“So, then, you’re not going to—”
“No, I’m not,” he admitted softly. “I’m sorry. I’ve been such an ass.”
“You weren’t alone there,” Mal said, nodding quickly, and that grin went from sweet and kind of goofy to almost blinding. “And Jules wasn’t the only one who missed you.”
Emery tilted his head up, and I realized it was because his eyes were filling and he didn’t want to cry.
“What the hell did I miss?” I said to the two men, my own meltdown forgotten as I watched them struggle through what certainly sounded like an epic reconciliation.
“Ancient history,” Emery told me, putting his hand on my cheek for a moment, enough to stun me, as well as the rest of the room, into a silence that buried us all alive.
“Okay,” Mal said awkwardly into the sudden deafening calm, addressing the girls. “We’ve got a zip line between the tree houses now. You guys wanna come see?”
They screamed out the yes.
“And your Aunt Jules is makin’ chocolate pancakes.”
They both jumped him, and he picked them up, a girl in each arm, because the man was massive, and walked them out of the kitchen toward their rooms. It wasn’t lost on me that he knew exactly where he was going.
“Emery?” Lydia said sharply, and now, of course, he had everyone’s full and complete attention as he stepped close to me, his hand solidly on the small of my back. The gesture was protective and signaled the grinding halt to our silence and separateness, but most of all, it was overtly possessive. There was no mistaking that.
My knees nearly buckled.
“Emery?” Lydia repeated, terse and barbed, glancing between us. “What’s going on?”
He exhaled slowly and then he smiled at her, and it was so kind, so loving, that I saw her sort of unlock, un-bristle. She was ready to throw down with him, but that wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t that kind of man.
“It’s not fair.” She passed her purse to Shelby and walked to the kitchen table. He moved away from me and joined her there, standing at the other end. “You deserve better,” he said flatly.
“What?”
“You know you do,” he insisted.
“Oh, screw you, Emery. Don’t you dare blame whatever this is on—”
“No,” he agreed quickly, which shut her down. “This is all on me; none of it is you. I’m just telling you truthfully that you do deserve better. You do deserve more.” He sighed, smiling sadly. “I’ve been married, you haven’t, and it’s not fair of me to rob you of standing up in front of everyone who means something to you and doing it for real.”
“It would be real,” she assured him. “Our marriage would be very real.”
“It wouldn’t, and we both know it,” he contradicted her, and there was a deep, resounding echo of certainty in his voice.
“That’s not true.”
He shook his head, and it was almost patronizing. It was like he was doing her thinking and not taking her feelings into consideration. Until I realized he was right, because in this instance, he did know more. He’d been there, been married, and she hadn’t. “You’ll regret it, Lydia. You will.”
“We both decided that—”
“Here’s the thing, if you wanted to just go to city hall, I’d have known you were telling the truth. I’d have believed that marrying me meant the same thing to you as it does to your father—a simple business transaction—if the ceremony itself was of no consequence.”
She was biting her bottom lip, and no one in the room was missing that Emery was speaking the absolute truth.
“We both know that’s not what happened.”
“But, Emery, I—”
“Some people dream about their weddings. I know I did,” he said softly, kindly.
“Yes, but—”
“Stop. We both know better. You want everything to be just so.”
She caught me in her gaze. “Is this about the capes?”
“You know the capes were merely the latest in a long line of signs that we should have been paying attention to,” he said pointedly as her focus returned to him. “You want a lavish day, and why shouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you want that?”
“I—”
“And why in the world would you want to waste that on me?”
Her bridesmaids behind her gasped, and the men looked like they’d all rather be anywhere in the world but in Emery Dodd’s living room.
“I thought it would be all right,” he admitted, gripping the back of the chair I’d come to think of as his, the other, on the other end, as mine. “I thought, Lydia is marrying me to help the town, and I’m doing the same thing. Aren’t we wonderful people because we’re more concerned for others than our own happiness? We could pat ourselves on the back all day long.”
She crossed her arms, gazing at him, but not sad or angry, merely listening. “And,” she began, taking a breath, tipping her head as she regarded him, “since you didn’t love me, you wouldn’t be cheating on Andrea.”