Neil chewed and swallowed, then reached for his beer. “My daughter. She’s a vegan.”
“Oh, you have a daughter?” My mom brightened, and my grandma and aunt Marie both perked up. I knew Mom had visions of adorable kindergarteners in her mind.
“It’s a funny story,” I said, even though I knew it wouldn’t strike them as remotely funny. “She’s twenty-five. She’s my exact age.”
“She’s a month younger,” he clarified. As though that made things better.
“Oh, a whole month.” Anger tightened my mom’s fake smile. I thought it might crack and fall off.
“Well, that would be a good story, wouldn’t it, Becky?” Aunt Marie laughed to defuse the tension. “‘My daughter and my grandbaby are the same age.’ You could go on Maury.”
“Um, no, Emma is not…” I shook my head. “Emma is not my baby.”
“Well, you better have some soon,” Marie said, as though it weren’t the most mortifying thing in the world for her to order Neil and me to procreate. “Your mom’s been hungry for a grandbaby.”
How soon my mom’s expectations had swung from “don’t get pregnant,” to “get immediately pregnant,” the moment a man was in the picture for me. I bet she felt differently now that she’d met Neil.
I’d gotten pregnant the year before, but we hadn’t kept the baby. I didn’t regret that choice, but I was glad my mom didn’t know. She’d told me time and again how disappointed she was that I wouldn’t have children. I wasn’t about to change my mind, but I wished for her sake that she didn’t feel that way.
I’d already warned Neil about my mother’s obsession with being a grandmother, and he’d agreed to take the fall for me. He cleared his throat and said, quite seriously, “Well, after I had chemotherapy and the transplant this year, it’s not likely that children are in our future.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.” I had no doubt that my mom meant that. She would probably feel irrationally guilty over Marie’s remarks later.
“The good news is, he’s still alive,” I reminded them with a wise-ass smirk.
Neil grinned over the top of his beer bottle. “Somehow, you’ll just have to cope with your disappointment, Mrs. Scaife.”
My mom laughed, and I saw a glimmer of hope that she might slightly warm to Neil after all.
A little after lunch, Neil excused himself to call Emma and wish her a happy Christmas. “I’ll go outside,” he said, gesturing toward the door with his phone. “It’s a bit loud in here. And I don’t want to be rude, of course.”
“Don’t put your tongue on anything out there, or it will get stuck,” I teased.
The moment he was gone, my mother and my aunt Marie herded me into the back bedroom. I backed into the end of the narrow bed and had no choice but to sit on all the coats as the two women loomed over me.
“Explain yourself, Sophie Anne!” Mom hissed in a low voice.
“Explain what?” I held out my open and utterly innocent palms. “I told you I was bringing my boyfriend to Christmas, I brought my boyfriend to Christmas.”
“You didn’t go to law school! You are not going to lawyer your way out of this!” Mom pressed her garish holiday manicure to her forehead. “How old is he?”
“Forty-nine.” I lifted my chin defiantly. Or was that childishly? Why could I never act like an adult when my mother was involved?
“Forty—I’m not even forty-nine, Sophie! What the hell are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking he’s super-hot and great in bed?”
Mom crossed herself. “Jesus Christ.”
“Okay, so, what does he do?” Aunt Marie asked, her voice insistently calm, like we were in an emergency that needed immediate handling. Then, in split second of panic, she added, “For a living! I meant for a living, what does he do?”
“He owns two media companies. He’s the tenth richest man in Great Britain.”
My mom sat down heavily beside me. “Oh, sweetie, you’re not doing this for the money, are you?”
“Mother, no! God, I didn’t even know he was rich when I met him.” I shook my head. “Why can’t I just meet a guy and fall in love with him and not have any ulterior motive? You are being extremely weird about this.”
“Your mom is just concerned for you, Sophie,” Marie said gently.
“And pissed off that you didn’t tell me any of this before,” Mom added.
