I giggled. “I’ll have it tattooed somewhere. Then no one can sue me.”
“I’ll sue you,” he murmured, tightening his arms around me again, pressing me close against his body as the tip of his nose grazed mine. “For descending upon me with no warning at all—or at least a manual—and knocking me off my feet until I was falling hard and fast and for good. I now have to live a life dependent on your welfare and happiness, and forever suffering this soul-deep love you’ve inflicted on me and for which there is no cure.”
I melted a little as Brandon followed up his complaint with a sweet, slow kiss. “I think you like this suffering, Brand, and wish to be never cured from it.”
He grinned. “Never.”
And then he started kissing me deeply again, as he had been earlier before we got interrupted. I managed to push him off a little, giggling as I half-heartedly reminded him, “Brand, we probably shouldn’t stand here and keep making out.”
He didn’t release me an inch—just smiled smugly. “You heard the professor. We can carry on... for the sake of knowledge, of course.”
Whatever I had for a retort slipped away from my lips as Brandon leaned close to kiss them again.
Learning had never been so much fun.
***
Nicole agreed to meet us at this private garden cafe outside of downtown called Flower House.
It was mostly a charming, post-war bungalow on a sizable corner lot in the suburbs owned by an elderly couple who’d created one of the most beautiful gardens I've ever seen. It was brimming with lush, colorful flowers of all kinds still vibrantly in bloom even late in the summer. The canopy of trees and the vines creeping on the wall cast the cozy backyard in the shade and made you think of secret gardens and sun-dappled woods.
It definitely seemed like the perfect place for a discreet meeting. Brandon remarked it was somehow a well-known location for illicit lovers to rendezvous in.
When I arched a brow at him and asked how he would know such a thing, he just rolled his eyes and retorted that he could know things without actually having done them himself.
I actually believed Brandon but sometimes, it comforted me to make him squirm. It reminded me that his heart was at stake as much as mine was.
I know. I’m terrible.
Nicole and Zach were already there when Brandon and I arrived.
"Hi!" I said brightly when Nicole rose from the table and turned in our direction.
She was as I remembered from a distance—the small, slender frame, the light brown hair she'd pulled back into a half-ponytail, and the delicate grace of her every movement.
Up close, she was actually quite lovely with an almost ethereal quality to her. She had smiling hazel-green eyes, a heart-shaped face and a porcelain complexion. Her pale pink sundress only added sweetness to her dainty beauty like whipped frosting on an already perfect vanilla cupcake—the kind that went bad real fast if left out in the heat and at the mercy of harsh elements such as Francis Pelletier.
I took her hand in a tight clasp between both of mine. “Thank you for meeting us when I know you’re still trying to stay incognito. If the most forbidden lovers in this city can get away with meeting here, I’m confident we’re safe from any prying eyes. Brandon guarantees this place is Days-Of-Our-Lives caliber.”
Nicole blinked rapidly in surprise before bursting into a soft chuckle.
"Hello, Charlotte. It's great to finally meet you," Nicole said, sniffling back some of her laughter. “Brandon talks about you nearly as much as the local tabloids do that I thought I’d know you well by now, but you are still larger than life.”
I rolled my eyes, grinning impishly. “A little too large if you ask some people but that’s alright. I’d rather not get trampled on because someone didn’t see me.”
Brandon wrapped an arm around my waist and kissed my temple. “My wife can be a little overwhelming, Nic, but she’s a treasure.”
Nicole glanced up at him with a knowing smile. “And I can see why you just had to have her, Brand.”
My face warmed a little but I both gave them a broad smile. “I don’t think it was really because he wanted me. He merely wanted to save the rest of mankind by suffering me on his own.”
“I can see he’s in real agony,” Nicole said with a laugh and a shake of her head. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help him out of this. I think he fully deserves it.”
Some kind of cutlery fell with a clatter and we both glanced at the small boy, about two, who was studying us with big-eyed wonder.
