5) She needed time around a decent guy so she could regain her faith in men.
6) Dawson was handsome.
7) And had a laugh that gave her shivers.
8) And may have wised up about women over the years.
9) Even if he hadn’t, Belle was no longer the quiet, mousy girl she’d been in college. She’d filled out and wised up. She could turn heads now. And she wouldn’t mind turning his.
10) A trip like this would be redemption and revenge rolled up into one.
Done. Ten perfectly good reasons for going. She got out of bed, made the reservations online, and texted Felix her decision all before she could change her mind.
Chapter 3
Flynn Dawson was tossing things into his suitcase and wishing that packing was one of those things he could delegate to an assistant. He’d been so wrapped up in the latest merger that he hadn’t given the family reunion much thought.
Well, maybe it wasn’t the merger itself that had made him mentally avoid the subject. His mother’s cancer also had a lot to do with it. She’d planned the reunion to celebrate her birthday, but they all knew that this trip would be the last time the family would all be together before her death. Flynn couldn’t help but think of the trip as a pre-funeral.
His sisters, Kennedy and Paige, had been tearfully putting together programs for the grandchildren and tributes to their mother. Flynn was supposed to give his own tribute on Friday night. What he really wanted to do was to tell his mother to go back to the Mayo Clinic for more radiation and chemo. Multiple Myeloma had no cure, only ongoing chemo treatments that prolonged the inevitable. They might be able to buy her a couple of more years, and her family needed her.
Marco’s divorce was going to be another difficult aspect of the reunion. He’d never told their parents that Daisy had left him for another man. No point in upsetting their mother at this point. The siblings had agreed to keep the divorce a secret, so Marco had come up with an excuse for Daisy’s absence: Her sister was undergoing emergency surgery and needed Daisy’s help taking care of her kids.
Marco would likely be in a self-pitying mood the entire week, and Flynn would have to watch every word he said so he didn’t accidentally let the news slip to their parents.
Yep, this reunion had all the ingredients of a perfect vacation.
Flynn’s phone buzzed. Speak of the devil; Daisy was calling.
He dropped a pair of shoes in his suitcase while answering the phone. “Hello.”
A long silence came across the line before Daisy spoke, sounding tearful and emotional. “Flynn, I know you probably hate me for everything that’s happened, and I don’t blame you, but you have to hear me out.”
Hear her out? Why was she calling him, and how many valid excuses could she possibly have for leaving Marco and hooking up with some high school flame?
“I’m listening.” He pulled open his sock drawer and grabbed a few pairs.
“What I did was wrong,” Daisy said. “I’ve regretted it every day for the last month.”
“Only for the last month?”
She hadn’t mentioned the two months before that, when she’d taken off with whatever-his-name was. “When I left, I thought Marco would fight for our marriage, fight for me. But he didn’t even call to talk about the terms I’d asked for in the divorce papers. Seven years of marriage, and he erased it all with a few strokes of a pen.”
Flynn headed to his closet. It was a walk-in the size of a small bedroom. Too big, really. He lost track of clothes in here. “If you didn’t want a divorce, you shouldn’t have filed for one.”
She let out a jagged breath. “You don’t know what it was like for me in Montana. Marco had a job and friends; he had a life there. I had nothing. I sat around all day being a residency widow. He worked eighty-hour weeks, and when he came home, all he wanted to do was sleep. I kept telling him that I was lonely, but he didn’t care. He made it perfectly clear that his job came first, and I came somewhere down on his list after everything else.”
Flynn flipped through his dress shirts, looking for the wrinkle-resistant ones. “Why are you telling me this?” Was she trying to win him over to her side? Had she made this same phone call to Kennedy and Paige? “Look, whatever happened between you and Marco is between you and Marco.”
Daisy sobbed, as though choking on emotion. “I’m telling you this because I want your help fixing my marriage.”
Um, what? Flynn’s hand stilled on a hanger. “The time to fix things was before lawyers got involved.”
