STORM: A Standalone Romance (70 page)

My heart crushed after the end of a marriage that never should have been, I boarded a cruise ship for a singles cruise that was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did for my dear, sweet aunts who’d bought the ticket as a birthday present. Not only did I not want to be here, I didn’t want my aunts wandering the streets of Miami while I was gone—even though my best friend, Lisa, would be there to watch over them—and I really didn’t want to meet anyone new. I’d already been on a series of awful dates. I had decided it was time to just sit back and spend a little time on my own, reassess my life, and maybe decide what I wanted to do with the rest of it. Was that so much to ask?

But my aunts were worried, and I hated to cause them any more trouble than I already had when I became an orphan who was thrust on them as an injured five year old. The car accident that killed my parents had left me in casts and bandages for months afterward, adding to the burden I must have been to my happily single, middle-aged aunts. They had made the choice not have children. Taking me in was really a sacrifice I can’t even imagine—so I do everything I can to make life easier for them.

Including this. Damn it!

The steward called me Mrs. Thorn. That bothered me. No one had called me that in the months since the divorce. I didn’t even use the name anymore, even though I’d earned the right. I returned to my maiden name of Giles. Yet, he called me Mrs. Thorn when I boarded the ship.

And then he said I was to have dinner with the captain. And this suite…I couldn’t imagine my aunts could really afford it. But, then again, I’d given them a significant portion of the money Miles paid me when he sent me packing at the end of our arrangement. I’d come to think of it as a marriage, as ironic as that seemed. But he thought of it as an arrangement. At least, he did on that last day. One minute we’re making love, the next, he’s pushing me out the door, telling me he doesn’t need me anymore….

Why did it still hurt so much? I mean, really, what did I expect from a marriage of convenience? He never even told me why he needed a wife so urgently, or why my boring, straight-laced life was so perfect for his needs. All he said was that he would save my aunts’ house—which was in headed to foreclosure after they, unbeknownst to me, mortgaged it for the first time in sixty years to pay my college tuition—and I jumped at the opportunity. Biggest mistake of my life.

Or maybe the biggest mistake had been allowing myself to fall under his spell and actually believe he loved me.

I wandered around the suite, admiring the luxury of it. It reminded me a little of the green room at his mother’s house—green everywhere. The draperies, the carpet, the small loveseat and recliner set into a corner, the comforter on the bed. Even the linens in the bathroom—which I could see through another set of double doors—were green. And not just one shade of green, but dozens. Kelly green. Emerald green. Pale green. The green of shamrocks and ivy—a room we shared. The room where we…

A shower was definitely in order. Twelve hours in a car with my two aunts was not exactly inducing a fresh feeling. And maybe the hot water would relieve a little of the tension that had suddenly settled in my shoulders.

I slowly undressed, my thoughts returning to Miles. I knew I shouldn’t be thinking about him, but the more I told myself not to, the more I did. The night of the party his parents threw for us…I should have known better. I should have known he was only putting on a show for his brother and his ex-fiancée. But I fell for it. So it was my own fault that I got my heart broken.

I shook my head as I peeled my panties off and crossed the room to the bathroom. Was it crazy that I could still smell him? That the scent of wood and spices still brought the taste of his lips to my tongue? I swear I could smell him now, even here, fourteen thousand miles from home. I must be losing my mind.

I pushed open the door of the bathroom and…
What the hell?

“Miles?”

Miles Thorn. Son of Jackson Thorn, who, in turn, was the grandson of one of the most beloved senator’s in American history and a well-known financier in his own right. CEO of Thorn Construction, the fastest growing business in Texas at the moment. Miles Thorn. My ex-husband.

He chuckled softly as he turned from where he’d been shaving in the mirror, nothing but a thin towel wrapped around his waist. His eyes moved slowly over me, over my nakedness, merriment dancing in his eyes.

“I was hoping you’d be happy to see me. But this is more than even I could hope for.”

Shock usually paralyzes me. I can’t begin to express how happy I was that this moment was not one of those. I quickly grabbed a complimentary bathrobe hanging from the door beside me and pulled it on, stabbing my hands through the arms and wrapping it as tight against me as I could, trying not to look at Miles and give him the satisfaction of the hot blush on my cheeks. But even as I looked away, I couldn’t help but see the way that towel around his waist showed off his heavy hips and that beautiful…

Damn, why did he always do this to me?

“What are you doing here?”

“Taking a cruise. Isn’t that what you’re doing here?”

“No, I mean, here, in my room.”

“Our room, darling.”

I shook my head. “No, my aunts bought my ticket for me. It was a gift—”

“That I arranged.”