He was perched on a high chair, chubby legs dangling, half his face covered in chocolate ganache from the mutilated cupcake in his hand.
Nicole reached out and took one of his sticky hands. "This little runt here is my son, Zach."
He turned his slow, blinking gaze to me as he clasped his mother's hand with his free one, his eyes lighting up.
I didn’t notice him right away because I was so focused on Nicole but my heart instantly melted into the consistency of the ganache smeared all over the boy's face.
"Hi, Zach!" I dropped to a squat so I could be eye to eye with the boy. "I'm your Auntie Charlotte. It's very nice to meet you."
I usually got along with children—I think they could sense the inner child in me (more often than I'd like them to, to be absolutely honest)—so it was no surprise when Zach gave me a gap-toothed grin and said, "Hi, Auntie Charlotte," which sound like "Hiyanneesharwot."
"Good enough, my man," I said with a laugh, dabbing at a small smudge of chocolate that was on the tip of his nose. He scrunched up his nose but didn't move away while I cleaned it up.
I glanced up at Nicole, who was smiling down at us, and grinned at her. "He's wonderful, Nic."
She looked pleased even as she shook her head. "He is until he gets chocolate handprints on your clothes. He thinks they're fascinating."
I turned back to Zach. "I looove chocolate handprints—during playtime, of course. Maybe next time we'll do them with paint and cover an entire big sheet with them. What do you think, Zach?"
His eyes were large and excited as he bobbed his head up and down. As to whether he understood what I said wasn’t clear but children seemed somehow wired to trust the adults.
"You know he's going to hold you up to that promise, right?" Brandon said as he came up behind me, placing his hands on my shoulders to rub them gently. "He'll be asking his mother about it every two hours until you eventually show up for it."
I rose to my feet and faced Brandon indignantly. "I'll do it. I don't break my promises to children."
Then I turned back to Nicole. "We'll set something up. Maybe you can bring Zach to the penthouse and I'll bring in other kids I know and we can make it a hand-painting day or something for all of them. I’ll make animal-shaped cookies and lots of cupcakes and they all get to decorate them!"
Brandon softly groaned while Nicole just chuckled.
"We should probably get a replacement housekeeper first if you’re about to turn the penthouse inside out," he said with a grimace. "I'm about to fire the one we currently have, if she hasn't disappeared from the face of the earth yet."
Nicole frowned. "Why? What's wrong with your housekeeper?"
I sighed, feeling again that tight knot of guilt which conflicted with my sense of justice. It irritated me, especially given the report that Brandon’s head of security, Ron, had given us while we were on our way to one of the schools. But in a way, I always felt that I may have been able to do something different that could’ve influenced Gwen not to betray us like that.
The what-ifs always come too late, don't they? If they didn’t, we would never ask them.
"She's the spy who mopped me,” I muttered under my breath but then I snorted at the cheesiness of my line. “Sorry, bad pun. Gwen is apparently the sleeper agent of He-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless-Until-He-Becomes-Worth-Our-Breath. Brandon will explain.”
“Oh,” Nicole’s eyes rounded as my words dawned on her. Her expression immediately
strained, her lips pressing into a thin, anxious line.
“Why don’t we sit down and order something to eat first?” Brandon said as he pulled a chair out for me. “When we’re full and happy, we can properly talk about it.”
So we settled down and got some food first.
Zach and I did the Battle of Honey Mustard with our potato soldiers while Brandon quietly relayed the report he got about Gwen to Nicole.
The secret camera he had set up in his office after it was burglarized showed the housekeeper snooping around for a good twenty minutes or so before I walked in on her.
She'd leafed through a good amount of files sitting around his desk and even tried to get into his computer but she couldn't manage. She was recorded hovering by the safe but didn't attempt to access it, which was smart of her as Brandon had it rigged to set off an alarm after it was easily broken into last time.
