The Bride (The Boss 3)

Neil accepted the congratulations of his brothers, and their wives cooed over my ring, and all the while I wanted to sink to the floor and never have to make eye contact with any of them again. It was a relief when my phone rang.

“I have to take this,” I lied. It was my mother, and I didn’t have the strength to talk to her right now. But she’d provided me an out, bless her.

“The reception in here is awful,” Michael called after me.

I raised my phone as if in another toast. “I will try the street.”

When I exited the dining room, I made a sharp left and headed for the bathroom. I needed to sit and carefully dab at my eyeliner and practice my ecstatic-twenty-five-year-old-fiancé-of-a-billionaire face. It was going to take a lot of work, in the mental state I was in.

The bathroom was brick-tiled, the walls cream stucco. Maybe it was supposed to make patrons feel like they were whizzing in Tuscany. The bathroom stalls were standard, though, and there wasn’t an attendant, so I didn’t feel bad about slipping into one of the cubicles, barring the door, and leaning against the wall for as tearless a cry as I could manage.

I remembered the conversation Holli and I’d had after we’d shared news of our engagements. That seemed a lifetime ago. Time passed oddly without my best friend. And I’d sacrificed her for what? For a man I loved, but who possibly was done with me?

I pulled up the browser on my phone and, with shaking thumbs, entered, “signs not get married” into the search bar. There, three links down, was the article I’d forced myself to not look at that day.

Without really knowing what my expectation was, I found myself relieved when the first items had to do with unfaithfulness, substance abuse, and differing religions. Neil had never, to my knowledge, cheated on me; our fairly open relationship should have meant he never had to go behind my back in the first place. We both kind of abused substances, like when we drank or smoked the occasional J, but it didn’t seem like a problem to us, and it had certainly never caused problems between us. As for religion, maybe his Protestant upbringing against my Catholic one would have been an issue if either of us hadn’t been atheists, but there we were.

The rest of entries in the list were things like, “You fight constantly,” and “He tries to control you.” While Neil was awfully bossy in the bedroom, he wasn’t consistently so outside of it. If anything, his lack of input was more frustrating than any need for control he might have had. Sometimes, I just wanted him to be the proverbial coin flip when it came down my life decisions, and he was maddeningly neutral until pressed. Other times, he couldn’t resist micromanaging our lives, but he never told me what to wear or eat.

Although he did have an annoying habit of trying to decide what was best for me when he thought he was ruining my life.

I saw nothing on the list that would make me hesitate to marry him. But there must have been something about me that had changed his mind.

The bathroom door opened, and I hurried to turn off my phone, like I’d been caught committing a crime.

Pamela’s voice drifted into the echoey room. “I can’t believe he has the nerve to bring her,” she said, and there was a laugh. A laugh I recognized.

Valerie.

“I know. It’s so pathetic,” she said with a resigned sigh. “But that’s Neil for you. The man’s arrogance knows no bounds.”

“It’s Emma I feel badly for, poor dove,” Pamela replied, just as I, quietly as possible, put one foot, then the other, on the toilet seat to hide my feet below the gap in the stall. “Imagine how awful that must be for her? To have her father’s practically teenage mistress at her wedding?”

“I know, I know.” Valerie sounded like she was consoling Emma, despite the fact that she wasn’t there. “She handles it well, but she is so uncomfortable with them. Apparently, they go at it like rabbits. Emma was afraid to move from room to room when she was still living with them.”

I peeked over the top of the door and caught a quick glimpse of Valerie applying lipstick in the mirror.

This was just like a teen movie. And I was the lovable nerd hiding in the bathroom stall while the popular girls bitched about me.

Well, apparently not too lovable, listening to them.

“He’s making a fool of himself,” Pamela went on. “Why do men always do this in middle age?”

“This is Neil we’re talking about. He started going through his midlife crisis the moment Emma was born,” Valerie snarked. “I’m sure this one will be the same as last time. Her biological clock will start making unreasonable demands, he’ll panic, and she’ll be gone.”

My anger boiled up inside me like some horrible, hot, nasty thing. I wanted to storm out and punch her, and I was pretty sure that the only thing holding me back was that Emma wouldn’t want her mother to have a black eye in the wedding photos.

“If she’s anything like the last one, the wedding alone will be an expensive lesson to learn,” Pamela mused.

“Oh, no. I don’t think the wedding is going to happen.” Pride dripped from Valerie’s voice. “I’ve been…gently steering him in the wise direction. ‘She’s so young, you two must have so much in common to overcome that,’ ‘it’s amazing you can keep up with her,’ that type of thing.”

“You can’t tell them anything directly, can you?” Pamela clucked her tongue as though they were talking about a naughty child and not a grown man.

“No, you really can’t. Especially Neil. He just doesn’t listen. I tried to warn him about the last one, and look where that ended up.”

“Hopefully, this one doesn’t take him for as much alimony,” Pamela snorted. “I’m going to the alley for a cigarette. Are you coming?”

“No, I’ll be along in a minute, I should get back out there. I just need the toilet.”