I didn’t have to worry about the heat of that blush anymore. The blood drained from my cheeks, taking with it the blush, the heat, everything. Even my ability to put together words. My mouth worked like a fish out of water for a second. And then the anger came.

I slapped my hand against the door as I turned around, storming back into the bedroom. I snatched my panties and jeans off the floor, quickly pulling them on under the cover of the robe.

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving.”

I turned my back to him and struggled to put on my bra without completely removing the robe. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I shook my shoulders and bent forward a little, muttering under my breath as I tried to arrange everything just right. There are times when being well-endowed is more of a curse than a blessing. This was one of them.

“You can’t leave. The ship is pulling away from the dock.”

I spun around, forgetting for a second that I wasn’t quite done fastening my bra. Once again, his eyes lit up when they fell on my bare flesh.

I jerked the robe in front of me as I brushed past him and rushed to the balcony doors off the sitting room. Sure enough, the ship was slowly reversing away from the dock, the crowd of well-wishers, of whom my aunts were two, waving to the people standing on deck. My mind furiously tried to remember where the next port would be. And then I remembered. Spain. In three days.

I slapped my hands hard against the glass of the balcony door, a deep groan slipping from my lips.

“Why?”

“It’s kind of the purpose of the cruise. We can’t visit places like Barcelona and Rome if we just sit here.”

“No!” I spun around, once again forgetting to hold my robe in place. But, again, I’m not sure I really cared at that point. “Why did you do this? Why are you here?”

“Because I wanted to see you and you wouldn’t answer my phone calls.”

“We’re divorced.”

A sheepish look came over his face, as he cast a long glance down toward the floor. I knew…something inside of me knew…what that expression meant. But I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know.

“I’m getting off in Spain. I’ll fly home.”

“And break your aunts’ hearts. They were so excited at the idea of playing matchmakers.”

“You put them up to this?”

“I did. And when they heard that you wouldn’t answer my phone calls and why I wanted to talk to you, they were more than willing to do whatever they could to help us get back together.”

“Back together?”

Despite myself, my heart leapt with hope. But the memory of the way he pushed me out of his life was too strong to overcome. I backed away even though he never attempted to come near me, pressing my back against the cool of the glass balcony doors, wrapping my arms around my chest in a gesture of self-defense.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish here, but I’m not interested. I already played my role in your little drama. I’m done.”

“Not really.”

I glared at him. “What do you mean, not really?”

“I mean, technically, we’re still married.”

And that was exactly what I’d been afraid he would say.

Eight Months Earlier…

Miles pulled me into him and held me gently in his arms, moving slowly to a song I didn’t recognize, but whose melody I would never forget. It was the music to which my husband truly held me for the first time.

We were married for four months before this, but we were like roommates, communicating whenever we needed something from each other. I attended parties and business dinners and fancy galas with Miles, and he paid to get my aunts’ house out of foreclosure, put a roof over my head, and provided me with the material possessions his assistant convinced me I had to have. We were strangers.

But then he was summoned home and he needed—for reasons I still didn’t understand—to make his family believe our marriage was real, not this modern day marriage of convenience. Last night we slept in the same room for the first time in our marriage, though he slept on the loveseat and I slept in the bed. And today I met his mother, a beautiful, kind woman who suffered from cancer. She offered some insight into this stranger I married. I’d met his sister before, but I got to meet her husband. And then his brother, Robert. He offered his own kind of insight in the form of the jealousy and anger I saw in Miles’ face when Robert arrived late to the party Miles’ parents threw to celebrate our wedding, his wife at his side, the same woman who was once Miles’ fiancée. It was a complicated family, and I had yet to meet the father.

But here we were, on the dance floor.

  We moved slowly, not really moving at all, but swaying as we held each other the way newlyweds often do. I could feel his heart pounding against my chest; I could feel his pulse under my thumb as I pressed my hand to his throat. His scent washed over me, filling my every pore, becoming a part of who I was in that moment. It was the first time I truly felt like a bride, like I belonged to someone, that I was a part of something bigger than myself.

It was a natural extension of the moment for him to lift my chin with a finger on my jaw, for his lips to seek mine. It was familiar, the taste of him, as he pressed his lips to mine. I sighed—I couldn’t help myself—and moved closer to him, wanting to be closer. How he could go from anger to this so quickly, I wasn’t sure, but it was a dream, less bizarre than the moment of our vows, but surreal just the same. I was floating, dancing on a cloud, no longer aware of the sea of humanity surrounding us. None of it really mattered anymore.

