people, but for me it’s more than that.”

  “For me too,” he said softly.

  “I don’t know how to just leap into an unknown future. I know you say you won’t come to resent me for holding you back, but how can you be so sure?”

  “The same way you’re sure that Sophie and I are enough for you.”

  She swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Well, when you put it like that…”

  He looped a stray strand of hair behind her right ear. “Now you’re starting to see things my way.”

  “I still don’t think I can do it, Julien.” She shook her head, and the hair moved back out of place. “Being sure of us is one thing, but marriage…it still terrifies me. Like to the core.”

  “What happens if I say it’s marriage or nothing?”

  Mandy went rigid, and he regretted the words immediately. He didn’t want to give her that kind of ultimatum.

  “Please,” she begged. “Don’t make me choose.”

  “Shh. Ma belle, calme-toi.” He rubbed her suddenly freezing arms and kissed the tip of her nose. “I shouldn’t have asked. I knew you were getting married for my sake, not yours, but I had no idea you felt so strongly about it. Look at you; you’re shaking.” He rocked her gently.

  “I should have told you.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Yes. I do. I thought I could get over the all-consuming terror. I thought because you were so wonderful and I’d been so good at letting you in that it wouldn’t change anything, that we would be the same after the wedding, but I just don’t think we would. Besides…I…I heard you on the phone this morning. You knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That I was pregnant before you proposed. It was one of the reasons I thought we would be okay, because you’d asked before you knew. But that’s not true.”

  “Is that why you disappeared? Because you thought I’d only proposed because of the baby?”

  She nodded.
>
  “Well, then you’re insane. I’d planned on proposing to you since the moment you told me to fuck off.”

  She laughed. “That’s crazy. You can’t mean it.”

  “When I saw you were pregnant, I thought, ‘Here’s my chance. I can ask her, even though it’s only been a few months, and it won’t seem so nuts, because she’s already pregnant.’ It was just the timing of everything that made it okay for me to ask you to marry me. But I would have asked anyway. In a few weeks or a few months, maybe later. Didn’t matter. It was going to happen. And don’t tell me I don’t mean it. I mean every word.”

  “But why? Why me?”

  She still didn’t get it. Frustration racked him, and he wanted to shake some sense into her. “Because you’re incredible. You’re this intoxicating mix of spicy and sweet. The girl who wears pastels over lingerie, showing the world your sweet smile only moments before you’re ordering me about in the bedroom. Because you’re you. The woman who moved three thousand miles away on her own to find herself, but found me instead.”

  She kissed him, a deep, passionate tangle of tongues and teeth and desperation.

  “But this isn’t going to work.” He kissed her cheek, and she gasped, her eyes going wide.

  “Julien, please don’t say that. The thought of getting married is terrifying. But the thought of losing you is equally horrific.”

  “I didn’t mean us. Well, I sort of mean us. One of us will have to compromise here. I want to get married. You don’t. One of us will lose in that equation. There’s no such thing as being half-married or sort of married.” But as he thought about it, he realized that wasn’t exactly true. “Son of a bitch.”

  “What?”

  “Well, what about PACS?” he asked.