I took a sharp breath, my exasperation audible. “It’s not like I lied to you—”
“You didn’t lie to me, but you didn’t tell the truth!”
“What does it even matter?” I demanded. “It’s not like I’m doing anything wrong.”
“So he’s a little older, so what?” Marie said, putting her hands on her hips. “Sophie, do you love him?”
“Absolutely.”
“And does he treat you good and love you back?”
I nodded decisively at my aunt. She turned to my mom. “Then why are you having a shit fit over this, Becky? You should just be happy that she found a guy who isn’t covered in tattoos with a bunch of junk in his face.”
Marie was talking about my first boyfriend, a nineteen-year-old I’d started dating when I was seventeen. He’d had the most awful amateur tattoos and he’d played bass in a garage band. He’d seemed so dangerous and like such a bad boy.
I’d since learned that the truly bad boys looked perfectly normal and respectable until you got them into a Parisian sex club.
Mom huffed. She knew she’d lost the argument. “Are you guys still staying out at the trailer?”
“I don’t know, are we still invited?” I snapped.
Mom’s expression softened. “Of course you are. Just…stop dropping these bombs on me, Sophie. I never know what’s going on with you anymore. You don’t have to be so secretive.”
“Well, apparently she does, if you’re going to freak out like this whenever she tells you something,” Marie observed.
“Can I go now and enjoy my lovely Christmas with my family, who I have not seen in a year?” I asked with a roll of my eyes.
Mom huffed and I pushed through the door and out into the dining room. Neil was still outside, thank god. I went to the kitchen and leaned over the sink to peer out the window. He paced between cars in the driveway, phone to his ear, his other arm wrapped around his chest. Occasionally, he stopped and bounced for warmth. He had a huge grin on his face as he talked to his daughter.
I knew it was difficult for him to be away from her at Christmas. The only other time it had happened, Emma had told me, had been when he’d gone to visit his ex-wife, Elizabeth, and her family the year before they’d gotten married.
Emma took this trip to be a very good sign for her father and me.
Still, I felt a little bad that Neil wasn’t spending the holiday with his daughter. I knew he missed her terribly. It assuaged my guilt slightly that she was celebrating with her fiancé and his family this year.
The rest of the visit was surprisingly stress-free. Neil was asked at least seven times what part of Ireland he was from, but he was very gracious about correcting people. As the day went on, he relaxed considerably, and I marveled again at how adaptable he was to such an unfamiliar situation. Neil had grown up with wealth and proper manners, but he didn’t look down on my loud, sometimes earthy family the way other people with his upbringing might have.
It was around four o’clock when Neil and I left, our arms weighted down with plates of leftovers, cookies, and my grandmother’s fudge. I must have hugged all of my relatives a thousand times apiece.
“Are you heading back to the trailer right now?” my mom called from the table as we walked past.
“No, I wanted to take Neil to see the lake while it was still light out.” I gestured to the door. “We’ll meet you back there. Is the key still in the same place?”
“Just don’t ‘get lost,’ or ‘run out of gas,’” Marie snarked, complete with finger quotes. The woman would not shut up about that first bad boyfrie
nd.
My mother shot her a look. “Yes, the key is in the same place. I’ll be heading that way shortly.”
“Okay. Bring more leftovers, we’ll have dinner.” I was going to be as relentlessly cheerful as possible about this whole thing.
When we stepped outside, Neil gave me a reassuring smile. “I think that went quite well.”
Awww. The poor guy. “I think you’re being way too optimistic. You have no idea what’s going to happen to you tonight.”
CHAPTER TWO
The wind off the frozen surface of Lake Superior was cutting cold, but since we’d both grown up in extreme low temperatures, Neil and I were brave enough to face it. Someone had plowed the gravel parking lot by the shore and shoveled off the wooden steps to the beach.
“I thought the Great Lakes had magnificent, sandy beaches,” Neil mused aloud as we navigated the slick staircase.
“There’s sand. It’s just under all this snow.”
