The Surrogate Husband Page 17

  The wooden boards of the gazebo creaked under Johnny’s substantial weight as he paced the circular floor. “Integrity is something I never compromise on, ma’am. But I suppose Dex didn’t actually lie to me since he isn’t really in a relationship with your niece.”

  Oh, but I am.

  He could just let that one go, but Bev knew better. As she eyed him now, he could see the wheels turning in her head, trying to decide what she should say, if she should throw him under the bus. Because God knew she had every right to, after everyone had deceived her all weekend. Without a single word exchanged, they had an entire conversation. She silently let him know that she knew he loved Lucy, regardless that they weren’t married. And she could share that information with Johnny. Or not.

  If Johnny backed out of the deal, well…that would suck. Bad. But somehow, Dex would figure out a way to restore his father’s retirement account. It could take a while, and his dad might have to work longer than Dex had hoped. Disappointing, but doable. He’d been using Johnny as an excuse when all along, it had been fear, plain and simple, that had made him want to keep from falling for Lucy.

  Yet how could he expect Lucy and her family to be honest when he wasn’t holding himself to the same standard? Whatever the consequences, he’d have to deal with them.

  He cleared his throat, stood taller. “Johnny, there’s something you should know.”

  “Yes?”

  Glimpsing Lucy across the lawn, he prayed she’d forgive him, and that today wouldn’t be the last time she’d give him that lovely smile. He met Johnny’s stare. “Although I agreed to play Lucy’s husband as a favor to her, our relationship hasn’t remained…platonic.” He thought about all she’d come to mean to him, everything they’d done together, all the feelings and emotions she’d inspired. “Actually, I didn’t mean to, but I’ve fallen in love with her.”

  Johnny sank onto the bench wearing a scowl. “Damn it, Dex. You know how I feel about that sort of thing.”

  He nodded. “I do. But I share your opinion about integrity, so I had to tell you the truth.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Lucy coming toward them, vague worry etched on her forehead. Had she sensed what was going on?

  He offered up a silent prayer that she’d understand and forgive him.

  Bev stood up. “I’m not quite sure what’s going on between you gentlemen, but I do know that my family has broken my heart, and I need some time alone, immediately.”

  The knots in Dex’s gut tightened. “Bev—”

  “Not now, Dex.” Aided by her cane, she descended the steps just as Lucy approached.

  “Is everything all right?” Lucy asked her.

  “It most definitely is not,” Bev replied.

  Lucy closed her hand over her throat and looked up at Dex. “What’s going on?”

  Please don’t hate me, Lucy.

  Dex rubbed his forehead but a headache roared to life.

  “You all lied to me,” Bev said.

  Lucy took her aunt’s hand. Her expression was pure misery from the deep furrow of her brow to her pinched-tight lips. “Aunt Bev, I’m so sorry. This was all just a huge misunderstanding that ballooned out of control.”

  Bev poked a finger at her. “Everyone’s in on it, hmm?”

  Lucy stared down at the ground but said nothing.

  “Since when does a misunderstanding include you and the entire family lying to me?” Tears spilled onto her cheeks, finding paths in her wrinkled skin. “You’ve all deceived me the entire weekend. How could you?”

  Lucy tried to hold her, to console her, but Bev nudged her away.

  Lucy let out an anguished sigh that cut Dex to the quick.Great. Had he lost Lucy and screwed up his parents’ future in one fell swoop?

  He met Lucy’s stare, then wished he hadn’t. The hurt he found there was unbearable. “Lucy, please hear me out. Your aunt was planning more than just the move here. There was a cruise over Christmas, and who knows what else? We couldn’t have continued this ruse indefinitely. Someone had to fix this and set her straight.”

  “And you decided that someone should be you, huh? Who the hell put you in control of everything?” Red splotches colored her cheeks.

  Before he could stop her, she’d run off.

  She’d never forgive him.