The video was sufficient evidence to show that she was definitely snooping for information but not to align her with Francis. That was where Ron had come in, conducting a private investigation about Gwen. She had mysteriously skipped town, telling her landlord that she was going to be away due to a family emergency. After questioning some of the other tenants in her apartment building and sifting through what surveillance video they got from the front lobby camera, it would seem like Francis had dropped in on our housekeeper a few times in the past month since he arrived in the country. A deeper dig on Gwen's employment records though showed that she once worked part-time as the receptionist at the resort villa in the Florida Keys where Francis owned a unit. He must have met her there because she didn’t start working for Brandon until about a year and a half ago.
“Why would he hire someone to spy on you?” Nicole asked, shaking her head in bewilderment. “If it’s too look for information about me, that’s an awful amount of time and resources he’s spending on someone he’s written out of his life. And it can’t be Zach because God knows Francis didn’t care one bit when I told him I was pregnant.”
My heart squeezed as I watched Nicole’s gaze drift to her young son who had been let off of his high chair to totter around the flower beds a couple feet away from our table.
Brandon sighed. “I think, most of it was to find some kind of leverage he could use on me. He always felt that I was holding you over his head as a secret that could ruin him with my father. He knows Dad will never accept this kind of behavior from him. He needed something to counter my threat.”
“And what wrong could you have possibly done that would ever carry any weight as a threat to you?” Nicole asked with a disbelieving expression. “I can’t imagine you would ever do anything that you’d wish to bury as deep as as you could into the ground you would pay the price Francis demands.”
I swallowed with difficulty as Brandon and I briefly exchanged glances.
Oh, we have a pretty big dead body we’ve buried under the flower bed and we’re crossing our fingers that no one bothers to sniff around and ask questions.
But Nicole knew none of the agreement Brandon and I had struck or the fact that Francis was now using that against us to draw her and Zach out.
Brandon and I had decided that until we knew exactly how we were going to deal with Francis, we weren’t going to admit to Nicole that he was blackmailing us.
She and Zach had just settled in. She was starting to put her life back together and it wouldn’t be an easy process. We wanted her to come to her own terms in how she would deal with Francis.
I, for one, wasn’t going to let him force her into difficult circumstances once again.
I cleared my throat, hoping to direct the topic away from mine and Brandon's skeleton in the closet. "Regardless of Francis's search for Brandon's Achilles heel, he definitely wants to know about you and Zach. Any reason you can think of why he would want to learn your whereabouts?"
Pain flickered across Nicole's eyes as she shook her head. "Not really. For a long time, I thought I knew Francis but when he reacted the way he did after I told him I was pregnant, I realized I didn't know him at all. I knew he was far from perfect but I never expected he would hurt me as much as he did. Why he wants to bother with me now is something only he knows. I certainly have nothing he could possibly want."
"Could he have had a change of heart?" Brandon asked quietly.
Nicole gave a weak, tremulous smile. "Knowing him the way you do, Brand, do you think he's capable of it?"
I waited as Brandon took a moment to answer. "I'm not sure. Having changed as much as I did after I met Charlotte, I won't consider it impossible. A man can change with the right reasons. I just don't know if Francis has realized those reasons."
We were all paused in a taut stretch of silence when Zach squealed in excitement as he happily pointed to a large dragonfly that was swooping around the flower bed.
Brandon rose and went to him, squatting next to the boy and telling him about the insect.
I watched Nicole as she stared at her son, an expression of tenderness and a certain haunting sadness crossing her face.
“Do you still love him?” I ventured in a hushed tone.
She didn’t have to ask who I meant.
She simply said, “What use is there to love someone you can never be with anyway? Someone who would never be the right choice for you?”
There was no straightforward answer in that statement but it was an answer in itself.
I felt a pang of sympathy.
We all have certain truths we’re ashamed to admit—whether it’s a guilty pleasure or an unrequited love for the last man to deserve you.
“I can’t say I like Francis a lot but you must’ve seen something in him to have taken the risks you did with him,” I told Nicole as my own gaze averted to my husband whose shoulders Zach had climbed on as the two of them moved on to another flower bed, trying to chase after the dragonfly.
