Some Like It Hopeless (A Temporary Engagement) (19 page)

That’s why she liked him. He was Truth. Everything else had been stripped from him, leaving only the raw truth behind.

It was what she loved–

Cassandra sucked in the last word, choking on it.

She met Mackenzie’s eyes across the table, and apparently best friend was working again, because she didn’t need to say what she’d been thinking.

Love?

They had
something
, but it wasn’t love. Not for her, not for him.

He was still in love with his dead wife.

She was still in love with Shane.

She checked, making sure, but there he was, in her heart. Hers.

And see, there was Brady right next to him.

Her Brady. Tall, dark, hurt. Dangerous. Hers.

Well, shit.

Mackenzie stood up, stopping Ethan in the middle of a sentence. “Okay?”

She smiled at him. “Just one of the joys of pregnancy. Cassandra will come with me.”

Ethan watched them walk around the corner, his eyes following Mackenzie, worry in them.

Mackenzie steered Cassandra inside the bathroom, heading for a stall as soon as they entered, and Cassandra said, “Oh, I thought you were trying to get me alone.”

“I was. But I really do have to go.” She flipped the lock and said loudly, “So, what was that?”

“I just. . .remembered I forgot to do something at work. Hopefully, I’ll get fired tomorrow morning.”

“Hmm. You looked like you needed a bucket of ice cream to cry in.”

“Please. I remember you bawling into your pathetic pint of ice cream when you realized you’d given your heart away.”

“It was traumatic. Ethan O’Connor? Roughly three billion men in the world, and I go and fall for Ethan O’Connor. I’m still embarrassed about it.”

Cassandra smiled. “Does he believe anything you say?”

“No. Kind of like I don’t believe you were thinking about work a few minutes ago. I know you.”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking about falling for someone who would embarrass me. I’m not sure I
could
be embarrassed. . . Okay, if I accidentally fell in love with Christian, I’d have to go hide my face in a pint of ice cream. I get that now.”

Mackenzie came out of the stall to wash her hands, and she wasn’t smiling.

And she didn’t say anything.

She waited. Watched Cassandra in the mirror. And didn’t say anything.

Cassandra sighed. “Mackenzie, I’ve already fallen in love, and it wasn’t a pint of ice cream I hid in, it was a keg of beer.”

“Before my time.”

“Well, it was in high school. We didn’t start with the beer floats until college.”

Mackenzie stopped drying her hands. “I thought the nausea was over but that. . .” She shook her head. Cleared her throat. “You won’t distract me.”

“I just was surprised to find someone else taking up room in my heart. I wasn’t expecting it. I wasn’t expecting it with Brady.”

Cassandra could hear it in her voice.
Why? Why had she fallen in love with someone who couldn’t love her back completely? Again!

“Why is it bad?”

“Because he loves his dead wife. The guilt he bears for killing her will always outweigh everything. I’d always have to share him with her. How would you like to compete with an angel?”

Mackenzie said softly, “What is it with you and sharing?”

Cassandra didn’t know. “I’m hopeless.”

“No. I
do
know hopeless when I see it. This isn’t it.”

Cassandra looked in the mirror, at herself. At a woman who would love only the parts they could give. Who could be happy with just those parts.

She said quietly, and she didn’t know if she was trying to talk herself into it or Mackenzie, “We can’t all have the fairy tale. Some of us have to accept as good as it’s going to get.”

And maybe as good as it could get wouldn’t be that bad. She’d thought, this whole time, that when Shane fell in love with his bird, that it would mean he would love her less. That he would have to love her less.

But her heart wasn’t divided.

She could love both Shane and Brady. She did love them both.

She wasn’t quite sure she wanted to.

When they came out, Ethan was waiting for them. Pacing back and forth in front of the ladies’ room, and when Mackenzie smiled at him, there wasn’t any kind of embarrassment in her eyes.

“Why didn’t you send someone in?”

He was by her side in two large steps. “Are you okay?”

She stroked his arm, sidling into him as best she could. “We were just catching up. Girl talk.”

Ethan’s eyes flared. “Now I’m really worried.”

Mackenzie laughed. “I know how to girl talk.”

Cassandra shook her head. “No, she doesn’t.”

Ethan turned those green eyes on her and out spilled all her secrets. “We were arguing about my sorry love-life.”

Ethan peered at her for one more long moment, then relaxed and stroked his hand down Mackenzie’s belly. “Okay. Maybe you’re right and this will be the last one. I don’t think I can go through this again.”

“You don’t think
you
can do it again?”

“Pregnancy is hard on a man.” He held one elbow out to Mackenzie, the other for Cassandra, and when he was sandwiched between them, Mackenzie said, “You’re going to pay for that.”

Ethan smiled at the proof that everything was okay with her. “I know.”