  Trisha stepped up to the gazebo and set a comforting hand on Dex’s shoulder. “I know it’s none of my business, but I couldn’t help but overhear part of your conversation.”

  Johnny shook his head. “My apologies, dear. A bride shouldn’t have her special day burdened with such unpleasantness.”

  “Can I tell you something?” She sat beside Johnny. “My folks were your clients for many years. And your friends for what, thirty, thirty-five years now? So I can be straight with you. You remember a young woman who had temped for you, then came to work at my parents’ company? A secretary, her name was Jean something.”

  He nodded. “Vaguely.”

  “Jean ended up working for them for almost twenty years. She had some not-so-nice things to say about you, about how difficult you were to work for. I remember her using words like oppressive, rigid, close-minded.” She threw a surreptitious wink at Dex.

  Johnny grumbled something unintelligible.

  Trisha patted his knee as she stood. “All I’m saying is that maybe it’s time to lighten up a bit. The best wedding present you could give me would be to ease up on Dex.” With that, she left.

  “I don’t expect you to honor that,” Dex told him.

  Johnny pulled himself up. “What some people call rigid and close-minded, others might consider steadfast and persevering. As a CPA, your honesty and integrity must always be above reproach.”

  Dex stood taller. “My record stands on its own. And this thing between Lucy and me…it was just supposed to be a one-or-two-day thing to appease her aunt. I couldn’t help falling for her, sir.” Which was as honest as it got. “Trisha’s right, though. It’s time to lighten up. I don’t want to be a part of a company where the staff is terrified of management. The most productive companies have a teamwork spirit. It’s high time to lose the dictator model.”

  For a moment, Johnny looked as if he was going to explode. Then he glanced toward the lawn where the guests were dancing and socializing. “I need some time to think about all this.” He descended the steps of the gazebo. “We’ll talk about this next week.”

  Dex gave the merger’s chances of surviving a fifty-fifty shot. His relationship with Lucy, on the other hand—odds there were way grimmer.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The bottom dropped out of Lucy’s world. Somehow she made her way from the gazebo to the porch, then grasped the railing, which was blessedly at least a football field away from the tent where the wedding dance was taking place. She felt as if she were drowning all over again. Who did Dex think he was to take it upon himself to tell Aunt Bev the truth? Taking it upon himself to control the situation. To control her life?

  She should have known.

  He came toward her, but she held up her hands defensively. “Go away.”

  “Please, Lucy, hear me out.”

  Across the lawn, the band played a slow, sappy song, and the bride and groom danced, thankfully oblivious to the drama playing out near the back porch. To hell with romance. Who needed it?

  Setting her hands on her hips, she faced him. “I asked you not to tell her, and you did anyway. Was my family’s secret just too messy for your neat, orderly life? All you had to do was maintain the pretense for three days. Three days. But you had to do it your way, didn’t you?”

  “Do you really think you could have fooled her forever?” He rubbed his forehead. “We have something special, Lucy. Better to build that on a foundation of truth.”

  “Past tense. I’m done. Just leave me alone.”

  Thankfully, after only a moment’s hesitation, he did.

  What had she been thinking? Not only had she handed over control of her emotions to a ma
n, but she’d broken Aunt Bev’s heart. She’d never felt like such a loser. Her world darkened with a gloom she’d never before known.

  And the hits kept coming. Now she had to share the news with the rest of the family that Bev knew the truth. She headed over to the tent and found her relatives eating wedding cake. After a stiff drink for courage, she told several family members the bad news.

  Her stepfather Jack scratched his head. “I don’t understand why Dex spilled his guts to Bev.”

  Her mother pushed frosting around her plate. “No telling. This is all my fault. I never should have lied to Aunt Bev or asked Lucy to go along with my story. All I wanted was to comfort a woman I thought was dying, and now I’ve destroyed her relationship with all of us. I’m so sorry.”

  Niki hugged her. “Do you want me to try to talk to her?”

  Mom shook her head. “If she said she wants to be alone, we need to give her some time.” She wrung her hands.