I was so lost in the kiss that the world evaporated and I felt like we were the only people in the world. But there was more. So much more. Maybe it was my inexperience. Maybe it was the fact that the moment I saw Miles, I wanted to touch him and to feel him touch me. I don’t know why, but that moment felt like a moment I’d been waiting for all my life.

He pulled back, a heaviness to his eyelids that I’d never seen before. I wanted to smile, to reassure him in some way, but my muscles weren’t responding. It was like everything inside of me had just melted and I was a pool of nothing. He moved closer, pressed his forehead to mine, and his breath washed over me.

“Riley,” he began. My heart skipped at beat because of the huskiness of his voice. But I would never know what he was going to say.

A gasp went up in the air around us, and then someone yelled, “Call 911!”

Miles grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the gathering crowd at the other end of the veranda. He was big and determined, pushing people aside as he dragged me along behind him. And when we reached the center of the circle of worried partygoers, we found his mother unconscious at the foot of the chair where she’d been resting all evening.

“Mom!”

Miles dropped to his knees, letting go of my hand at the same time, his hands pressing the hair from her face. Elena was pale, all the color washed from her face. Even her lips were ashen, taking on a terrible gray patina. Lila, Miles’ sister, dropped to her knees beside him, her hands just as frantic, but full of purpose as she searched for a pulse. She looked up and caught my eye. There was real fear in hers.

I immediately turned, shoving people back.

“Back up. Give them space.”

I repeated myself over and over again, but I managed to get the worst of the crowd out of the way just as the paramedics arrived. I heard Lila quietly explain to them that her mother was a cancer patient, that her cancer was terminal. That word hit me like a blow to the stomach. When Elena told me earlier in the day that she had ovarian cancer, a lot of things crossed my mind, but I never really imagined that she was terminal. But Miles knew. I could see it in the set of his shoulders as he watched the paramedics start an IV on his mother.

I moved up beside him, unsure if he knew I was there or even wanted me there. But then he reached for my hand and held it so tightly I quickly lost feeling in the tips of my fingers.

He knew I was there.

“My car is in the street,” Robert announced, coming up behind Lila, Miles, and I, as we followed the stretcher to the front door a few minutes later. “We should all ride together.”

I felt Miles stiffen, but he didn’t protest. Keegan, Lila’s husband, met us at the door, her jacket and purse in hand.

“Did anyone call Daddy?” Lila suddenly asked, as we climbed into Robert’s Cadillac Escalade.

“I did,” Claire—Robert’s wife—said.

Miles didn’t respond to the sound of her voice. He slid onto the back bench seat and reached for me, helping me up beside him. His arm slid around my waist, and he pulled me as close to his side as he could. Lila slid in beside me and Keegan took the last space, slamming the door and gesturing for Robert to move as the ambulance flipped on its lights and headed out.

There was a heavy silence in the car as Robert fought late night traffic to keep up with the ambulance. I felt out of place, as though I was watching a private, family heartbreak unfold that I had no right to witness. And yet, Miles’ arm around my waist was so tight that I wasn’t sure he would have let me go if I had asked.

It was a long, miserable ride to the hospital.

Miles kept me close to him as we followed Robert, Claire, Lila, and Keegan into the hospital. Their father, Jackson, was waiting in the emergency room waiting area when we walked in.

“Dr. Philips is in with her,” he said, as Lila rushed up to him. “He said he’d let us know as soon as he could.”

“I’m sure she’s just dehydrated,” Lila said. “This happened before.”

“It’s the party,” Jackson said in a low growl. “I told her it was too much for her. I told her it was a mistake. But she…” He looked up, his eyes floating over the faces of his children and their spouses until they rested on Miles. And then his handsome face—so much like Miles’—changed. What was a soft—almost kind—face became hard, like granite. His eyes darkened, and his mouth puckered almost like he’d tasted something unpleasant.

“Now you come home,” he said. “Now you decide to show your face. She’s been fighting this for months, and now, now that she’s given up, you decide to come back and see what you can get out of this…out of her. You shouldn’t be here.”

Miles stood a little taller, but he didn’t respond to his father’s words.

“Daddy,” Lila said softly, “you know why he didn’t come home before.”

“I know he acted like a child when he couldn’t have what he wanted. I know he ran away from his responsibilities, turned his back on his family, and pretended that his
feelings
were more important than our family legacy.”

“Daddy,” Lila said again, but Jackson wasn’t finished. He pushed past Lila, shouldered his way between Robert and Claire, and came to stand nose to nose with his eldest son. “I know that the moment you decided to run away, you should have never looked back. You aren’t welcome here.”

Miles was taller than his father, taller by several inches, and wider too. The physical labor that came with his construction company put the advantage in his court. He could have pushed Jackson out of his way with the smallest bit of effort. Yet, he made no effort to defend himself. He simply watched his father, something like apathy in his eyes.

