The Wedding Dress (8 page)

When they pulled back, Gareth looked like he might say something, but Anne beat him to it.

“I love you too.”

Chapter Fourteen

Anne woke up to the sun coming through the window of her bedroom, spilling in and over her. Through the window, the sky was a perfect blue, the birds were singing to each other, and the bright green leaves on the trees were dancing in the light breeze.

Everything was
perfect
.

She could hear Gareth downstairs in the kitchen. He’d obviously tried so hard not to wake her, but Anne’s eyes had flickered open the moment he moved from beside her, which had given her a fabulous view of his toned body as he’d dressed.

Anne went and showered, enjoying the feel of the water on her skin. The way the warmth caressed her skin reminded her of Gareth. Although, she thought with a laugh, the truth was, everything reminded her of him right then.

Last night had been everything she had always dreamed it might be. Not just physically satisfying but emotionally satisfying as well. There hadn’t been any barriers between them, just so many sweet yet sinful moments where she wasn’t sure where she stopped and he began.

She dried off, then put on a sky blue T-shirt she’d customized with silver stitching around the edges, and a pair of jeans with extra decorative patches. Every small thing leapt out at her this morning, from just how much she appreciated the old pictures on the wall to how stunning her mother’s wedding dress looked on one of her dressmaking stands in the living room.

And then there was Gareth. He stood in the kitchen with his back to her, cooking scrambled eggs on the stove. He turned as Anne entered the room, and she was on the way to give him a good-morning kiss when they were interrupted by a knock at the door.

She was surprised when he quickly moved past her. “Why don’t you go ahead and start on breakfast?”

Since he had just gone to the trouble of making her breakfast, Anne took her eggs to the kitchen table by the window to eat. They tasted great, just how she would have made them if she’d been doing them herself. Though admittedly slightly less burnt than her usual version of breakfast. She was on her second or third mouthful when the sound of Gareth’s raised voice came to her.

“I don’t care who you say you are. You aren’t coming in.”

“You think you can help her hide from this?” another man’s voice demanded in a hard tone. “I was told to deliver this to Anne Farleigh, and you aren’t going to stop me from doing my job.”

“Wanna bet?”

Anne shot up from the table, spilling her scrambled eggs as she hurried through to the hall.

The man at the door was big and tough-looking, dressed in a dark suit and holding an envelope.

“What’s going on?”

He started to step past Gareth, but Gareth wouldn’t let him pass.

“Anne Farleigh?”

“Yes,” Anne said, “that’s me. Who are you?”

“My name is Terrence Blithe. I work for Richard Wells, Jasmine Turner’s lawyer. He’s asked me to inform you that Ms. Turner intends to submit to a DNA test proving that she’s Edward Farleigh’s daughter.”

He threw the envelope to her, and she caught it out of sheer reflex.

“Those are the details. He’s also told me to let you know that if you don’t agree to take part in this DNA test, he will ask the judge to consider your noncooperation when it comes to deciding how much to award. And that he’ll press for the exhumation of Edward Farleigh to get the DNA evidence he needs.”

“Wait a minute,” Anne said, staring down at the envelope. She looked back at the man at the door. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s your problem, lady. Have a nice day.”

He walked off, leaving Anne standing there, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Have a nice day?
She’d been having a nice day. The best day ever, and now…

Her eyes were starting to blur with tears as Gareth put his arms around her and took her into the living room. His voice was gentle. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you, but—”

“You should have warned me?” Suddenly, Anne felt as if the hardwood floor beneath her was falling away. “You
knew
?”

Anne tried to ignore the negative feelings the way she had so many times before in her life, but this time it was like trying to plug the Hoover Dam with her finger.

She pushed back from Gareth and stared at him like she didn’t even know him. Because right then, she wasn’t sure she did.

Especially when he said, “Yes, Anne, I knew.”

“You knew and you didn’t say anything?” Each word felt brittle as it fell from her lips. “How could you let them blindside me like this?”