  Man, it destroyed Lucy to see her mother cry. Mom had wept all the time before she’d left their father and for a long while after, but Lucy had never gotten used to it. She held back her own tears, but if she didn’t get away from all of them soon, she knew she’d lose it.

  Alan gestured for them to gather around him. “Folks, can you all take this inside? No offense—because I know a whole lot of bad stuff just went down—but this is our wedding day, and our guests don’t need to hear all about the family’s problems today.”

  Lucy mustered all her strength and hugged him. “You’re right. We don’t want to ruin your day. I’m so sorry.” After a glance over her shoulder at Dex, who was sitting all alone by the pool, she headed inside to the TV room, out of earshot of the rest of the guests.

  She tried to keep away the black cloud that kept threatening to engulf her. There was no other choice but to suck it up, at least for the time being. Later she could break down, and she was sure she would.

  The family piled in after her, minus the bride and groom, who’d stayed outside with their friends. Lucy shut the door behind them.

  “What are we going to do?” Jonathan poured himself a drink at the bar then tipped his chin at his rocks glass. “Anyone else want one of these?”

  Niki climbed onto a barstool. “I’d like a Tom Collins.”

  Jonathan folded his arms and cocked his head to the side. “You can have vodka or gin straight or with soda.”

  “Next year, after she turns twenty-one,” Mom said.

  Niki huffed. “Seriously, Mom? Do you think I drink lemonade when I go out with my college friends?”

  No wonder Lucy’s first instinct was always to run away from these family powwows. They were a collective train wreck, and at the moment, she felt like the caboose, struggling to keep chugging along despite her overwhelming need to curl up into a ball and cry all her tears out.

  “Can we discuss the issue at hand, please? We need to figure out how we’re going to handle the situation with Aunt Bev.”

  Her mother sat on the sofa. “I got us all into this. I’ll go to her and tell her it isn’t anyone’s fault but mine. I hate that I dragged the rest of you into it.”

  Lucy sank into the seat next to her and held her hand, taking as much comfort as she gave. “I jumped on-board, too. Once Aunt Bev calms down, I think she’ll hear us out. Nothing we did was malicious.”

  “No, but we all still lied to her.” Niki pressed her fingers into a steeple. “I wonder if she’ll still move to Miami after this.”

  Lucy had been selfishly wishing that her aunt would change her mind about the move. But now that they were past the problem of the fake marriage, she realized it would be great to have Bev close by.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Come in,” Jack said.

  Dex took a couple steps inside, looking like hell with new lines around his mouth and crossing his forehead. “I know I’m not a part of this family, but I sort of was for a few days. I want to apologize for what I did.”

  Lucy tried to banish the empathy she suddenly felt for him.

  He shifted from foot to foot. “Can I speak to you, Lucy?”

  She clenched her jaw to keep her tears from spilling. After taking a moment to find her voice, she said, “It’s too soon.”

  Her mom squeezed Lucy’s hand.

  He nodded. “Well, I’m sorry.” With that he left the room.

  No one said anything for a minute or two.

  “Poor guy,” Niki said. “He obviously feels terrible for what he did.”

  All Lucy knew was she’d never let another man into her heart. Even though their fake marriage was short, it had been good. But she’d been right all along to avoid emotional entanglements. Dex had tried to take over and control things, just as she’d feared he would. Exactly as Richard had. Much as she’d tried to safeguard her heart, she’d let herself fall for Dex. She wasn’t really safe with any guy.

  This whole experience had only confirmed her deepest held belief.

  Nothing hurt as bad as love.

  …

  Dex knocked on Bev’s door at the inn.

  “Go away,” she said.

  Leaning his head against the wood, he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “I’m not going anywhere until you hear me out.”

  “I don’t want to speak to anyone.”

  Maybe not, but she could listen. “I know you must feel very hurt right now, really betrayed,” he said to her through the door. “But before you make any rash decisions, you should consider where Michelle and Lucy were coming from.”