Brady stood next to Cassandra and watched the O’Connor’s car pull away. Back to New York, and Brady felt a little like Shane. Slightly glad they lived on the other side of the country.

Glad he didn’t have to look at anymore brainless smiles from Cassandra.

It was unnerving.

And he’d laugh with her about it, get her to admit she liked a little friction in her love life and Ethan O’Connor would have never made her happy, except she’d stopped talking to Brady sometime during the week.

At first he’d thought she’d just been busy with her friends. With the kids, and he’d been glad he’d been busy himself.

He said, “Are we going to talk about it?”

She didn’t look at him. Hadn’t looked at him in days.

“Talk about what?”

“About whatever is wrong.”

She waved at Rodrigo and he jerked his thumb at her car. When she nodded, he grabbed the keys and went to get her car.

“Nothing is wrong.”

Brady looked up at the sky, then closed his eyes. He almost smiled. It had been a long time since a woman had told him nothing was wrong in that tone of voice.

He didn’t say anything until her little peach lady pulled up in front of them, didn’t say anything even then.

Cassandra said, “I need to go home. I haven’t been home since they got here. Shane’s flowers are going to be dead again.” She whispered, “I just need some time alone. To think.”

“About
what
?”

She looked at him then. Looked, and he knew something was wrong. He’d done something. He just had no idea what.

“Are you coming back tonight?”

“I know you can’t sleep without me beside you. I’ll be back tonight. I don’t know what it means that you can’t sleep without me, but I’ll be back.”

Brady fought the anger, fought the embarrassment. He didn’t need her pity.

“I didn’t sleep for six years without you. I can do it again.”

Her lips thinned and she walked around the car to where Rodrigo was holding her door open, his face politely blank.

“Do you really think you could do it again, Brady? Do you still have a choice? Because I don’t think deciding between no sleep and always sleeping with me is much of a choice, do you? There’s no choice there. There’s only need and what you’ll do to meet that need.”

Brady couldn’t help it as his eyebrows rose to his hairline, couldn’t help it that he was standing there looking completely clueless.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The only choice I have is to accept or deny. My only choice is the rock or the hard place. My only choice is the frying pan or the fire. My only
choice
is to be happy with what I can have or to be miserable without it. Because I can’t change what I can have.”

He lifted his hands in the universal sign of incomprehension. “What does that
mean
?”

She sat down in the car, slamming her door shut and leaning over to look at him through the window. She said something, flicking her hand to emphasize whatever it was she was saying.

He shouted, “I can’t hear you!”

She sat back up, and all Brady could see was her hands gripping the steering wheel. She finally rolled the window down and shouted back, “I just need to
think
!”

Rodrigo came to stand next to him, watched with him as Cassandra peeled away.

“What the fuck just happened?”

Rodrigo clapped him on the back. “It’s good to see you with woman trouble,
Jefe
. What is life without a little woman trouble?”

The fog of confusion cleared a little as Brady’s frustration turned to anger.

As his anger triggered his need.

He sucked in a breath through his nose, blew it out through tight lips. He rolled his neck, turning away from the road and looking at his hotel.

At the people streaming in and out. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists.

Goddammit!

He would never beat this beast. He would never be free from this monster. The monster who waited for any tiny chink to dig its fingers in and free itself. The monster who waited patiently because it knew it only needed a moment of weakness to escape.

All Brady could do was sweat the want out. All he could do was work his muscles so hard that the endorphins would calm his need.

He would blow off his meetings, change his clothes, and go hit the gym.

Brady clenched his jaw and said, “Get my car, Rodrigo.”

Rodrigo grinned. “You going to go after her,
Jefe
?”

“
Yes
.”

An hour later, Brady pulled into Cassandra’s driveway.

He’d driven like a mad man for half a block and then had pulled over and raged in his little Z. He’d screamed and beat the steering wheel. He’d punched the roof until his knuckles bled. He’d pummeled his thighs until they were numb. He’d fought until he’d sat breathless and spent. Until he was too tired to do what the monster wanted.

And then he’d cried.

His shoulders bent and shaking, the tears falling unchecked. And he understood what Cassandra had meant.

He had no good choice.

No choice except to keep fighting or to give in. What he
wanted
was to be free, and that would never happen.

He didn’t know what Cassandra had been talking about when she’d said she didn’t have a choice. But he knew what it felt like.

Brady sat in his car and looked at her little bungalow, at the little dead flowers in her front yard. And then he turned the car back on and reversed out of the drive.

Another hour later, Brady was digging in the dirt with his hands. Pulling out dead flowers and carefully planting the pansies he’d bought at the hardware store. He hadn’t known what they were called, just seen them and grabbed them because they were pretty.

The sun was hot on his back, and he loosened his tie, unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, and rolled up his sleeves.

The door opened slowly and Cassandra came out to watch him. Her eyebrows pinched together, her arms folded.