My heart thrummed with a warm, featherlight emotion as I watched both boys. “Sometimes, all an eternally-romantic heart needs is that one glimpse of the man he could be to bear it past the beastly facade.”
“It’s a terrible risk to take, especially when behind the beastly facade is an actual beast, well-skilled in luring you in like prey,” Nicole agreed, a hint of bitterness to her tone.
Sometimes, the frog you kiss is really just a frog.
I had been lucky with Brandon.
He actually turned out to be everything I ever dreamed of and more. But not every woman lived the life of Cinderella.
“I haven’t seen Brandon in a long time, you know,” Nicole said and I arched a brow at her for the swift, not-so-suave shift of topic. She was smiling though. “The last time he came to see us was several months ago. He avoids visiting too often, not wanting to draw attention to me and Zach, but I think in his heart, seeing us made him feel guilty for what Francis had done even though it was in no way his fault.”
I sighed and sat back in my chair, taking a long sip of my cold mint tea. “Brandon thinks he has to fix everything and he doesn’t forgive himself easily if he fails. I’ve tried to cure him of it but he’s not as self-indulgent as I could be about my own shortcomings.”
“Being the Maxfield heir, the sense of responsibility is probably instilled in him forever,” she said thoughtfully. “But the Brandon I last saw more than six months ago and the Brandon who showed up at our door recently don’t seem to be the same person. He’s less serious, for one.”
I snorted. “Less stuffy, you mean? He has to be, to be married to me.”
Nicole gave a light chuckle. “True. But it doesn’t take much to see that you’ve been good for him. He seems younger, you know? Happier, too. He smiles and laughs a lot and he’s lost that look he used to wear as if the world was on his shoulders.”
I felt a rush of pleasure at the thought, especially as I glanced toward Brandon just as he threw his head back and laughed at something Zach said.
“We’ve been very lucky with each other,” I murmured softly, my gaze never leaving
the man whose name was forever etched in the deepest recesses of my heart, untouched by anything in this world.
Nicole reached forward and placed a hand over my own, her expression earnest. “I already know he’s extremely lucky to have found you and while I’m sure that there’s no need for me to point it out, I want to reassure you that Brandon is a wonderful man who will make you happy any way he can. He has a good, generous heart. I mean, just look at what he’s done for me and Zach.”
I warmed at the fierce conviction of her words. “You’re family, Nic. Of course, he’ll take care of you.”
She shrugged. “I guess but I know for a fact that Brandon’s generosity isn’t limited to his extended family. When he found me outside of the shelter, huddled and freezing with other people who were also waiting for a spot inside, he didn’t merely just come along to take me away.”
I leaned forward, intrigued. I didn’t say anything though—just simply waited for Nicole to continue.
“He deposited me in the car and went in to talk to someone in the shelter. He just... marched in... and people just gave way, even when a riot was nearly escalating as those waiting outside got more and more restless in the cold,” she went on, her gaze drifting into space as she replayed the memory. “He was gone for a good twenty minutes or so that I started worrying he was never going to make it out of there. It was one of those small, poorly organized shelters where they take in anyone, no questions asked, which was why it was so packed full. A little while later, a couple of school buses came and picked up everyone waiting outside who were unlikely to even get a spot in the shelter.”
“Oh. And where did the buses take them?”
“Where else but to a school?” Nicole said with an amused smile. “He didn’t tell me anything when he got back to the car. I read about it in an article someone wrote later that week. An anonymous benefactor had opened the doors to a nearby school gymnasium for these homeless people where they were provided cots and blankets. Staff had arrived with loads of hot soup and bread and water to last them through the night. Three months later, the entire block corner where the shelter was located was purchased by another anonymous benefactor and converted into a massive, well-funded and well-organized lodging for the poor and homeless. It was renamed St. Martin House, if you’ve heard about it.”
The Mischievous Mrs. Maxfield Page 65
