Royal Chase (26 page)

I would have to pay my parents back for all the money they’d spent on this wedding. I’d have to return the gifts, write apologies—it was all going to be overwhelming. I was also going to have to shut down my business. Matthew Burdette would make sure of that. Everything I had worked so hard for was just gone. I sighed and squeezed my eyes shut, afraid I might start crying again. But I had so dehydrated myself over the last two days that there were no more tears.

All I had to do was get through tonight, and deal with everything else tomorrow.

I put my face on, and then the ivory sheath dress with a silver lace overlay that I had so excitedly picked out weeks ago for this night.

The doorbell rang, and I could hear voices downstairs. My family, Sterling’s family, close friends, so many people were there to celebrate.

I came downstairs with a smile glued to my face. I said hello and hugged people and pretended like everything was fine.

And hoped that no one could see how devastated I truly was.

Sterling came in, and I had thought that there might have been something—a moment, a spark, anything. But there wasn’t. I knew then that I had made the absolute right choice in letting him go.

He came to greet me, and I offered him my cheek. I didn’t like the reminder of Dante, but I didn’t want him to kiss me, either. He didn’t seem to notice. “Lemon! I haven’t seen you in so long!”

I thought,
And whose fault is that?

He studied me for a moment. “You look tired.” They should really give boys in high school a class entitled, “Things You Should Never Say to a Woman.”

“You look like you’ve got some lines around your eyes. Although, I suppose that’s what plastic surgery’s for, right?” He actually laughed. Kat was right. He was a jerk. How did I not see that before?

“What if I get fat? Is that what plastic surgery’s for, too?” He seemed a little bit surprised by the venom in my voice.

“Don’t be silly. That’s what diets and exercise are for. Excuse me a second, but I need to go thank your parents for hosting this evening.” He walked away.

Dante had at least said he would love me despite those things. Dante. A sharp pain pierced my heart. How could I be thinking of him right then? He didn’t deserve it.

Ellis Wetherly sauntered in the front door carrying a bottle of wine. I just got cheated on again, and the woman who helped the very first guy to ever cheat on me was in my house. That white-hot rage roared to life inside me, and my gaze flicked over to the antique candlesticks on my right. She was lucky I was more scared of getting blood on my mother’s hardwood floor than I was angry.

It had been six years since she’d screwed me over, and I still disliked her just as much as I had back then. “Lemon, honey. How are you?”

She hugged me, but I didn’t return her greeting. “What are you doing here?”

“Didn’t you know?” She gave me a puzzled look, but I could tell she knew exactly what she was doing and how much she enjoyed doing it. “I work at Sterling’s daddy’s law firm as an associate.”

He had told me he had to stay up all night with the other associates. I wondered if she was one of them, and what kind of work they’d been up to. “Are you working with Sterling?”

She gave me a catlike smile. “We do work together. Intimately.”

I didn’t know if she was just trying to mess with me, but in that moment I knew what was happening with them like I knew with Abigail and Burdette. No wonder he turned his phone off. They were sleeping together.

Strangely enough, the murderous anger faded. I just didn’t care. “I hope the two of you will be very happy together,” I said, and she looked both confused and shocked as I walked off.

I went out on to the back porch, needing to have a second to myself. It definitely said something that Dante’s cheating had sent me into a downward spiral that made me wonder whether I should seek psychiatric care, and Sterling’s wasn’t even a blip on the radar.

Looking up at the stars, I had a moment where I wondered whether I had misunderstood the situation at the mansion. What if that was Rafe? Something had felt off about him, but I had assumed it was the anger and the cheating. But what if it wasn’t? What if he had really been there? But wouldn’t I have known that?

Was it possible? Anything was possible. The South could rise again. Possible, but not probable.

What if I had been wrong?

I wasn’t. If I had been wrong, Dante would have been here by now. He would have called his private plane and would have been in Atlanta before I got here. He would have called. He would have ridden up in his shining armor on his white horse to take me back to his castle, all his quests completed. Something.