He put a hand out to steady me. “Careful.”
“Yeah, I might fall and bruise my ass. Oh, wait, it’s already bruised,” I snorted. Knowing the limits of our stamina and accommodations over the holiday season, we’d gone a little crazy with the Dominance/submission fun times in the week before we’d left New York.
It had been entirely warranted. I’d been so keyed up and stressed over my audition with Wake Up! America that, when it had gone perfectly, I’d needed to blow off some steam in a big way. Sometimes, it felt like our lives were never going to slow down and let us catch our breath.
Which was why it was so nice to stand on the shore and smell the clean lake breeze. “I’ve always felt like this lake had a primal energy, you know?”
Neil raised one eyebrow sardonically.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I laughed. “I’m not about to get a tattoo of a dream catcher and start reading tarot cards in the park. But look at it. As a force of nature, you have to be impressed. All the sand here? Washed off the bottom of the lake by the water. If you went in right now—”
“My bollocks would crawl all the way up into my neck, I’d imagine,” he quipped, laughing a little at his own joke as he looked down at his feet. He seemed strangely nervous, considering it was just the two of us.
Then he put his hands in his coat pockets, and I decided it must just be the cold.
I sighed at his juvenile humor. “As I was saying. The bottom of the lake is sandstone. Like an underwater cliff. I’ve waded out pretty far before, and I’ve never found the edge.”
“You were too frightened to find it?” His hand rummaged in his pocket as he stared out at where the gray of the sky melded into the gray of the open water farther out.
“I was.” I kicked the toe of my boot into the snow, mixing it with the sand. “Last year was the year that just kept rubbing up against us and wearing us down. So I think I know how this sand feels.”
“And now?” He was still staring off, as if he didn’t trust himself to look at me. It was like he’d been overcome by delayed stage fright from meeting my family.
“Now, I’m just glad that things are going to be more peaceful,” I said, reaching over to loop my arm through his. “We’ll go to Iceland, we’ll meet your family, then we’ll come back to New York and just…settle in.”
His laugh was strained. “You sound like you’re ready to feather a nest. I suppose we should get more serious on this house hunt?”
“If you want.” I shrugged. “I’m happy enough with everything exactly the way it is.”
“Oh?” He shrugged. “If you wanted to put off buying a house—”
“No, it’s not that.” Well, it was that. At least, some of it. “This is going to sound crazy…but if we’re going to buy a house, that’s settling down. I don’t think I want to spend the rest of my life in Manhattan.”
“Oh?” he said again. His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “When did you arrive at this conclusion?”
“Right now, actually. I haven’t been hiding it or biting my tongue.” I breathed in more clean, fresh air. “I never realized how much I missed the quiet and the open spaces. Do you think you could see yourself living outside of the city?”
“I had planned to. I’d like to retire at Langhurst Court. I thought we’d agreed upon that.” He sounded wary. “I’m always happy to discuss—”
“No, that’s… That actually makes me feel better.” I wouldn’t like being that far from my family and friends full time, but my job had definitely changed. When I’d worked at Porteras, I’d had to live in New York. Living in the city wasn’t cheap, but commuting from out of town would have been prohibitively expensive and needlessly frustrating. Now, I was writing, and if I got the job at Wake Up! America, I would still only be working on segments once a year. I could go anywhere, provided I could make it back to New York for a week here and there, so I could see Holli and Deja.
Neil smiled, then faltered, then smiled again, even bigger. “I’m very glad to hear that. I’m not ready to fully retire yet, of course, but I have been thinking about scaling back my involvement with the company. Not in any official capacity—I’m still expecting to return to a fairly heavy schedule—but I’d like to delegate more. Take some time off, travel with you. Not work myself into an early grave.”
“Then it’s settled. No enormous life changes right now.” I beamed at him, but to my surprise, his expression fell.