“At first, I didn’t say anything about it because I couldn’t. I had a legal obligation not to.”

“And rules are rules,” Anne said, half turning away from him as she felt the tears starting to well up in her eyes.

Years’ worth of tears, all the ones she’d managed to hold back through her sheer determination to be happy, rushed at her.

“I tried to tell you,” he insisted.

“When? When did you try?”

“I needed to find a way to tell you that wouldn’t hurt so much, but it was so hard, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it last night. I hoped it would be easier in the morning, that I could find a way to explain it without hurting you.”

Anne whirled back toward him, her hands balling into fists. “You think that
this
doesn’t hurt?”

Oh God, it hurt.

So much, like her parents had died all over again. For years, Anne had worked so hard to press that pain down, the depths of hurt that drowned her every time she tried to breathe. She’d only managed it by remembering how much her parents had loved one another. By clinging to that knowledge as tightly as she could.

But it had been a lie.

All of it.

Jasmine and her lawyer wouldn’t ask for a DNA test if they thought there was even the remotest possibility that Edward Farleigh wasn’t Jasmine’s father. Which meant that all the time her father had claimed to love her mother so much, all the time their marriage had seemed so perfect, he’d been having an affair with some other woman.

And had been the father of another little girl.

“Anne,” Gareth began, reaching out to touch her shoulder.

“Leave me alone!”

Anne had wanted to believe that she and Gareth had found the same magical love as her parents. But now she knew that the two of them were just as big a lie as her parents had been. Because the whole time that she was in Gareth’s arms and he was kissing her and sharing her bed, he’d known what was going to happen.

In her rush to get away from him, she crashed into her mother’s wedding gown on the dress stand.

Wedding dresses were a symbol of two people promising to love one another. Promising to be
faithful
to one another. Anne had made her living stitching together a symbol of perfect love, but now she knew that love was the biggest lie of all.

“I hate this stupid thing!”

She tore the dress from the stand, wanting to tear it into rags, then burn those rags like the meaningless scraps of fabric they were. Her fingers ripped at it, pulling apart seams and opening up lines of stitching like wounds.

And yet, none of it,
none
of the mess she’d just made of the once-beautiful dress, looked as bad as she felt right then.

“Anne! What are you doing?”

He caught her arms and pulled her back from the dress, holding her against his chest.

Anne fought to break free from him. She wasn’t going to let herself cry in his arms the way she had before. And she definitely wasn’t going to let him promise her that everything would be all right.

Nothing was all right…and wouldn’t ever be again.

“Let. Me. Go.”

“I know how upset you are right now,” Gareth said as she pushed away from him, “but don’t keep destroying your mother’s dress. Not when I know how much it means to you.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” Anne snapped back, letting herself lash out for the first time in her life. “I was stupid enough to think I loved you, but love is just a word, isn’t it? Just something people say to try to feel better about their pointless lives.”

“That’s not what love is,” Gareth insisted.

“No, you’re right,” Anne said. “Love isn’t even that, because it
doesn’t
make you feel better. It just tears you up inside.”

Gareth reached out to put his hands on her waist and wouldn’t let her evade his touch no matter how she tried. “You have to keep believing in love.”

“Why should I, when it’s just another lie?”

“Because love is real.”

“And how could you possibly know that?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Because I love you.”

A part of Anne wanted so desperately to believe him. Because if she could believe in his love, then maybe…

No, she wasn’t going to put her faith in any more fairy tales. She couldn’t.

She broke free of his grip. “Get out, Gareth. Just…get out.”

“Anne—”

“Get
out
!”

A few seconds later, when the door closed behind him with a soft click, Anne collapsed on the pile of ripped and ruined fabric from her mother’s wedding dress and cried every last one of the tears she’d held back since she was a little girl standing at the window with her mother watching the taxi take her father away one more time.