Instead I had a big fat nothing.

No job, no fiancé, nothing.

I went into the kitchen, surrounded by the catering staff my mother had hired. Nobody tried to talk to me, and I liked being anonymous and ignored. Nobody to ask me if I was excited about tomorrow, nobody making innuendoes about the honeymoon, nobody telling me how lucky I was to be marrying Sterling.

I didn’t want to be surrounded by my loved ones, standing alongside the man I was supposed to marry, because I realized that the only man I had ever truly loved was Dante.

Dante, who didn’t come for me. Dante, who had cheated on me. Dante, who could never be the man I needed him to be.

The doorbell rang again, and I heard my mother calling my name. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to stand around talking to people and pretending like my life wasn’t in shambles.

“Lemon!” she said as she came into the kitchen, looking very bewildered. “There’s someone at the front door to see you.”

It was him. He had finally come.

Chapter 26

Sometimes I think it would be the best thing in the world to be someone’s favorite hello and hardest good-bye.

Heart in my throat, I followed my mother. What would I do when I saw him? Should I tell him to leave? That I didn’t want to hear any more of his lies?

Some part of my heart pleaded with me to listen.

But it wasn’t Dante standing in the foyer.

It was Taylor. “Can we talk? Privately?”

I led her into my father’s study and closed the pocket doors behind us.

“Is that your rehearsal dinner?” she asked, sitting down on the brown leather sofa. She started chewing the end of her fingernails. I sat in my father’s favorite armchair, facing her.

“It is.” What was she doing here? Did she think she was going to convince me to come back to film the finale?

That would not happen.

“So you’re still getting married tomorrow?”

“Not that it is any of your business, but no, I’m not.”

She leaned forward. “Because you’re in love with Dante.”

I could feel a massive headache coming on, and I pinched the bridge of my nose. “What do you want, Taylor?”

It was then that I noticed the clear case she had in her hands, small and thin. It was a DVD. “This is the whole show, with some unedited parts at the end of the finale. You need to watch it. It will explain everything. I wanted to e-mail it to you, but I still had your phone and I didn’t know if you’d check your computer.”

The finale wasn’t scheduled to be filmed until tomorrow. They had filmed it early? Why?

She pulled my cell phone out of her pocket and handed both items to me. There were like a billion missed calls and texts, most of them from Kat and Dante. I turned my phone off and put the DVD down.

“You have to watch it. Because Rafe was telling the truth. That was not Dante. Dante was outside in the gazebo waiting for you, and you interrupted Rafe and Genesis.”

Now he had Taylor doing his dirty work? I ignored the piece of my heart that leapt with hope. I knew better. “Did he send you here to lie to me?”

“I have no reason to lie to you. That’s why I brought the DVD. So you could see that both men were on the show, and have been from the very beginning. It’s another twist. Matthew felt that the show had become too predictable, and that blogger, Reality Joe, keeps spoiling who the winner will be every season, so we played everything very close to the vest to keep it from getting out. It’s why we broadcast the show early, too.”

I looked at the silver disc. She said it would prove that I had found Rafe, not Dante. “Why didn’t Dante tell me?”

Now she looked uncomfortable and chewed on her nails again. “He might have been under the impression that you already knew.”

“And who gave him that impression?”

“I did,” she confessed. “When it became clear that you were the favorite of both the audience and Dante, they wanted you to be surprised too. They also liked the tension between you and Genesis, where you guys were trying to be friends, but you thought you were both falling in love with the same man. Only that wasn’t how we wanted you to find out. You caused total chaos when you walked into that house and went upstairs. Not only because we wanted to film everything, but because you were about to ruin the surprise and we knew it would not be good.”

“So sorry my pain messed up your TV show.”

“It’s okay.” She shrugged, totally missing my sarcasm. “It worked. It’s reality television. Everything’s about the drama. It’s what we do.” She expelled a deep breath. “And I should probably let you know that the audience saw the whole story.”

“What do you mean the whole story?”