  When she didn’t respond, he continued. “I didn’t want to go into all this in front of Johnny Bass, but as I understand it, everyone thought you were dying when Michelle and Alan visited you in Wisconsin. Lucy says you had a very happy marriage, and that you wanted the same for her because she’d suffered so much at her father’s hand when she was growing up.” He ached inside when he thought about what she must have gone through, living with the sort of bastard who’d stand by and let his kid nearly drown.

  “Michelle was thinking she couldn’t let you slip away thinking that Lucy was going to continue living in her self-imposed isolation. She said you wanted to believe that Lucy would marry and be happy, like you were with your husband.

  “And then you recovered. They were so thrilled, but then Michelle didn’t have the heart to tell you the truth about Lucy.” He sat on the floor outside her door, with his back against the wall. “They all love you so much, Bev. Everyone went to great lengths to ensure that you kept believing the story that made you so happy. Only people who care about you a whole lot would do something like that.”

  He thought about Lucy, how he’d wanted her in the time he’d known her.

  “Something happened to me while I was pretending to be in love with Lucy. I really fell for her. I just couldn’t admit it because…well, ethically it was a conundrum for me with her being my client. It’s a long story that I can’t really go into now, but when my relationship with Lucy took a romantic turn for real, there were repercussions. Not just for me and my company, but for my folks as well. Johnny Bass was planning to buy my accounting firm, but now that deal might not happen.”

  He heard the floor creak from inside the room, but Bev still remained silent.

  So he went on. “His company is traded on the stock market, so it’s imperative that advance word of things like mergers stays quiet. Theoretically, I could be cited by the SEC and even lose my certification for telling you all this. I didn’t want to put myself or Lucy in that position.”

  Bev sniffled.

  “Foolishly, I assumed that being with her this weekend would get her out of my system. Crazy, huh? But this ruse made me realize how good we could be together,” he said. “Something changed, and the pretense stopped. I began to care about her.” He stretched his legs out. “You know better than most that despite her tough shell, inside she’s still wrestling with the same demons she was two decades ago. So is her mother. They did what they did out of love
for you.” He paused, considered what he was going to say next. “And I did what I did out of love for Lucy. I love her, Bev. Just like you hoped for us. But I don’t know if I can get her to love me back.”

  The lock clicked. He held his breath as he offered up a silent thanks.

  Bev opened the door a couple inches. “What are you doing on the floor?”

  He got to his feet. “Sorry. I figured I was going to be here a while.”

  She let him into her room, a smaller version of the one he’d shared with Lucy. “You’re quite the eloquent gentleman. I appreciate everything you said.” She sat on the bed.

  His mood brightened a little. “Does that mean you’ll forgive them?”

  She huffed. “I’m hurt, Dex. I need a little time. But of course I will. They’re family. And you’ve become family this weekend.” She extended her arms toward him.

  He closed the distance between them and gave her a hug. “Thank you.”

  “Johnny seemed quite upset with you. Hopefully you can salvage your deal. And I pray you can convince Lucy to forgive you. Give her some time.”

  A golf-ball-sized lump formed in his throat. “Good advice.” Hopefully time would help. Because without the woman he’d fallen in love with, nothing would be right ever again.

  …

  Lucy grabbed her things from the dresser drawers in the room she shared with Dex and stuffed it all into her suitcase. Her mom and Jack were leaving the inn in an hour, and she wanted to have her things cleared out before Dex decided to show up to pack.

  The pain was too raw for her to face him. Not that she had anyone to blame but herself.

  She opened the third drawer of the dresser—the one he’d been using—and glimpsed his neatly folded boxers and carefully paired socks.

  The signs had all been there, staring her in the face. Everything about Dex was eerily similar to either Richard or her dad, from the way he organized his clothes to the fact that he worked in a mathematically based career, just as Richard had. Why hadn’t she realized before that he also had that take-over-everything compulsion that the other two did?