Another sob. “Couples are supposed to have a waiting period before a divorce is finalized—six months of separation. I wanted Marco to realize how serious our problems were. I wanted to force him to face them because nothing else seemed to get his attention. But for some reason, the judge waived the waiting period and rushed the whole thing through.”
Flynn was hit with a pang of guilt. He was the one who expedited the divorce. After Daisy filed, he’d gone to Montana to visit his brother. Marco had been so angry at Daisy—he’d actually wanted to drive to Tacoma where Daisy was staying and beat up her new boyfriend. Flynn practically had to hide the car keys. When Marco wasn’t working, Flynn took him out, watched sports with him on TV, anything to keep his mind off of Daisy and what she was doing in Tacoma.
Flynn hadn’t wanted to see Marco dragged through the remnants of his failed marriage for half a year, so he made calls and wrote some checks to speed the process along.
As quickly as the guilt hit Flynn, it drained away. “You left Marco for another man. If you wanted to work on your marriage, you picked a strange way to do it.”
Sniffling came across the line. He’d never heard Daisy cry and hated that she sounded so broken. “I didn’t leave Marco for Jeff. I just said that Jeff cared more about me. He was happy to spend time with me online. I said I’d go see him while I was in Tacoma. Nothing ever came of it. I couldn’t have a relationship with Jeff when I still loved Marco.”
Flynn softened a little. He carried a few shirts to the suitcase as he spoke. “You should be telling Marco this, not me.”
“He won’t listen. He’s convinced I was cheating on him while we were married.”
A second pang of guilt hit Flynn. During his time visiting Marco, they’d sat in the family room eating chips and watching the Lakers give the Clippers a beating. Marco’s anger from earlier in the week had transformed into depression, and he stared blankly at the screen, more whipped than the Clippers.
“I was planning to look into hospitals in Los Angeles after my residency,” he said.
“LA is nice.” Flynn hoped Marco’s statement meant he was thinking about moving on, thinking about life after Daisy. “Beaches, great weather, and enough patients to keep you busy.”
“I never wanted to go to California,” Marco muttered. “Daisy did. I wanted to stay rural, but I was looking into LA for her. You know, making compromises. I should have told her I was willing to go to LA. I should have done more.”
So Marco wasn’t moving on. In fact, it looked like he was about to go grovel to Daisy. Flynn wanted to say, “Pull yourself together and have some pride.”
Instead he said, “You’re going to be fine. You’re smart, outgoing, and almost as good-looking as me.” It was an old joke between them. They were identical twins. “Also, you have an MD after your name. Women will beat down your door for that alone.”
“An MD,” Marco repeated dully. “Daisy wanted to start a family, but I kept telling her that we had to wait until after my residency. I didn’t want kids until I had time to spend with them. I used to imagine them, though—a little girl with pigtails and a boy with Daisy’s eyes.”
“You can still have kids.”
“They won’t look like her.”
This was worse than Flynn thought. Marco was not only mourning Daisy; he was mourning the loss of their imaginary children, too.
The crowd erupted into a cheer. The Clippers had added three points to their score.
Neither Flynn nor Marco paid much attention to it.
“Do you know why a lot of businesses fail?” Flynn asked. His company, Bainbridge Capital, bought underperforming businesses and made them profitable again.
Marco picked at his potato chips. “You’re going to use this as a metaphor for marriage, aren’t you?”
“Sometimes the product no longer works in the economy—”
Marco grunted. “Talk to me when you’ve had a girlfriend for longer than a few months. You’ve never been that invested in”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“a product. Business isn’t the same as marriage.”
“But just as often,” Flynn went on, ignoring his brother’s protest, “businesses fail because the management is poison. Employees can only do so much to make the company succeed if they have a management who sabotages them. You’d think that sort of thing wouldn’t happen very often. You’d think managers would want their companies to succeed. But the truth is, sometimes people are shortsighted, or incompetent, or simply more invested in running their own personal empires than they are in making the company work. And when that happens, the only thing you can do is start over with new management.”