“The whole one. Your engagement. Your previous relationship with Dante. We filmed everything. There are cameras in every room, including the bedrooms. We did censor out Sterling’s name, because he didn’t sign a release, but everything was filmed.”

“Not everything,” I corrected her, my heart thudding lowly. “There aren’t cameras in the bathrooms. And there were times Dante and I were alone that there were no cameras around.”

“The times you thought you were alone with Dante, we had cameras and long range microphones to pick up what you were saying. Even if we couldn’t see you, we could still hear you. His bodyguard nearly took out a few cameramen a couple of times. And when you and I were in the bathroom together, I had a small camera on my shirt.”

I felt so violated and betrayed. “The interviews when the camera was off?”

“Hidden cameras were filming.”

I thought of everything I had told her, everything I had admitted to in those interviews, everything that was personal and private that was now no longer mine. Had everyone at this party seen everything? Did they watch the show? The only thing I had going for me was that my parents’ crowd were not the television-watching type. Nobody here had said anything to me.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that Taylor had used me to advance her own career. My life had been used to entertain. My problems, my suffering, would be given to the masses to enjoy.

And I was not okay with that.

“You signed a release,” she said defensively. She must have seen how angry I was getting.

“Are you filming me now?”

She paused. “Yes.”

Unbelievable. She hadn’t come here as a friend. She didn’t care about my feelings or what had happened to me. She cared about ratings. She had come here to film my reaction, to see what I would do next.

“Get. Out.” I marched over to the pocket doors, throwing them apart, and then to the front door, flinging it wide open.

“Lemon . . .” she tried.

“If I see you or any cameras on this property, I will sic the dogs on you. Now go!”

She looked sorry, but I knew it wasn’t for the pain she had caused me. Only that she probably hadn’t gotten on film what she had come here to get. I slammed the door shut behind her.

More than anyone else, I understood being devoted to your career, wanting to succeed more than anything. But I had also been willing to give it up, to put other things, like my own sanity, first. Taylor wasn’t, and she was willing to sacrifice me and our relationship to get further ahead.

I never could have done that to someone I cared about.

Our friendship was over. One more thing for me to be sad about.

The DVD reflected the overhead lights in my daddy’s study. My chest constricted tightly as I thought about what she said it contained. Weeks’ worth of episodes showing that Rafe had always been a part of the show.

Which would mean that Dante hadn’t cheated on me. He hadn’t lied to me. I had been so quick to believe the worst of him, to automatically jump to the worst possible conclusion. After he had told me he loved me and promised to be honest and true to me.

I would have to spend the rest of my life apologizing to him.

First, I had to watch that DVD.

“Lemonade, it’s time to go in and eat.” My daddy had been sent to find me. He put his arm around me, and it was all I could do to not rest my head on his shoulder and sob my heart out.

“I spoke to your young man,” he said. My pulse jumped and my whole soul lifted with anticipation. When had he talked to Dante?

“I’ll tell you what. I set that Sterling straight.” I felt deflated. “He said you were going to stay home after you got married, and I told him that my little Lemonade was just like me, and that you would figure out how to be a wife and a mother and have a career.”

My heart caught. “Thank you, Daddy.” I kissed my father on the cheek. He finally got it. He finally understood.

And I knew that had been thanks to Dante.

All I wanted to do right then was call him. Make this right. But I didn’t even know where he was. If they had already filmed the finale, he could be on his way back to Monterra. I could call Kat to track him down.

But if he hadn’t cheated on me and he wasn’t guilty, why wasn’t he here? Why hadn’t he come after me?

With a sinking sensation, I wondered if maybe he had left me here because of what I had done. Because I hadn’t trusted in him or in our love. That I hadn’t waited to find a reasonable explanation for what was happening. He kept trying to prove that I could trust him, but I had shown him that he couldn’t trust me. Maybe he didn’t want to be with me anymore.

I couldn’t blame him for that, even if it destroyed me.

