Don't Marry the Ex: A Sweet Romance (The Debutante Rules Book 3)

by Emily Childs

  I guess my response is a surprise because she halts her pacing, eyes wide on me. Almost like she can’t believe she actually revved up this conversation. Dot shakes her head, her slender fingers thread through her curly ponytail. Those fingers can do incredible things. The softest touch, a caress that’ll leave chills on my skin for days.

  “I—” Dot stammers, she lowers her head, chin trembling. My heart is in the back of my throat, and I’ll break without a doubt if she cries. A soft sob fills the room, and I’m in front of her in three steps, hand on her elbow. She lifts her glassy eyes. “Why did you ruin us, Sawyer?”

  Sympathy, the need to fix her hurt, are buried with a wave of hot anger. I draw my face closer, voice raw. “I never wanted to ruin us.”

  “You did! Whether you wanted to or not, you did.”

  “I did?” Does she not see that she ruins me? Around her, I’m tossed in a hurricane of love, longing, frustration, anger. I can hardly remember my name with this woman, even after everything. My voice is jagged, like broken glass. “Stop playing with me, Dorothy-Ann. I can’t do it anymore.”

  She wipes a hand under her nose as a single tear drips onto her cheek and shoves me away. “Playing with you? I was ready to marry you, Sawyer! I loved you. And you turned around and let me down like I was . . . nothing.”

  I drag my fingers through my hair and curse. A sting builds behind my eyes when I look at her again. It’s all I can do not to take her in my arms and forget this wide, open wound between us. “We don’t need to do—”

  “Yes, we do!” she shrieks. “We do need to do this, so you can quit saying that. What is so terrible that you refuse to tell me why you broke up with me? I’d rather know, so I can move on.”

  She’s like me, then. Stuck in limbo, desperate to hang onto what was lost. The small muscles in my jaw beat like a pulse. “You really don’t want to know. Trust me.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want.”

  “Fine,” I say in a growl. “I went to your dad, all right? I know we said it didn’t matter, but I wanted his blessing. I wanted to surprise you with your folks there at our wedding.”

  Her breath hitches and I take a step closer. We’d made the choice to elope because the Gardeners were putting up walls at the end.

  “He told you no, didn’t he?” she whispers.

  “Oh, he told me a lot of things.”

  When did we get so close? Her skin is hot against me. My voice lowers, my hand glides down the curve of her waist. Dot draws in a sharp breath, her eyes bouncing between mine. I swallow past the scratch in my throat when her hand rests gently in the center of my chest. Over the rapid pulse of my heart.

  “He told me a software developer wasn’t going to be good enough for his girl,” I tell her softly. “Like we’d be homeless or something.”

  Her lips part, eyes wide. For a moment, I see the cogs working in her head, piecing things together until she looks at me again. “When I mentioned to Mama you wanted to go back to school, I never thought—”

  “I’m glad you told them,” I interrupt, my grip on her waist tightening. “It brought out the truth. Your dad told me to leave you alone and make something of myself, then he might consider it.”

  “So your love for me was so weak that at a bit of pushback you end it?” Her anger trickles like acid down my spine. She shoves against my chest, but I rest one palm to the side of her face. Dot leans into me, almost as if it’s involuntary.

  Our mouths are too close, but I don’t pull away. I’m too far into this, and she needs to know the truth. “You think I’d give you up because he said so?”

  “But you did! You left.”

  “He threatened the clinic, Dorothy-Ann!” There is one of the main events. Shouted out in the open. I break away, pacing.

  Dot is frozen in place. “He what?”

  My voice croaks. “He threatened to take the clinic if I married you, okay? Back then, he still had the power to kick you out and take it. You think I’d let that happen after all you’d done for that place? I knew how much it meant to you.”

  My eyes burn. I curl my hands into tight fists, my fingernails digging into my skin. How I wish I could say such a thing isn’t believable, but it is. Rob Gardener won things. If he didn’t want me for Dot, I should’ve seen long before that day how far he’d go to make me disappear.

