Summers' Love, A Cute and Funny Cinderella Love Story (LPC Romantic Comedy Series) (24 page)

“Hotcha mighty, you won!” Red screamed. “You’re Tasmania’s Salesperson of the Year! How ‘bout that?”

Stu, who had stood patiently waiting beside their table, swooped her into his arms. “So, how’s it feel to be the best at what you do? Pretty neat, huh?” Gently extracting the trophy from her arms, he carefully placed Kate’s major award in the center of the table, pushing aside the vase of flowers.

Celebration,
a song Kate detested because it was overplayed at ballgames, weddings, and award banquets, boomed over the sound system. Attendees rushed to the parquet flooring. All except Kate. She remained frozen by her table, too stunned to move.

Stu took her by the elbow and made a move toward the dance floor. “Let’s dance.”

“I can’t,” she said, extending a foot. “Not in these shoes.”

“Come on, kick’em off. This is your night, Kate.”

Kate sat in her chair, peeled off her heels and tossed them under the linen-draped table. She crossed her legs and rubbed the bottom of her left foot with her right thumb. “My arches are killing me.”

Stu shook his head and crooked his finger in a “come on” fashion.

“Seriously,” she said. “This is too much. I need to sit here for a—”

Before she finished, Stu pulled her up and she found herself steered into the cavorting clot of couples.

The DJ was into the third song before he eased into a slower number. Stu, wrapping his arms around her bare shoulders, pressed his lips close to her ear. “You were right about me,” he said softly. “About all of it. I was wrong to use you in my story. I just didn’t want to hear it, especially not from you. Not from someone I care for so deeply. I didn’t understand that I was hurting you.” He pulled back and looked so deeply into her eyes she feared being pulled into them. “I’m sorry.”

“Sssh …” She put a finger to his lips. “That’s over now.”

“I’ve been waiting my whole life for the right person to come along, but I thought it never would happen. And then you showed up in that bookstore with your pouty face and those sad puppy-brown eyes and I knew, I knew right then you were the one.” Lifting her hand, he kissed her knuckles.

She felt tears slip from her eyes and down her cheeks. “Please stop talking. You’re ruining my makeup.”

“I mean it.” He brushed the tears away with the pads of his thumbs and smiled. “Oh sure, you’re testy and cynical and impossible to reason with, but the truth is, finding you is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” He caught another tear, this time leaving the palm of his hand resting against her cheek. “And there is a very good chance I am going to spend a lot of time apologizing to you about all the dumb things I do because I have every intention of spending the rest of my life with you.”

Before she could completely comprehend what he was saying, Stu curled one arm around Kate and pulled her close. His hand left hers. He dipped it into his pants pocket and, when it came back out, a diamond ring winked at her from between his thumb and index finger.

She gasped, but he held her tight. “Shhh … don’t say anything,” Stu whispered as he slipped the ring onto her third finger. finger, “except yes.”

Kate stared at the ring, nearly speechless. She nodded, tears escaping from behind her eyes.

Stu chuckled. “Is that a yes, then?”

She nodded again, burying her face into the soft fabric of his tux. “Yes,” she finally choked out.

The DJ cued up
Always and Forever
by Heat Wave and, with an overwhelming feeling of fatigue, contentment, and disbelief, Kate fell against his chest, sighing heavily.
Stu Summers, a New York Times bestselling author with a beach house, and yacht, and sports car, is in love with me, Tasmania’s
Salesperson of the Year.
The thought of it, all of it, was too much to take in. Never mind that he had just proposed.

A hard tap jerked her out of the stupor. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Red holding up her phone.

“You need to see this,” said Red.

“
Now
?” Kate asked, her voice reminding her a little of Meg Ryan’s in the movie she’d watched a few nights before.

“Yes, now.”

“Is something the matter?” Stu asked Kate.

“I don’t know.”

Kate took Red’s phone and began to read. There, on the Little Brown Pelican Publishing website, were the opening chapters of Stu’s story —
their story
— the one he promised would never see print. The one he’d sworn he had deleted. A gut-wrenching nausea caused her knees to buckle. Every cherished moment and loving comment they had shared lay exposed on the web page.

“Kate, I’m sorry,” said Red, “but I have a Google alert set for ‘Stu Summers’ and …”

“Hey, you okay?” Stu’s words came from far away. “Kate, honey, what’s the matter?”

Kate’s heart slammed against the walls of her chest; her eyes searched the phone’s screen for some hint the posting was a joke, but it was not. Emblazoned in bold letters across the top of the page were the words “
Man’s Best Friend - The First Four Chapters,
by bestselling author Stu Summers
.
Coming soon to a bookstore near you.”

With hands shaking, Kate returned Red’s phone and located her own handbag. Plunging her hand inside, she rooted around until her fingers curled around the stun gun’s handle. Then, stiffening, she directed the hurt and anger she felt toward the man she
thought
she loved.

“Kate, baby, what are you …”

Kate advanced toward Stu with a rage that left her numb. “You
promised
me! You swore it was over.”

Stu backed away, his eyes darting side to side while he looked for an escape. Trapped, Stu replied, “I swear, I didn’t authorize the release of those chapters, Kate, you have to believe me. Something must’ve happened. I explicitly told my editor she
could not
use my manuscript.”

“Well, your editor
didn’t
get the message.”

“Come on, let’s talk this—” She pressed the gun’s stub nose against Stu’s ribs. “Kate, wait! No!”

Bolts of electricity flashed; sparks crackled. For several seconds Stu shook uncontrollably, his heels bouncing on hardwood flooring as the voltage shot through his body. Kate released the trigger.

