He might be running a little slow, but he wasn’t
that
slow. “What others?”
Now she looked up at him, this time her face truly guilty. He knew by looking at her that she hadn’t let it slip on accident. This was the secret she held the tightest, the one he could never get her to explain. “Adam has other kids. Another wife, another whole family.”
Lucas struggled to sit up further. “Why haven’t I heard about this before? How do you know?”
“I…I followed him. I found two of his sons. They look like Bailey, if you can believe it.” The same dark hair and dark eyes as her brother. Spitting images of their father.
“Adam knows about this?”
“Oh yeah.” She started pacing again. “I made
sure
he knew. I walked right up to the door and waited for the bastard to open it up. Why do you think he finally started acting like a human being? Well, to everyone else. He knows if I tell my mother he has another family… God, he drove cross-country. There could be dozens of other Riggses all over the place. If she knew, she’d leave him. Even my mother has her limits.”
None that Lucas had ever heard of. “You’re protecting him?”
Belinda shook her head. “No, I’m protecting
her
. All of them. For the rock-bottom price of his utmost hatred, I made him quit drinking, treat his children like they’re his and keep his hands to himself. If he raises so much as a finger to her or those grandkids, I’ll ram the truth down his throat so fast he’ll choke on it before she ever gets a
chance
to leave him. He hates me anyway, so I figured it was a good deal.”
“Except?” There had to be a
but
in there somewhere.
“Except…most nights, I think about the two boys I saw in that house. It’s been ten years, but in my mind, they’re still about eight years old, staring at me, trying to figure out who I am and why their father never comes home anymore.”
“Belle.” Lucas reached out for her, but she shook her head and stayed too far away.
“I was autocratic, so damn full of myself and what I wanted. I destroyed those boys’ family without even thinking about it. That’s the kind of person I am, Lucas. That’s why I didn’t deserve you. I couldn’t even imagine what I would do to you. I didn’t want to know what it would be like when
your
eyes were the ones I was haunted by. But I was haunted anyway.”
“Belinda, you’re not like him,” he said with as much authority as he could. “You’re a pain in the ass—no one in their right mind is going to say otherwise—but you don’t hurt people because it makes you feel better about yourself. You’ve never built yourself up by tearing anyone else down. If anything, you’re so busy tearing into yourself, you don’t have the damn time to do it to anyone else.”
Her eyes finally met his, wet and tortured. “I did it to you. I faked cutting up the lace so you’d leave me alone, once and for all.”
He stared at her, speechless.
“Are you stunned or angry?”
“I think I’m too tired to decide.” Didn’t she realize cutting up the lace was what finally got them together? Or would a smart man keep quiet?
“I was worried your ego might get dented.” She shook her head, obviously reassessing.
Hell, some people would say his ego was indestructible. “The only thing that ever really hurt me was watching what you do to yourself.”
She finally smiled at him, a shaky grin despite the tears on her face. “You were at the banquet, weren’t you? I didn’t imagine you?”
He nodded.
“Why did you leave?”
“Aside from the fact that I was about to lose an organ coughing so much?”
She walked back to his side of the bed. “Aside from that.”
He took hold of her hand and pulled her down to sit next to him. “Because if I didn’t leave, I was going to go up on that stage and drag you home until I could shake some sense into you.”
She looked around, amused. “I can see how your leaving really prevented that.”
“Yeah, well.” He watched her coil her fingers through his, then he made room for her when she kept his hand around her waist and lay back down with him, snuggling into his side.
“You had me really worried, Lonnigan. Kyle’s lost half his hair and Jessica has enough soup stock to last you the next six months.”
“Sorry.” He smiled into her hair. “A man has to do what he has to do, I guess.”
“Please, do not even try to claim you got this sick just to get me back over here.”
“It would have worked if it had been a plan.”
“Just be grateful it wasn’t. As it is, I have to spend the next couple of years making you pay for scaring me like this.”
“Yeah, how many do you think it will take?”
“Oh, fifty, probably. Maybe sixty. People in my family seem to live for-freaking-ever.”
He frowned. “Is this some sort of proposal?”
She tilted her face up at him, her cheeks flushing. “That depends, I guess.”
Damn woman and her conditions.
“On what?”
“On if you can forgive me.”
“For?” This should be good.
“You’re just going to make me say it all, aren’t you?”
“
My
fantasy,
my
happily ever after, so I’m going to go with yes.” And smile the whole way through.
“Can you forgive me for being afraid of loving you?” she asked softly, laying her hand over his heart. “For being pigheaded and cruel? For hurting you?”
“What about for hurting yourself?”
She nodded resolutely, if not completely convinced. “I’m working on it.”
“Anything you want to let me in on?”
“I told you I went to see my mother.”
“And?”
She groaned, bringing her hand up to riffle through the blonde hair on her head, only slightly longer than his own. “I finally sat down and talked with her. I guess it started with what you said to me about what I deserved. At the banquet, Yvonne tried to threaten me when I won. She said I didn’t deserve it. But then I had you in my head, telling me I should be proud of myself, of my work. No one has ever been proud of me, Lucas. I didn’t know what to do with it. But when I looked at that crowd of people clapping, I knew I’d earned it. That I’d done something worth being proud of. But it didn’t mean anything without you there.”
“I was there.” He pulled her as close as his sore arms and ribs would let him. “I couldn’t have missed that night, even if you and I never worked things out. I needed to see you succeed.”