His posture stiffened a bit. He slipped his hands from his pockets and rubbed them together, then spoke as though he were purposefully moving on from that part of the conversation. “It’s quite beautiful out here. Cold, but quite beautiful.”
Something was definitely up with him.
“Does it look like Iceland?” I’d never seen Iceland, and I was strangely eager for some connection between our childhoods. Because of our age gap, I found myself reaching for those superficial similarities, despite logically knowing that they didn’t matter.
He squinted out at the waves tossing in the distance, far beyond the shelf of ice around the shore. “The light is different. I’ve never seen light behave the way it does in Ísland.” He added cheerfully, “You’ll see.”
I would see. After our Upper Peninsula Christmas, we’d be flying to Reykjavik for New Year’s, to spend it with his brothers and their families. Runólf had recently had a baby with his second wife—“As if becoming a first-time father weren’t terrifying enough, he had to do it at fifty-two,” Neil had lamented—and Geir had five children ranging from their teens to their twenties. It would be a far cry from the chaos of a Scaife family Christmas, but I felt just as nervous at the prospect of meeting them as Neil had been of meeting my family.
So if he was going to be this weird the entire time, it was going to be terribly inconvenient.
“If something were wrong, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” I asked, taking his hand in mine and squeezing it.
He looked penitent at once. “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. My mind was elsewhere. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Let’s go back to the car, before we freeze.” I pulled him along with me, still not sure what had caused his change in mood.
“I’m worried about Emma,” he finally confessed as I steered the car up the gravel drive to the road. “She didn’t sound like herself on the phone. She was too chipper to have just spent the day with Horrible Michael’s mother.”
I knew the reason behind Emma’s forced cheerfulness, but I couldn’t tell her father. She’d sworn me to secrecy when she’d confided that she and Michael were trying to conceive. Her concerns about her fertility had led her and Michael to begin trying for a baby shortly after they were engaged, but she didn’t want her father to know about any of it. While I knew that the reason for Emma’s emotional state was likely the arrival of yet another unwelcome menses, I couldn’t tell him that.
While gas lighting him was an option—“Are you sure you’re not just projecting your feelings of missing Emma onto her mood?”—I really wanted to st
ick to the honesty thing we’d been working on. “I know what’s wrong with her.”
“You do?”
“But I can’t tell you.”
“Why ever not?” It would drive him crazy, control freak that he was, to think I knew something about his daughter’s life when he didn’t.
I shook my head and smiled. “Because she asked me not to tell you, and she trusted me, so I’m not going to break her trust. She’s going to tell you what’s up after the wedding. But I promise, it’s nothing serious, nothing you can fix, and nothing you need to worry about.”
His mouth set in a grim line as he stared out the windshield, and I knew he wasn’t as stoically accepting as he looked. His devious mind would be furiously calculating all the ways he could find out what I knew.
“And don’t try to wheedle it out of me,” I warned him. “Emma’s trust is extremely important to me.”
He sighed. “You’re right. I suppose I should be glad that the two of you get along so well now. Even if it means you both get an opportunity to make me crazy.”
As I drove us back to the trailer where I’d grown up, Neil’s mood improved greatly. And that was oddly touching; he trusted me enough to put his worries about his daughter, the single most important person in his life, aside at my reassurance.
“Home sweet home,” I announced as I navigated the rental car down the dirt two-track through the pines at the back of my grandma’s property. The road widened into a clearing, and in the center sat the trailer I’d grown up in.
I knew it was small, probably smaller than anything Neil had ever set foot in before. I didn’t think he would love me any less, but I did wonder if he might view me differently when he saw the reality of how we’d lived. He was too good a person to make it affect his opinion of me negatively; it just wasn’t how he operated. But I wondered if he would have some misplaced rich guy pity for me.
I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it if he did.
“It’s a bit like a fairy tale cottage, isn’t it?” he mused, leaning toward the windshield to gaze up at the tall pines. “This must have been an extraordinary place to play as a child.”
The Bride (The Boss) Page 2