Dinner was a blur. I smiled and nodded, unaware of what was happening around me. I was suddenly ravenous, though. After not eating for two days straight, I gobbled up everything they put in front of me. They brought dessert out, a gorgeous chocolate mousse, and as I went to take a bite, Sterling took the plate away from me.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

I nearly stabbed his hand with my fork. That’d teach him not to get between a woman and her chocolate. I snatched my plate back and shot him a dirty look. I ate every single last bite, and then asked my mother if I could have the rest of hers. Sterling excused himself, as everyone sat around the table, still talking.

I had to get that DVD. I had to see with my own eyes what a moron I’d been. As guests started drifting away, I snuck over to the study.

Someone had closed the doors. I heard voices. I put my ear to the crack to listen.

It was Sterling and his father. “I don’t know if I can do this, Dad. I don’t love her.”

“What’s love got to do with it? This is a merger. After the wedding tomorrow, her father’s going to sign the contract. Beauchamp Oil will be our newest and biggest client.”

“It doesn’t seem right.”

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

I pushed open the doors, and both men just stared at me. “You’re marrying me for my father’s company? I think I would have preferred to catch you in here with Ellis.” This seemed worse, somehow. That I hadn’t ever mattered to him at all. I was just a means to an end. He hadn’t loved me. I had at least thought I’d loved him, even though I had been wrong.

“Ellis?” His voice sounded strangled.

“You’re together.” I didn’t need him to confirm it.

“We were.” His eyes darted to his father. “Until . . .”

“Until your daddy promised you that you could make partner if you brought Beauchamp Oil in as a client.” I crossed my arms and stared them both down. I guess the jerk apple didn’t fall far from the jerk tree.

His father looked furious. “Now look, Lemon, don’t go getting . . .”

“Quiet, please, Mr. Brown. Sterling and I are having a discussion about ending our engagement.”

“I’m sorry, Lemon,” Sterling said. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“No, you just meant to use me and cheat on me. Because that’s so much better.” I let out a sigh. I didn’t need to be taking my anger out on the idiot patsy. “It doesn’t matter. You never had the power to hurt me. I never really loved you, either. I only did this because . . .”

The reasons were too many to explain to someone who mattered so little.

“I never should have said yes,” I finished. “This will hurt my parents, so I hope you’re at least enough of a man and a gentleman to apologize to them.”

There was no ring to return. It was probably symbolic or a manifestation of both of our subconscious minds that we had never bothered to get it. Because we had both known this wouldn’t work.

I left to find my mother and father first. I didn’t want them to hear about the cancelled wedding from Sterling. I could imagine how disappointed they would be. I would just add the guilt to the emotional pyre burning inside me. They were saying good-night to their dear friends Eunice and Charles, so I waited until they were finished. With a trembling voice, I asked them to come with me into the parlor, and I closed the doors behind us.

They sat down, and I told them quickly what had happened, that I was calling the wedding off, apologized for taking so long to get to this point, and what Sterling and his father had planned.

Talking about Dante was still too painful, so I left that part out.

My parents sat in silence, both looking at me thoughtfully. I prepared myself for the lecture. To be told about the money and time I had wasted, and how I had let both of them down.

Then my mother said, “Well, thank heavens. Took you long enough to throw that boy over.” She turned to my father. “I never liked him. I told you they were all up to something.”

“You were right.”

There was nothing they could have said that would have stunned me more. “What? I thought you were so excited for me to marry him. Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because I didn’t want to influence your decision. I know we give your our opinions probably more than we should,” my mother said as she glanced at Daddy, “so I didn’t say anything.”

“I didn’t call it off earlier because I was afraid of disappointing you both. I know that I’m always letting you down.”

My daddy put his arm around me. “Why on earth would you say that, Lemonade? We are so proud of you! Don’t you know that your mother and I are thrilled by everything you accomplish? That we will support you in any decision that you make? That we think you’re the most wonderful girl in the whole world?”

Tears burned the back of my throat and my chest ached. All this time, I thought I was disappointing them. And it was all in my head. They loved me and were proud of me.