“And after you did, you ran away like a little girl,” she added sarcastically.
At least admitting she loved him hadn’t changed her so drastically. “You have to work on your proposing skills.”
She laughed.
“I’d pushed you enough, Belle. I could push and push all I wanted, but if you weren’t ready for me, we were just going to keep hurting each other. Backing you into a corner wasn’t the way to make you love me.”
“We were trying to set each other free.” She sounded almost awed. “Do you realize that’s the one thing my parents were never capable of?”
“What your parents have might be love, Belle, but it’s not the only kind out there. It doesn’t have to be the kind
you
have. You have to trust yourself—trust me—enough to try for something better.”
“I know. I realized when I was talking to her. We’re not like them. They hurt each other to squeeze more love out of each other. The only reason
we
hurt each other is because we keep trying to protect each other from ourselves.”
“It sounds stupid when you put it that way,” he grumbled. He liked to think of their attempts as sacrifices.
“It
was
stupid,” she insisted. “Which means protecting you can’t be so high on my list anymore. I’ll have to let you have it with both barrels now.”
He’d be dead by dawn. “Have you considered talking instead of arguing?”
She looked up with a slim raised eyebrow.
Damn, couldn’t she give him the smallest break? “All right, but we could at least try talking things out calmly
before
breaking down and yelling.”
“Maybe we should work that into the wedding vows,” she said with a laugh.
Lucas lurched to a sitting position, pulling her awkwardly up with him.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, not helping in the slightest.
“Looking for my pants. What day is it? There’s flights to Vegas every day, aren’t there?”
“Lucas.” She laughed, a tinkling, easy sound, even as she shoved him back into bed. “We’re not going to Vegas.”
“Yes we are. You change your mind too damn quick for anything else.”
“No, we’re going to have a nice wedding, with people watching and everything. I’m even going to wear that wedding veil you bought me.”
That opened his eyes open. “That was a
wedding
veil
?”
“Yes, dumbass. When else does a woman wear a twelve-foot-long veil?”
How was
he
supposed to know? “You’d really wear it? Do the entire embarrassing event?”
“The whole nine yards.”
Lucas narrowed his eyes at her, looking for the loophole she expected to use. “The white dress and somebody’s crying kid dripping their way down the aisle, too?”
“If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll get. I’m sure one of my sisters has an available drippy kid or two.”
“What do
you
want?” he asked with a faint frown. “I don’t want you to put on some show just for me.”
“But
I
do. I want to show you off, Lonnigan. It’s not every day I get to dress you up, drag you out in front of people you know and force you to be nice to them. That alone is worth letting my mom sob all over satin dresses. And there is the added bonus of making my father foot the bill.”
“He’ll want to walk you down the aisle,” Lucas had to remind her. It would be the first time in history a bride might get into a brawl before being handed to her prospective husband.
She snorted. “Like hell he will, but he’ll probably have to.”
“You’d be all right with it?”
She shrugged, a touch of unease tightening her lips. “Five minutes on his arm for a lifetime on yours?” She shook her head, the fine strands of her hair falling over her forehead while her dark eyes sparkled. “That’s not even a question, Lonnigan. The good news is that I get to leave him behind. Him and every bad memory he brings with him. We get to start over. You and me, like new.”
“Does that mean you’ll finally stop holding our childhood over my head?”
“I said
like
new. Be realistic.”
The next question would probably kill the mood, but he had to ask. “What about having kids?”
He got the typical Belinda eye roll instead.
“It’d be nice to know what’s a possibility or not.”
She took a few minutes to think about it, laying her head on his shoulder, thankfully not squirming away. “I’m not ready for kids yet,” she finally said.
He held his breath, holding on to that “yet”.
“I don’t think it would be too bad of an idea to have one or two someday. Not seven, though, okay? And they’ll be the crankiest kids on the planet. You know that, don’t you?”
He grinned. This was really happening. It didn’t seem real…but it was. It really was. “Probably worse than either of us.”
“We’ll need a plan for childcare.”
He coughed again, this time on laughter. “We’re going to need a whole damn constitution.”
“No matter what, I keep working,” she insisted, her pointer finger already up for battle.
“You think
I’m
going to quit?” he asked.
“No.”
“So why should you? Which means we’re even. We’ve got a plan. We’ll get married.”
“And live happily ever after,” she added with a frown.
“Why do I sense another ‘but’ in there somewhere?” He groaned, burrowing the back of his head into his pillow. He wanted to sleep, damn it.
“It’s probably going to take me a while to get any good at this,” she said, sounding a little too similar to a horror movie.
“Good at what?”
“Being an
us
.”
“We’ve always been an
us
,” he replied, relieved. “We just didn’t admit it.”
“I’m serious, Lucas. I’m not my sisters. They seemed to take to couplehood like ducks to water. I’ve never taken to anything that way, not even art. I’m bound to get scared.”
He kissed her head. “So am I. But I’ll just hold on to you a little tighter. And you can hold on to me.”
“You really think we can make this work?” she asked, worried enough to be biting her lip.
He freed the flesh from her teeth with a gentle pull from his thumb. That was his favorite lip, couldn’t have her denting it. “I think we can. I mean, if you think about it, the only thing we
haven’t
done so far is try.”
Then she smiled. Without sadness, worry or fear. It was the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen in his life. And he knew, no matter what battles they might have, trials or aggravations, she’d be in his arms every day for the rest of his life.