Marco put his bag of chips down, uninterested in eating any more. “I can’t just interview new people for a marriage position. You don’t understand.”
Maybe, but wallowing in self-pity wasn’t doing Marco any good.
“I don’t understand women?” Flynn scoffed as he picked up the chip bag. “How many women have you dated compared to how many I’ve dated?”
“My point exactly. It’s all about a good time for you. No commitment.”
Not true. Well, not exactly anyway. Flynn had been too busy with work to settle down. He bit into a chip. “Over the years, I’ve learned a few things about women. One of them is that if you find out that a woman has cheated, she’s probably done it before, and you can bet your stock options she’ll do it again.”
Marco straightened, a spark of anger resurfacing. “You think Daisy cheated on me before?”
A couple of Flynn’s exes flashed through his mind—his college girlfriend who got too friendly with his roommate, and more recently, Audrey, the event planner, who’d planned a few private events of her own while he was out of town, one involving a French chef named Philippe.
“I don’t know,” Flynn said. “But I can tell you that by the time you catch someone embezzling from your company, you can be sure it wasn’t their first time.”
Marco nodded, the set of his chin showing determination, resolve. “You may be right. Sometimes she’d storm out of the house without telling me where she was going.”
Yet now Daisy was on the phone, telling Flynn he’d been wrong about her past indiscretions. She wasn’t prone to lying or exaggeration, so when she insisted, “I didn’t cheat on Marco,” he had to consider that maybe it was the truth.
“Jeff was just a friend who listened to me. He helped me sort out what I really want. And I’ve realized that’s Marco.”
Flynn sighed and rubbed his forehead. Had he done more harm than good by trying to help Marco get over Daisy? Maybe they’d already be back together if it hadn’t been for him. “I’ll call Marco and tell him to call you.”
“I want more than that. I want to go to the family reunion.”
That was asking a lot more.
“It still starts tomorrow?” she asked. “In Cancun?”
His parents had started planning the reunion when Daisy and Marco were still married, so she knew some of the details.
“I’m not sure that you showing up would be a good idea.”
A family reunion wasn’t the place to work out marital problems, especially since the siblings were keeping their parents from learning about those very problems.
“If I can see Marco face to face,” Daisy went on, pleading, “then I can convince him that our marriage is worth saving. I need to apologize to him the right way, in person, not through texts or phone messages.”
Maybe she was right. Flynn knew his brother wasn’t over Daisy. But would he be happy or furious at her for coming? He might be deliriously happy. Maybe the sadness he’d carried around like a weight on his shoulders would lighten. It was probably at least worth letting Daisy try.
She took another shuddering breath. “Besides, I love your mother. If nothing else, I want to say goodbye.”
Daisy knew that Marco was keeping the details of the divorce a secret from his parents. She’d agreed that they didn’t need more stress. Whatever else happened, Flynn felt sure she wouldn’t intentionally do anything to upset his mother.
“What’s the resort name?” Daisy pressed. “Just tell me that much.”
Flynn stood over his suitcase, shirts in hand, debating.
“Please?” she asked, voice wavering.
“Playa Del Sol.” Flynn was a pushover when it came to crying women. “You didn’t hear it from me, though.”
“You’re the best.”
He wasn’t, but if he helped Daisy, he might make up for whatever harm he’d caused their marriage earlier.
“Don’t tell Marco I’m coming,” she said, her voice brighter now. “I want to surprise him.”
Yeah, he’d be surprised. “I won’t tell him.”
Chapter 4
Belle had an early morning check-in at the Playa Del Sol. She wanted to be there before the other guests arrived so she could hang out in the lobby, casual and inconspicuous, waiting for her chance to run into Dawson.
The resort was a whitewashed building nestled into lush jungle terrain. Large pristine pools with lazy umbrellas lay around the perimeter, offsetting the ocean in the distance. Turquoise blue set against lush green. She liked the rich colors together and made a note to use them for next summer’s line.
