The Bride (The Boss) (3 page)

“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 stick 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.”

I frowned. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’d had plenty of happy hours pretending to be Belle rescuing the Beast from wolves, or chasing imaginary white rabbits into imaginary holes. “Yeah. It was, actually.”

“I used to love our family vacations to Austria. The forests were spectacular for pretending to be soldiers or hunters. Or bears.” He smiled at the memory, and I had to admit, the idea was cute. I’d seen photos of him as a child, and he’d been absolutely adorable. He and his sister would have looked like Hansel and Gretel playing in the woods.

Mom wasn’t back yet, so I retrieved the house key from the mouth of the frog fountain in the unused birdbath and let us in. I flicked on the light.

It’s amazing how home always smells like home, no matter how long you’ve been away.

Mom had made everything as neat as a pin. A stack of blankets, sheets, and pillows were on the sleeper sofa, waiting for us to make up our bed. Well, waiting for Sophie and the young, twenty-something Neil mom had pictured. I had no illusions about how the night would go when she got back.

“This is pretty much it,” I said as Neil stepped in behind me, carrying our bag. I took it from him and put it down in the space between the end of the couch and the entertainment center. Then I shrugged off my coat and gestured around. “Through there is the kitchen, beyond that is the dining room. Over that way is the bathroom, and my old bedroom. But that’s my mom’s now.”

“You and your mother shared a bedroom when you were growing up?” He sounded shocked at the idea.

“Nope.” I shrugged. “Mom slept on the couch out here, and I got the bedroom. She’s probably still got my posters up, if you want to see how embarrassing my life truly was.”

He took off his coat and laid it over the arm of my mom’s Lay-Z-Boy. “I don’t think it looks embarrassing at all. You were clearly raised by a very loving—if loud—protective family. You had a comfortable home, a caring parent, and you grew up to be a woman I love very much.”

“Awww!” I stepped into his arms and hugged him hard. His chest was so firm and warm under my wind-burned cheek. I tilted my head up to kiss him, but first I said, “My family is loud?”

“I could barely understand anything they were saying, with all the background noise.” He made a disgusted sound, but not at my family. I’d heard that huffy exhalation before. “I feel ancient.”

“You’re not ancient. Chemotherapy can damage your hearing. You know that,” I said, reaching up to touch his face. I cupped his jaw with my hand, and he leaned his cheek against my palm. “Besides I kind of like being able to mutter under my breath without you hearing.”

“What was that?” he asked, widening his eyes and leaning slightly forward so that I would take the bait. And, because I’m too nice and trustworthy a person, I began repeating what I’d said before. He grinned, I realized the joke, and I smacked his chest.

“How do you manage to fall for that every single time?” he laughed.

“I was trying to console you!” I rose on my tiptoes, and he bent his head to kiss me. I’d meant to give him a brief peck, but what I ended up getting was a thorough tongue-fucking that made me lose my balance and lean against him. His hands slipped down my back, over my ass, and he lifted his head and cursed softly.

I opened my eyes to see the illumination of approaching headlights skating over the faux-wood paneling. “Mom’s home,” I said with a resigned sigh.

“The point of coming here was for you to see your mother, and now you’re trying to avoid her?” He stepped back and ran a hand through his hair. “Do I look like I was just ravishing you?”

“No, you’re fine. Except…wipe my lipstick off your mouth.” I brushed my thumb over the smudge of MAC Pre-Raphaelite that stained his lower lip.

The door opened and Mom stepped in, faked normal at the sight of our close proximity, and held out a huge Tupperware bowl. Neil stepped over quickly to take it from her.

“Potato salad,” she said as she handed it to him. “I think that’s the wrong color on you, Neil.”

His blush was kind of cute.

“Do you need us to bring anything in from the car?” I asked as she slipped off her coat and hung it on the pegged shelf beside the door.

“Nothing that can’t keep until morning.” Mom pushed her sleeves back. “I want to get some quality time in with my daughter, if that’s okay.”

This time, when she hugged me, it wasn’t a stiff armed, suspicious hug. She was also faintly alcohol scented, so I was
so
glad she’d been driving.

When she stepped back, she called to Neil, who was trying in vain to find room for the giant Tupperware bowl in the tiny galley kitchen, to ask, “Are you hungry, Neil? Do you need something to eat?”

“No, thank you, no. Still quite stuffed from this afternoon.”

Mom smirked at me and mouthed, “Quite.”

I mouthed back, “Stop.”

I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to stop doing, but I had this horrible feeling that what I’d meant was, “Stop finding my boyfriend cute.”

“How about drinks, then?” Mom suggested. “Neil, put that down, I’ll find a place for it in the fridge. What are you having?”

“Oh, um…” He stepped into the living room and let Mom past; the kitchen of a single-wide trailer was really a one-person show. “What do you have in the way of scotch?”

“I don’t know about scotch, but I have a fifth of Wild Turkey,” Mom offered. The bottles in the refrigerator door tinkled, and I heard stuff moving on the shelves. “And I’ve got some Jack.”

Neil looked like my mother had just asked him if he wanted to drink gasoline, but he managed to choke out, “I-I think Jack Daniels would be fine.”

“Rocks?”

He nodded, then, remembering she couldn’t see him, said, “Yes, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Have a seat before you fall down,” I murmured, steering him toward the couch. His sudden case of nerves was a combination, I thought, of his claustrophobia in the small trailer and the realization that we were all alone with my mother. It was only five o’clock, and she had plenty of time to ask us whatever she wanted.

When I’d first met Neil’s daughter, Emma, it had not been under the best of circumstances. She’d come home unexpectedly and overheard her father and I having headboard-slamming, obscenity-shouting sex. I’d felt so super awkward around her for longest time after that, so I couldn’t help but feel that Neil’s discomfort around my mother was a little bit of life balancing the scales.