Chapter Fifteen

Gareth waited in his car outside Richard Wells’s office until he saw the lawyer leave for the meeting Gareth had set up for him using a false name. What he was about to do would only work if the lawyer wasn’t there. Even then, Gareth would be breaking so many laws he could barely believe he was really about to do this.

Breaking and entering, burglary, possibly even industrial espionage. If he was caught, he could not only get his PI’s license revoked but maybe even end up in jail.

But if it helped Anne, he didn’t care.

All those years of sticking to the law, yet for Anne, he’d gladly break the rules if it would take away her look of betrayal when she’d found out that he knew about the DNA test…and if it would restore that faith she’d once had in him.

Was this what Brian had felt when he’d found out his girlfriend’s son was caught up with a bad group?

Gareth had spent so long hanging on to his certainty that things were black and white, and that Brian had done the wrong thing. And yet, with Anne’s happiness on the line, he could suddenly see so clearly why someone would break the rules for someone they loved.

Just as Brian’s fiancée had said, love changed everything.

Absolutely everything.

Gareth got out of his car and strode across to the law offices, making sure he looked confident as he said hello to the receptionist and kept going. No one tried to stop him. After all, he’d been there before enough times to be recognizable, and he obviously knew where he was going.

He headed straight up to Richard Wells’s office and a young woman came over. “Can I help you?” She asked the question rather flirtatiously, while clearly admiring the way he looked in his dark suit.

Gareth, fortunately, had always been good with names. “Nikki, it’s good to see you again. I’m here for my meeting with Richard.”

“Oh no,” she said with a small pout, “there must have been a mix-up. Richard just left the office for a different meeting.”

“I really don’t have much time,” he grumbled in a tone that indicated he in no way blamed her for the mix-up but that he was frustrated by the inconvenience just the same.

“Would you like a cup of coffee while you wait?”

She was already pouring him one, and after he thanked her for it, he said, “I suppose I could give him a few minutes.”

Luck was on his side when the lights on her phone suddenly lit up.

“Please let me know if you need anything else while you’re waiting,” she said before rushing back to her desk to deal with the flurry of calls.

It was that easy to get into Richard’s office. For the next few minutes, he was all alone to look out over the city’s skyline, admire the mementoes the lawyer had picked up from around the globe, enjoy his cup of coffee…

…and steal a look at the file relating to Anne’s case.

Fortunately, it was at the top of the pile of files on Richard’s desk.

Making sure he could still hear Nikki’s voice as she dealt with the callers, he slipped on gloves so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints, then reached for the security camera over the door and slipped a piece of black tape over it. If he found anything in Richard’s file, he’d photograph it on his phone. He wouldn’t be able to risk taking documents.

Except that ten minutes later, after he pulled the tape from the security camera and then informed Nikki that he’d have to reschedule, he hadn’t taken a single picture because there wasn’t anything in the files but cold, clinical facts.

The only new information he’d learned was that Anne had given a DNA sample and the results would be back soon.

When had she agreed to do that?

And, really, what had he been expecting to find in Richard’s case file? Because nothing could change the fact that Edward Farleigh was Jasmine’s father. So what was he actually trying to do? Win the case for Anne? Deal with Jasmine Turner? Beat Richard Wells?

All he really wanted to do was make Anne happy. In fact, he’d give anything to do that.

But how?

Fortunately, by the time he left the building, he had an idea. A good one, he hoped.

Realizing just how much ground he had to cover before the DNA results were laid out at the follow-up mediation, he pushed the gas pedal to the floor as he called his office on his cell.

“Gareth?” Margaret said on the other end of the line. “Where have you been this morning? We’ve had several inquiries for new clients, and I’d like to schedule their consultation visits with you as soon as possible.”

“That’s great,” he said, “but there’s something else I need to do first. I need the address for Jasmine Turner’s mother in Oregon.”

* * *

Five hours later, he drove through the pretty town of Ashland, Oregon until he found the house he was looking for. The sun had set, and faint streetlights lit his way up the front path. He’d barely knocked on the door when Deirdre Turner opened it.