“I called Joan when she got sick. I know you knew it back then. I know you knew how much she needed you to come home, but you chose to hide from your problems and break her heart rather than come back and face everything you ran away from.”

“Maybe this isn’t the right place for this,” Keegan said, taking his father-in-law’s arm.

Jackson simply pulled away.

“Do you think I didn’t find myself in messes when I first started this company? Do you think I didn’t get myself embroiled in problems?” Jackson shoved a finger into Miles’ chest. “The difference between you and I is that I’m a man and I stood up to my problems. You just ran away and left the rest of us to deal with it.”

A muscle jerked in Miles’ jaw, a flicker of something—anger, maybe?—flashed in his eyes. But he continued to stand there and continued to listen to his father without responding.

Robert, of all people, stepped close and said, “Dad, you should probably stop before someone calls security.”

Jackson sneered at his other son. “You think I’m going to listen to you? You think I give a shit what you think? You stabbed your brother in the back, the only person who was always on your side, you stab him in the back. I don’t really care what you have to say.”

Robert’s face reddened. Claire grabbed his hand and pulled him away, saying in one of those whispers that’s meant to be heard by everyone, “Don’t worry, baby. It doesn’t matter.”

“Look at this,” Jackson said, something like a mirthless chuckle slipping from his lips. “My wife is dying. She might die tonight. And my children—my legacy—consists of a son who thought nothing of stealing his brother’s fiancée, and a son who ran when things got too hot. Some legacy I’ll leave behind when it’s my turn to go.”

“That’s not true,” Miles said.

Jackson looked up at him—his dark eyes so much like Miles’ in their size and shape, missing just the emerald green he clearly got from his mom—and laughter again spilled from his lips that was so full of bitterness that it sent a chill down my spine.

“What’s not true about it? What Robert did to you? Or the yellow stripe running down your back?”

“I didn’t run.”

“You didn’t exactly stick around to face those people, either. Who do you think took your place? Who do you think stepped up—?”

“Jackson.”

My head was spinning, trying to keep up with everything, trying to keep my heart from breaking for the pain I could hear in Miles’ voice. I didn’t understand what was happening. And then a doctor was there, holding Jackson’s hands and speaking low. Something about electrolyte imbalances and fevers. I didn’t catch it all, but it didn’t sound good.

We moved as a unit upstairs to another waiting room, Jackson disappearing for a while with Lila at his side. Miles tried to sit down, but he was on his feet again after a few minutes, pacing the length of the room. I watched him, unsure what I should do. Claire watched him, too, a tiny frown creasing her model’s brow, even as Robert clung to her hand and stared absently out into space. Keegan took a seat beside me and offered a weak smile.

“Some introduction to the family, isn’t it?”

I shrugged, my attention moving back to Miles. I so wanted to do something to make things better for him, but I didn’t know what.

“My family lives near the Thorns, so I’ve known them all my life. It wasn’t such a shock when I married into the family. But I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you. Maybe it’s better Miles hid you away before introducing you to this chaos.”

“Is it always like this? I mean, their dad…?”

“Jackson is pretty intense. But he grew up in a world where perfection was expected of him. Elena used to soften his rough edges, but since she’s been sick, it’s only gotten worse.”

A part of me couldn’t blame him. It couldn’t be easy to watch the woman he’d loved most of his adult life get sick and suffer. I looked at Miles and found myself wondering if…and then I reminded myself not to let my heart go there.

Jackson and Lila came back down the hall. Lila was using a worn tissue to wipe at tears, trying not to smear her makeup as she wiped them away. Keegan went to her, and she collapsed into his arms, allowing him to lead her back up the hallway.

“She’s settled for the night,” Jackson said. “You should go, get some rest. You can visit her in the morning.”

“I’d rather stay,” Miles said.

“Me, too,” Robert chimed in.

Jackson’s eyes narrowed. “She’s dying. The last thing she needs—the last thing I need—is the two of you around to remind her of her failures.”

“She’s their mother,” I said before I even knew I had something to say. “They should be here.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Jackson said, turning his attention to me for the first time, the full vehemence of his anger burning in his eyes. “Who do you think you are to speak to me that way?”

“They have as much right—”

“It’s okay, Riley,” Miles said, grabbing my arm as I stood and began to approach his father. “I don’t want to be where I’m not wanted.”

Miles focused on his father. “Lila has my cellphone number. Have her call me if anything happens.”

I expected Jackson to balk at such a request, but he didn’t. He simply inclined his head. Miles did the same, like it was some sort of ritual or something, then led me away.