Shopping for a Billionaire's Wife (29 page)

It’s the best apology I’ve ever received.

“You’re right,” he says as we take our respective drinks. “This
is
the best damn coffee I’ve ever had in a shop.”

“Too bad they don’t have any Grind It Fresh! stores back in Boston,” I say in a mournful tone.

“You’ve got a point.” He drinks and closes his eyes, savoring.

“See? Orgasm in a cup.”

His eyes drift to my breasts. “D cup? DD cup?” he speculates.

I punch him. “I’m serious. I would trade Chuckles for a Grind It Fresh! in the Seaport District.”

“That can be arranged,” he says with a wink.

As I laugh, he walks across the room, stops, then swings around.

“Here.” Declan hands me a piece of paper with his handwriting already on it. I’m surprised. I don’t think I’ve seen him physically write more than little domestic notes and birthday cards to me.

Grace writes everything for him.

“Your handwriting is so neat! Like an architect’s!” I gush. It literally looks like Frank Lloyd Wright himself filled out this...application for a marriage license?

“I know. I was bored in school and learned to write like that. It was a coping mechanism.” He smiles and points to the paper. “Can you finish that up so we can go to the license bureau?”

“The what?” I stare dumbly at the page. It’s a marriage license application for Nevada.

“We need to have a license if we’re going to get married, Shannon. The one from Massachusetts won’t transfer easily. This is a quick fix.”

So we’re really doing this. We’re getting married in Vegas. I sit down on the settee at the end of the giant California King bed in our suite and clench the end of the paper.

“I thought you wanted this?”

“I do, but...” We’ve been here for
I-don’t-know-how-many
days now, running into Mom and Dad, James, Pam and Amanda and Andrew at odd intervals, an uneasy equilibrium in place. Mom stopped asking when we were getting married as soon as she discovered the adult products trade show, and Dad keeps disappearing for long stretches of time, probably hiding in his hotel room and watching a twenty-four-hour sports channel between meals. 

Amanda and Andrew are obviously grabbing every chance they can get to chafe parts of her I don’t need to know about, and James and Pam are a mystery. They’ve become buddies, and I’m starting to wonder if Amanda’s fears about becoming the woman in some stepbrother romance book aren’t real.

I distract myself by looping through all that because I can’t quite bring myself to look up and meet Declan’s eye. The hotel pen is right there, on the desk behind him. Telekinesis would be a great superpower to have right now, but lacking that, I stand, pick it up, and complete the form.

He smiles. Not nervous or worried, Declan’s removing an obstacle. I’m sure that in his mind, marrying in Vegas is just a checkbox. Not that he doesn’t love me. Of course he does. He wouldn’t put up with my mother if he didn’t. But the actual ceremony itself is just a transaction. A legal transfer of our relationship from one that is based on respect and love and mutual trust to a codified, licensed agreement that becomes part of the public record forever.

That’s how he views it.

I don’t know how I feel, but when it becomes hard to fight the tears that want to take over my throat, I know I have to say something.

“Um, is this really how we’re doing it?” 

His back is to me, encased in a perfectly-tailored suit. Some staff member brought him an array of clothing and it’s all been here, the washables neatly washed and folded, crisply-pressed business shirts hanging in the armoire, suits in the closet, all his size and bespoke. As my words sink in, he straightens up, like an animal at a watering hole that hears something worth its attention.

Declan’s eyes are wide and open, soft and accepting, when he turns around. He bends on one knee to be at eye level with me. The gesture reminds me of his proposal at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

That moment feels like lifetimes ago.

“Isn’t this what you want?” Stillness lingers in the air between us, a welcome change from the chaos that has driven me forward through a life I didn’t choose, the Boston Wedding of the Year a tidal wave I never decided to ride. It was thrust on me. In the questioning quiet between us, right now, I can really take him in. He’s so handsome, the skin around his eyes full of expression, the green irises reflecting back a querulous me. His body heat warms the chill that invades as I navigate new territory. 