  Dot glares at me, a rasp in her voice. “Not that it matters, but I cared about you more than the clinic. If you’d given me the chance, I would’ve walked away. His threat holds no water now that Josephine owns most of it.”

  I lift my eyes and drink her in. The shape of her face, the wave of her hair. My mind isn’t spinning anymore. I have one focus and it’s her. I cross the space between us. Dot draws in a sharp breath when my fingertips trace the soft line of her jaw, outlining the slope of her neck. Her hands rest on my hips. As I draw my face closer, she closes her eyes, my lips brush her ear.

  “I wanted to marry you,” I whisper. “I wanted you so badly I couldn’t think of anything else. But I promised myself I’d back off, make something of myself, be someone he couldn’t refuse again.”

  “You didn’t need to break up with me,” she says, her breath on my neck. Our foreheads touch. “Look at us now. You aren’t a man who wants me. It’s like you hate me, Sawyer.”

  “Don’t do that,” I say, a little darkly. She lifts her head, pulling back. My eyes narrow. “Don’t play with me.”

  “Sawyer,” Dot snaps, breaking out of my hold. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The next day, before I could even talk to you about any of this, I got these.” I pull out my phone and swipe through the email folder I can’t seem to delete. Jaw tight, I shove the screen under Dot’s nose, unsure if I’m ready to face this. There’s not a choice, though. It’s done.

  Dot takes the phone, scrolls through the two images. Selfies of a laughing couple, her hand clasped tightly in a man’s. Her lips brushing his.

  “Don’t tell me you wanted to get married when I see something like this.” My voice is like venom slipping through my teeth. I turn away, digging the heels of my hands into my eyes against the sting.

  Dot is still, her hands shake as she simply stares at the images. Her shoulders heave, and her breath seems a little disjointed. Rougher, harsher.

  Then she screams.

  I startle back. She’s lost her mind. Maybe she never thought I’d toss the evidence right in front of her face. I wipe away my own emotion, nervous someone in the halls will hear her cries and think I’m murdering the woman.

  Dot stops and furiously pads around in her purse on the bed until she fumbles with her own phone. She keeps muttering nonsense under her breath. I broke the woman. No other way to say it.

  “You’ve got to be . . .” she starts. Then groans angrily. Keeps swiping on her own phone. “This isn’t happening.”

  I go to say something, but stop when all at once, Dot shoves her own phone in my face. Her cheeks are soaked in tears. Tears I put there and I hate myself a little for it.

  “Look!” she wails. “Just look!”

  Nervously, I take the phone out of her hands. Two pictures. Almost identical to the ones I have on my phone except . . .

  I freeze.

  Dot is in the picture, kissing, laughing, loving a man in the same position as the others. Except I am the man. The lighting is different. The background, too.

  “What?” I can’t even wrap my head around it all.

  Dot covers her face with her hands and screams again. When she pulls them back, her eyes are fiery embers ready to burn me down. “You didn’t.” She gasps. “You didn’t break my heart over this. Tell me those stupid pictures weren’t the reason.”

  I’m floundering. Drowning. My brilliant reply is, “It wasn’t me in the pictures, so what was I supposed to think!”

  She closes her eyes, silent tears carve down her cheeks. “You were supposed to trust me! At the very least, ask me. The woman you supposedly loved abo
ve everything; we should’ve confronted this—together! That’s what you should’ve thought to do.”

  “At first, I didn’t want . . . I didn’t want to ruin a relationship with you and your dad. You know how I am about family.” Not that Rob deserved it, but I didn’t want to cause a strain for Dorothy-Ann at the beginning of her venture with the clinic, or at home. After losing my sister, I learned quickly how family is a person’s gold on earth. “Maybe we didn’t see eye to eye, but he’s still your dad.”

  “But after, with these pictures, what kept you from calling me out?”

  I can’t say my answer because it’s too weak, too stupid.

  “Tell me!” she shouts.

  “I was angry,” I admit. “Hurt. I wanted to get as far away from you as I could, I wanted to make something of myself to show you what you lost.”

  Her mouth drops. “So all this—coming back to Honeyville, getting brought in to the clinic, was all what? Some kind of revenge?”