Stu collapsed into a heap at her feet.

Kate tossed her stun gun onto the floor.

In a haze of anger and hurt, Kate fled barefoot from the ballroom.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Stu convalesced in a hospital room at Medical University of South Carolina Hospital, though between the bong of the intercom with its announcements, murmuring voices outside his room, and nurses making their early morning rounds, Stu found it impossible to sleep. Instead, he lay in bed, listening to his security guard telling someone, whom Stu assumed to be a reporter, that he could not allow him to enter the room.

The guard, Earl Butler, a contract employee of Palmetto Security Services and a former all-conference offensive tackle for the University of South Carolina Gamecocks, was under strict orders to keep away all visitors, especially visitors from the media.

Outside his window, a glorious sunrise brightened over the steeples of Charleston’s skyline. Stu moved his hand to his side and felt the thick gauze bandage. The burn wound under his left nipple remained tender, a painful reminder of his disastrous attempt at reconciliation with the woman he thought he’d spend the rest of his life with.

Stu shifted and winced. Okay. So the more he thought about what happened, the easier it was to see that Kate had the right to be upset with him. Even though technically
he
was not the one who had posted the first four chapters of
Man’s Best Friend
, the partial manuscript
had
found its way online and ultimately that was on him. If he had not emailed the chapters to Dalyrimple, that would never have happened.

Dalyrimple … More like Daly
Pimple,
that … Stu resisted the urge to say a dirty word.

He wondered if all couples experienced moments of misunderstanding like these. Truth was, he didn’t know. The only other serious relationship he’d ever had was with a young woman at the paper mill in Richmond and that ended badly when her mother caught them making out in her father’s Bayliner motorboat parked in the driveway.

What he and Kate had was completely different. Or so he hoped. Still, there was one thing he couldn’t ignore, one thing that nagged at him as he lay with his face turned toward the sunrise. Yes, there were differences, misunderstandings, and now this stun gun burn, but he never doubted for a moment that he loved her.

His door opened a few inches.

Earl Butler poked his monstrously large head around the door. “Someone to see you, boss.”

“Told you, no visitors.”

“‘Splained that to her, boss, but she …”

“Out of my way, Tiny.” Hattie pushed past Stu’s security guard like a middle linebacker coming up the gut on a blitz. His holy ghostwriter wore a blue overcoat and matching hat. With her shoulder, she nudged Earl back into the hallway, then turned and focused her scowl on Stu. “What are you doing in a hospital bed?”

Stu pressed the button to raise the bed while at the same time yanking the sheet up to his neck. “Got shot.”

“Must not be too bad. I don’t see any tubes or drip bags.”

“With a stun gun. I’m lucky to be alive. Those things have been known to kill people.”

Hattie made it to the bed to stand beside him. She crossed her arms and scowled. “What did you do this time? Lie, cheat, get caught eyeing another woman?”

“
I
didn’t do anything except ask her to marry me. Then she zapped me.”

“Must’ve done something, else you wouldn’t be laid up in that bed. I also wouldn’t be reading about you in the newspaper.” Hattie dropped her oversized purse on the bed, dug around, and then held up the front page of the Ocracoke Observer.

Stu winced at the sight of him sprawled on the ballroom floor, hair tousled, jacket askew. “I swear, Hattie, I’m not the one you should—”

“Don’t curse. It’s offensive.”

“To who?”

“To
whom,
” she corrected him. “And it’s offensive to God.”

Stu wilted under her intense glare. Hattie draped the paper over his blanket-covered knees before digging around in her purse again. This time she drew out a ball of yarn and a crochet hook. She pulled a chair up close, plopped into it and started twisting her wrist around and around as a line of handwork formed from the hook. “Tell me what happened. And start from when I left you in Beaufort. If I’m going to help you, I need to know everything.”

Stu recounted how he’d raced to the airport in New Bern and flown to D.C., dropped off his love letter and accidentally stumbled into Kate in the airport. He skipped the part about going to New York, figuring that was an unnecessary detail, and picked up the story again when he arrived just in time to watch Kate win her major award, then dancing.

“Next thing I know, Kate is staring at some fat chick’s smartphone and tearing up. When I ask her what’s the matter, she pulls a stun gun from her purse and points it at me. I thought it was some kind of joke, part of a ‘tase your boyfriend’ initiation hazing thing.” He touched the wound again. “Until she shocked me, that is.”

“And you have no idea why?”

Stu felt his face redden. “Might have had something to do with my former publisher releasing those first four chapters.”

“Um-hum. What else?”

“That’s it. I told my editor, in no uncertain terms, that Little Brown Pelican
did not
have the rights to that manuscript.”

Hattie put down her crocheting and frowned. He sensed a lecture coming.

“Yep.”

“Yep, what?” Stu asked.

“Yep, it’s your fault.” She crossed one leg over the other. “She’s hurting and I can see why. She trusted you. She let you coddle her heart and you crushed it.”

“But I didn’t
do
anything. I mean, I sent the chapters but that was before our big blowup.” He looked away from Hattie and back out the window. “I can’t control what my editor does.”

“No, but you can show Kate how you are willing to take full responsibility over what happened and do whatever it takes to make it right.”

“Groveling has never been a good look on me,” Stu shot back, looking at her again. She had resumed her crocheting.

“Other day in our Bible study, you remember what you said?”

“I said a lot of things.”

Hattie kept her focus on her hands. “You said, ‘Love never gives up, never gets down, or backs down. It always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.’” She eyed him and not in a pleasant way. “Were those just words or were you simply trying to impress that girl?”