“Dec, I don’t—I don’t know.” Salty regret fills my mouth, making it nearly impossible to untangle all the feelings and thoughts inside me. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to say the wrong words, but it feels like every part of my life involving expressing myself is a gear with teeth that don’t fit in with the other gears that keep the machine working. 

“You don’t know...whether you want to marry me?” His eyes dart to the three-carat ring on my hand, to the half-crumpled Nevada marriage license application in my hand, and then to my lap.

I drop the paper and cup his jaw in my hands. “No, no, I do. I do. I want to say those words more than anything in the world, Dec.” His mouth tightens, eyes going blurry, and I realize we both have too much emotion stored inside us to be able to handle it all.

There’s a point where your emotional resilience can be stretched so thin that even an overabundance of love isn’t enough.

And that is when you know that the outside world needs to be put in check.

I take a deep breath. He joins me. His arms slide around my neck as he comes up and in, holding me in an awkward embrace, a movement of impulse that lacks his usual grace. We’re all arms and elbows, knees and breasts, the grating sensation of a pen in his shirt pocket scratching my neck, his cufflink catching in a lock of my hair, but as my own palms spread across the fine cashmere of his suit jacket and my hitched sob dissolves into the little sanctuary our bodies create, I know it’ll be fine. 

Better than fine.

“Thank God,” he says. “I was worried you were calling it all off.”

“I want to call off the bloodhounds. Not the marriage.”

He laughs through his nose, then sniffs. I pull back and look at him. He’s not quite crying, but emotion has overwhelmed him, his fiercely blank poker face completely disassembled by love.

Love for
me
.

“What do we do?” I ask, my fingers tender along his jaw, worrying a tiny scar.

“That’s up to you.”

“No, Dec. It’s up to us. What would you do? If I weren’t a factor.”

His full-throated laugh is contagious as I realize how ridiculous that sounds. “Considering I can’t marry myself, honey, I don’t think I can even begin to give you an answer to that question.”

“You know what I mean.” 

Scratching his face, then rubbing his chin like he does when he’s sorting through a complex issue, he finally seems to give up and make a half shrug. “I’d run off and get married at a little wedding chapel here in the hotel. Alone. Just the two of us.”

“No Mom and Dad? No James?”

“You asked what I’d do. That’s the answer.”

“It wouldn’t bother you? In the future, when you look back on our anniversary, to remember the day without your loved ones there?”

“My loved one would be there. The only one who will be there with me through the end of my life.”

“Oh!”

“I do love my dad.” That’s the first time I’ve ever heard Declan say
that
. We’re in very vulnerable places now. “And I love Andrew and Terry, but I love you so, so much more, Shannon. You’re my real life.” He grips my arms harder, as if increasing the pressure will make me understand him better. Will make his words truer. 

Will make his declaration more real.

“I have these circles. They’re concentric. I’m at the center, but you’re right next to me. Then there’s Dad, Andrew and Terry. Grace is right on the edge there, too. After that, there’s your family. Beyond that, a handful of friends. Then there’s everyone else. Business colleagues, old classmates, people on the street, employees....and they’re not quite real.”

“You sound like a sociopath.” I smile when I say it. 

“No...not quite.” He frowns. “Maybe when it comes to business, but I can compartmentalize. I can’t do that with you, though. I can’t just put you in a box where I pull you out and deal with you and then tuck you back away. You are at the core of my life with me. You bleed into every part of who I am and you are going to shape the man I become for the rest of my life.”

Now he actually
does
have tears.

“We have spent the better part of a year letting all those outer circles drive us away from our inner core. You and me. When we marry, I view it like a fusion. We’re fusing our lives together. For nearly a year our families have worked on fusing themselves together through the wedding planning, but we let them take off with the pageantry of the wedding itself and forgot that at the heart of this big celebration, there’s a couple.
Us
. A couple who are going to have a marriage that lasts five or six decades. We let one little day become more important than the rest of our lives.” 

He’s right. Oh, how my heart lifts at his words, his emotional unraveling like being caught in a maze and having someone give you an aerial map so you can find your way through to freedom.

Gazing over my shoulder, deep in thought, he adds, almost absentmindedly, “We did it to ourselves. Blaming Marie is a convenient outlet, but it’s our fault.”