  “No . . . maybe. It started that way, but being around you again—”

  “No, don’t tell me your feelings changed, because you still never confronted me. You’ve been back for months, and have allowed me to go on—my heart breaking every time I see you—believing something was wrong with me, something about me drove you away.”

  “Dot, I’m sorry.” I wish she could trade places with me, wish she could feel how angry I am at myself. “If I could go back, I would. You deserved better. I was . . . I was a coward, and hurt, and I let those emotions take hold.”

  “How did you get those pictures?” Her voice is flat, emotionless.

  I shake my head. Memories flip through my thoughts like a slideshow as my frantic brain tries to pin down the exact moment. “I . . . Liam found them. In our company email.”

  “And who sent them?”

  I didn’t focus on those details at the time, more the idea of the love of my life kissing another man right after her dad told me I’d never be hers unless I made something more of myself.

  “It was from your folks’ corporation.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” I insist, and start pacing.

  Dot wipes another tear from her eye. “I’m asking because my daddy is a lot of things, but a Photoshop expert is not one of them.”

  “Come on,” I say, annoyed. “You can’t tell me he didn’t set this up after what I told him.”

  “I’m not a fool, Sawyer. Clearly, he had something to do with it, I’m just saying he didn’t do it alone. Last I checked, Lanford & Hewitt hires a graphics team.”

  My heart falls out of my chest at her accusation. “Why would anyone who works for me do this?”

  She goes to her nook, rips open the drawer where she placed her few clothes, and slams her overnight bag onto the bed. Dot frantically starts packing as she talks. “I didn’t say it was someone who worked for you. Maybe someone who worked with you.”

  “Liam? That—”

  “I’m not here to accuse anyone, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. But you were leaving—for us—if you remember. More people than my daddy had reason to not want us together. Since Liam is the one who found the pictures, I guess I would’ve expected you to ask a few more questions instead of going right to not believing me.” Dot zips her bag and rushes to the bathroom. The rattle of makeup brushes and bottles echo into the room.

  I always doubted. Kyler is right about the reason I’ve hidden this for a year—I never could wrap my head around the truth of it. And somehow that makes this so much worse. I’m a coward, insecure. Stupid.

  Dot returns, face wet and puffy, and shoves her toiletry bag into her suitcase. “I’m leaving.”

  “Dot, wait.” I’m desperate to fix this. To pretend all this time I’ve been living in a state of disbelief, of bitterness that was undeserved entirely, didn’t happen. I have no right to ask it of her, but I want her to stay and tell me it’s not broken beyond the point of repair.

  “Why, Sawyer?” Her voice trembles. “Why should I stay and talk now? Because it’s convenient for you? No, thank you. You’ve had a year to talk about this with me, and you chose to live a lie created by others instead of coming to me. So if we talk about this, trust me, it’ll be on my timeline not yours.”

  She steps out into the hallway. “I’ll be getting my own rental car. Despite this, I’ll expect to see you on Monday, Mr. Lanford.”

  Dot turns on her heel and leaves. No. She runs.

  She’s gone. My heart is about to pound out of my chest. I whip through the images from the email again. I do pride myself on technology, but I’m not a graphics man. I hire people for that. Looking at the wretched pictures I never could get around to deleting, I agree she is in the exact position as the photo with us. The exact position. Still, if this was a doctored photo, it’s been done by a pro. I’m not an artist, but even the lighting is spot on.

  But I have a memory. Us trying to take selfies over a creamery table, but we kept laughing and kissing too much to even look at the camera. How had he gotten hold of the pictures? I’m still having a hard time understanding how a father would go to such lengths as to taint his daughter in such a way.

  Had I been so thrown, so lost in inadequacy, I’d let it all combust in one epic moment of self-doubt? My teeth clench to the breaking point. I lower into a crouch, mind whirring. I can’t keep a single thought straight before my head bolts and goes a new direction. Everything is one ball of chaos inside, and I hardly know how to reel it back in.

  I pace. Shake my hands. Squat again. Stand, and pace.