She could call it Cancun Dreams, or Romantic Ambitions, or Eighteen-and-in-Love Revisited. She still couldn’t quite believe she was here, doing this. This trip was all foolishness, really.
After taking her bags to her room, she changed into a poppy-red sundress. She’d designed it herself, purposely choosing a cut that emphasized her curves and small waist. The fabric swished around her legs, showing off their length. This dress made an impression.
She went to the large, open lobby, which had columns instead of walls and doors. The breeze drifted in, bringing the smell of sea, jungle, and sunscreen. She picked up a stack of brochures and flipped through them while keeping an eye on the front counter.
Dawson had to check in here, so this was the best time and place for her to accidentally-on-purpose run into him. After that, who knew if she’d even see him during the week. According to the stack of brochures in her lap, there was a lot to do in the area—horseback riding on the beach, scuba diving, snorkeling, dinner cruises, breakfast cruises, zip lining, trips to Mayan ruins, and shopping.
By noon, a steady stream of tourists had arrived, but no Dawson. She stayed on the couch, reading a book on her phone. One o’clock went by, then two and three. What if he didn’t check in until late tonight or tomorrow? She hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.
Her gaze drifted to an older couple at the counter. For all she knew, those were Dawson’s parents. She’d never seen pictures of his family. He’d talked about his brother, Flynn, and she vaguely remembered hearing about a sister, or maybe two.
Belle could have searched for him on social media to learn that sort of information, but she didn’t dare friend him right before coming to Cancun. If he had posted any details about the trip, and then she happened to show up at the same resort, it wouldn’t look like a coincidence; it would look like stalking.
And okay, maybe flying to Cancun and sitting in a resort lobby all day did verge on stalking, but it wasn’t. Not really. Belle was just doing what Pearl had suggested: making her own luck. She was fixing the mistake from her college days of not speaking up and telling Dawson how she felt before it was too late. How many times had she relived those first months with Dawson, wondering what would
have happened if she’d been more assertive, more flirty, more noticeable.
Would that have changed the outcome of Dawson falling in love with her roommate?
When he proposed to Daisy and they set an early date, all of their friends thought that marrying in college was foolish, but Belle understood. Dawson was the kind of guy who believed in commitments, went to church, and was certain he could make love last.
Belle had tried to be happy for both of them—or at least gracious. Every time Dawson took Daisy’s hand, Belle pretended she wasn’t crushed. She kept up the pretense for the three-month engagement, but on the day of the wedding rehearsal, she broke, unable to continue the charade. Instead of going to the reception hall with the other eight bridesmaids, she pled a migraine. Ditto for the actual wedding day. While everyone else celebrated and threw rice, she hiked to the town cemetery, sat on a headstone, and cut her bridesmaid dress into a thousand pieces of pink and burgundy mourning. She stayed there until the wedding was over and the wind had scattered bits of material across the grass. Dramatic, yes, but she’d been young and entitled to a few private acts of drama.
After Daisy moved out, Belle didn’t see her or Dawson any more than she had to. Daisy made a few half-hearted attempts to get together over the next year, and then she and Dawson moved to Seattle for med school. She hadn’t seen or spoken to either since.
Four o’clock passed. Belle finished her book after only half paying attention to it. Maybe she wasn’t making her own luck. Maybe she was just making a fool of herself. Even if she ran into Dawson, he was likely to give her a polite greeting and nothing else. She would suggest they get together sometime during the week, but he might decline. He was here for a reunion, not to spend time with old acquaintances.
Did she really need to be shot down by him again? Hadn’t her ego had enough of that? This whole thing had been a horrible idea. So what if Dawson had been a college crush, and he’d broken her heart. He wasn’t the only eligible guy around. She knew other handsome, smart, and caring men. Granted, not many, because the fashion industry didn’t have a lot of straight, single men working in it. Still, she was a successful, talented woman with a lot to offer. She didn’t have to sit here in some pitiful attempt to…
How I Met Your Brother (Power of the Matchmaker) Page 3