“How about we reclaim that day?” I say. “Run off alone. Get married with just the two of us. Not even Andrew and Amanda there.” 

“You’re sure?”

I nod. “You’re right. We made the marriage less important than the wedding. We let Mom and James take over and turn us into pieces on a chessboard. We forgot our own power.”

His smile is radiant. As he bends to pick up the marriage license application, I drop to the ground and kiss him, hard, interrupting him. The press of our mouths and the warm invitation to be with him whenever the need arises closes some circle inside me that has hung open and empty, all its energy drained by not being finished. 

For the next minute we are nothing but caresses and kisses, the rasp of stubble on skin, the feel of fingers threading in hair and seeking the warm asylum of a lover’s embrace, a partner’s welcome, a friend’s ever-present hello. We are more than two when we cleave, or so religion says, and in this pinpoint in the long, eternal flow of time, I fuse with Declan McCormick and become more to him than any piece of paper can ever declare.

The edge of my engagement ring scrapes along the back of his neck as I play with the thick waves, our mouths saying
I’m sorry
in the way only a kiss can confer. As the kiss deepens, his warm mouth reluctant to pull back and give even an inch between us, it’s as if the frayed threads of our souls are weaving together to form a patchwork quilt to warm the heart.  

We’re warm and comfortable, enveloped in whatever our sequence of touch, sight, taste, and sound generates for that layering Declan mentioned earlier.

Our inner lives have to merge for our love to flourish.

Undressed in what feels like wisps of time stolen from breath and worry, we’re under the covers and luxuriating in the sheer joy of having access to so much of each other. As my hand caresses his chest, the hard, molded lines of his ribs, the small hills of his abs and the delightful strength of his back, I marvel at how he’s both familiar and new.

He’s given me more of himself.

And it didn’t cost a penny.

“I’ve never met anyone like you, Shannon,” he murmurs against my neck as his hands bring me to places where blood runs wild, the anarchy of pleasure destroying all the rules. 

“You say that all the time.” My voice hitches at the end as he breaks a rule again and again and again and
oh
—

“I mean it. There’s only one of you in the world. The universe. The multiverse, if you believe in quantum physics. And of all the worlds and millennia in which beings have existed, I’m so lucky to find you.”

“Declan?”

“Mmmm?” My own hands decide to do a little chaotic good in Declanland.

“Shut up and make love to me.”

“God, I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

And then we stop talking.

* * *

In the quiet that always descends after making love, a spiritual cloud that hangs over us like a protector, watching and guarding, my throat tightens, an emotion so visceral I can only experience it in the fiber of my flesh, in the clench of muscle, in the open pores and the closed eyes.

“I love you so much,” I whisper. He stirs beneath the sheets, reaching for more of me, making us connect as much of our bodies as possible without having him inside me.

“I know.”

“I can’t do this without you,” I add, my throat filling with a sadness that tastes like regret. 

“Can’t do what?”

“Live. I mean, I can. If something happened to you, I’d—” A sob cuts off my words.

“Shhhhh. Shhhhhhh, honey,” he soothes, his voice filled with concern and consternation. “Where’s this coming from?”

“I—I—I just think about how hollow I felt when we fought. And how, for a few minutes, I wondered if you didn’t want me any more.”

“Never. I could never
not
want you, Shannon.” 

“But it felt like that. And even just a few minutes of feeling so separate from you made me want to die. Not in an active way. Passively, like I just wouldn’t want to exist in a world without you in it. You’re my anchor. You’ve become part of me. I can’t handle the thought of that part being ripped out.”

“You tore me apart, too, you know.”

“I did?”

“I don’t show emotion the way you do, but I feel it just as deeply. Spending so much time fighting over our differences made me feel so distinct from you, so separate. All of our relationship has been focused on what we have in common, which is so much. Arguing about money seemed trivial in the beginning, but then the issue grew and grew, and soon if felt so much bigger than the two of us combined. And I couldn’t find a way out.” He sighs. “I can always find my way out of a problem. But not this one.”