  My skin tingles in nervous energy and I don’t know what to do. Simple as that, the longer I circle over the last five minutes, I have no idea what to do.

  I’d always planned on returning to Honeyville. Once to prove to my future father-in-law I could provide for his daughter, then for a sort of spite. To prove they needed me more than I needed them.

  So now—much too late—the truth comes out. This whole time, Dot probably had no idea what happened to me, why I’d turned into a beast. My head won’t wrap around any of this. Like I put a mental block in place and refuse to accept that I let go of something perfect and beautiful by mistake. It can’t be this simple.

  I’m not sure how long I stay in the hotel room, alone and ashamed, but when I leave with my bag in hand, a housekeeper is holding a keycard out, ready to begin the cleaning process.

  “Oh,” she squeaks.

  “Sorry for the delay. We’re all out now,” I grumble and hurry to the elevator.

  Liam has called me twice when I check my phone. I call Dot instead. It goes straight to her voicemail. Alone, I curse and slam a fist on the wall of the elevator. The front lobby is alive with new visitors and people leaving. Liam and Veronica stand by the entrance. Both greet me with a smile, but I tug on Liam’s arm and nudge him away.

  “Those pictures,” I say, a little breathless. “Those pictures you found of Dot, did you have something to do with them?”

  Liam lifts a brow. “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Because I was leaving the company,” I snap. “Because they weren’t real, I’ve seen the originals. Because you had a reason. Did you and Rob Gardener come between me and Dorothy-Ann to keep me in my position?”

  By now, Veronica has taken an interest and hovers close by.

  Liam’s eyes shadow. “Come on, Sawyer. Do you realize how insane this sounds?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Totally insane. So outlandish, I never really questioned any of it. Until now. When Dot just unraveled it all.”

  Veronica claps her hands. “Oh, she said something. Yay!”

  When Liam and I shoot her a look, she bites her bottom lip and takes a few steps back.

  “Liam,” I mutter. “You were the one person I confided in after Rob shut me down. I vented to you. Sort of funny how you found the pictures right after, don’t you think?”

  Liam’s jaw pulses and we stare at each other like an Old West stand off for an unco
mfortable amount of time.

  “The man was never going to sign with us,” he says at last. “If you didn’t get your head in the game, he was going to be a roadblock for us to expand. You leaving would’ve been the downfall of us back then. So yeah, when he sent me a picture of you two, then told me I needed to make sure you focused on what was really important, I took the opportunity. Didn’t take much imagination to figure out what he wanted me to do with the image. Seems I did you a favor. You’re successful, you dodged a bullet because, come on, do you really want to be saddled to those people?”

  Each word is a throat punch. I shove against his chest, wishing I could brawl right there in the front lobby. Maybe I should. Get myself fired from my own company.

  “Sorry,” Liam says stiffly. “But if I hadn’t done it, he never would’ve let us do what we’re doing now. Your app—he would’ve stood in front of all contacts. No one would’ve invited us to do trainings. Despite what you think, I was doing it for your benefit.”

  “This isn’t the good ole days where parents pick who their kids end up with,” I shout. “What gives any of you the right to decide what we wanted out of life? What gives you that right?”

  “You were too close to it, Sawyer,” Liam says. “You were going to make a huge mistake. Our company, it’s not just about us. People have livelihoods and they would’ve lost it all because you picked the girl with a connected, vindictive dad.”

  I scrape my fingers through my hair, feeling sick. A tiny piece of me can see where Liam’s head was, but it doesn’t make any of this easier to swallow. Am I in the Dark Ages? Rob Gardener chased me off in the worst way. Made me think terrible things about his daughter, like her character was nothing. A woman I would’ve traipsed to the ends of the earth to make happy. Then enlisted my own company, my business partner, to drive the nail deeper.

  What sort of man does that?

  “I’m finding my own way home,” I say in a low voice. “When we get back, we’ll meet with the shareholders and start the transition of selling my shares in Lanford & Hewitt.”

  “Sawyer—”

  Liam doesn’t get the chance to finish before I stomp outside. I don’t know how, but when I get back to Honeyville, I’m going to fix this.