The Bride (The Boss) (38 page)

“No, I should have. If I had only thought—”

I pressed my palm to his cheek. My nose was stuffy from my hysterical crying. “You couldn’t have known. Even with your experience in the past…you’re a man. You don’t think of those things, because they’re not at the front of your mind, the way they are for women.”

He folded me close again and swayed with me until my breathing slowed and I was calm again.

“Sorry I sub dropped and ruined your birthday.” I tried to make a joke of it, but it sounded pathetic and self-pitying the moment I said it.

“You didn’t ruin my birthday, Sophie.” There was such tender conviction in his words, I nearly started to cry again. “In fact, I think you were wrong. Your submission wasn’t the best part of this evening.”

“What was?”

He took my face in his hands and tilted it up for the sweetest, softest kiss. When he drew back, his gaze searched my face, soaking in every detail. “Because tonight, unlike the other nights we spent here… Tonight, you’re staying with me.”

Looking back, I couldn’t understand how I’d ever had the will to leave him.

“I wish all my moves had gone like this.” I watched, enraptured, as a very broad-shouldered gentleman loaded the last neatly packed box into the back of the moving truck.

Beside me, Neil was scrolling through texts. It was late April and the sun was shining, but it was a chilly day. “I’m glad we waited until it was a bit warmer to do this,” he grumbled.

“What happened to ‘I grew up in Iceland, I’m a Viking, I can walk through the snow barefoot?’” I teased.

“Just because I can tolerate the cold doesn’t mean I like standing out in it.” He frowned at the back of the truck. “Surely this can’t be everything.”

“I checked and double checked. Everything that isn’t furniture.” My heart squeezed a little bit. We had no immediate plans to sell the apartment; Neil reasoned that it might come in useful if we ever needed to stay in the city overnight. I wondered if his reluctance to part with it was rooted in the same sentimentality I felt toward the place. It was our home, the place where we’d exchanged our first I-love-yous, where we’d made some difficult decisions that had shaped our relationship and made us stronger.

It hurt more to leave than I’d expected it would.

As if reading my mind, he peered up at the bright April sky and said, “You know…while I love this place, and we’ve made some very good memories here, it’s never really been ‘our’ home, has it? I’m looking forward to settling into the new house. Making it ours.”

I supposed I had a different idea of making a house my own. Something about the whole fully-furnished aspect made it seem like there were fewer options available in the customization department. Though I knew Neil wouldn’t bat an eye if I demanded we refurnish and renovate the entire place, that wasn’t my style. It seemed too wasteful, too indulgent, too—

“Ma’am? This was almost left behind,” one of the movers said behind me, and when I turned I saw, to my horror, that he held the orange Hermés box.

“What’s that? Could it be a one-hundred-thousand-dollar purse my fiancée has been hiding from me for months?” Neil asked, a hint of humor in his voice. He put his hand on my shoulder and leaned close to my ear. “I do read our card statements, Sophie.”

My face burned with shame, both at being found out and at the openly contemptuous look that had come over the mover’s face when Neil had uttered the dollar amount. I didn’t blame the guy; it was probably an involuntary reaction.

I took the box and turned toward the waiting car. We had to get the Maybach out to Sagaponack, anyway, where Tony would be moving into the staff quarters. The mover rolled down the truck door and slapped it as he headed toward the passenger seat.

When Neil got in beside me, I avoided eye contact. I just held the stupid, incriminating box in my lap.

“Shall I put that in the trunk, with the rest of valuables?” he asked, and I burst into tears.

“I am so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was in the store, and that weird neighbor put me on the spot, and the sales people were so snotty and it was like I was living in that scene in that old movie—”

“Dear god, tell me you aren’t referring to
Pretty Woman
as ‘that old movie,’” he said, seemingly more concerned with that aspect of the whole fiasco than with my transgression.

I couldn’t stop my shame from rolling out in a wave of incrimination. “I didn’t really want the bag, but I did, and it’s so pretty and my mom is still living in a trailer and I’m about to move into this enormous house and I bought a hundred-thousand-dollar purse, Neil! A fucking purse! I don’t even know who I am anymore!”

“Sophie, I don’t care about the purse.” He reached for my hand. “Truly, I don’t care.”

I raised my head and met his gaze through watery eyes. “But you’ve been so stressed out lately about money—”

“I’ve been stressed because my only daughter is getting married,” he admitted patiently. “And yes, it is costing me a small fortune. But we’re in no danger of becoming impoverished. My companies are doing well, I pay tax, and I have a very diverse portfolio. Unless something truly catastrophic happens to the world infrastructure, we’ll always have more money than we can spend. And your book is doing so well, it isn’t as though you couldn’t afford that bag on your own.”

He had a point there.
I’m Just The Girlfriend
had earned out its advance in a month, and when India had given me a projected royalty figure, I’d almost passed out.

Still, it seemed so wasteful, especially when I considered the long hours my mother worked just to keep her head above water. We’d spent my entire childhood one paycheck away from disaster at all times.

“I’m just… I’m really ashamed.” I shrugged. “I can’t get used to all of this. Coming from the way I lived, the way my family still lives… It feels wrong.”

Neil sat silently for a moment, before suggesting, with all the gentleness of a man handling a live grenade, “Do you think perhaps you might simply be reacting to the stress of this move? You’ve never owned property before, and this isn’t exactly a starter home. It’s perfectly natural that you would be nervous.”

“It’s not that, it’s…” I waved my hand. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m stressed. I can’t even finish a complete sentence.”

“Can I at least see the bag?” Neil asked with a crooked smile. “It must be awfully special.”

I lifted the top off the box. Inside, nestled in crisp, carefully folded tissue paper, a drawstring linen bag with the Hermés logo held the purse itself. I was almost afraid to look at it; I hadn’t seen it since it had been boxed up.

Neil took an audible breath at the sight of the pale alligator leather. “Oh, that is… Well, I can see why it would cost so much.”

Of course he would. The man knew leather, owing to his ridiculous shoe fetish. He reached out with two fingers—I swear his hand trembled—and stroked the glossy alligator as though he were petting a baby duck.

“Oh, Sophie. This is exquisite, really.” He shook his head. “If you don’t want it, I’ll carry it. I would not give a single fuck, to borrow one of your phrases.”

Why was it that he could always say just the right thing to turn my mood around? “You’re really not mad?”

“I’ll admit, I was a bit upset when I got the statement and saw that you’d spent so much without mentioning it to me. But you’d never been comfortable buying even a pack of gum without some kind of tearful admission after the fact. I thought perhaps it was a particularly expensive form of personal growth.”

I couldn’t help my tearful laugh. “I am really sorry, though.”

“I don’t mind if you spend our money, just tell me about large purchases. I may have more money than God, but I do need to keep my books balanced.”

The ride out to the new house was long and gave me a good idea of how hellish a commute by car would be. I couldn’t imagine a two-hour drive into the city every day, but Neil seemed positively invigorated by the idea.

“You know, I have the Ferrari out of storage,” he said, almost bouncing in his seat. “This drive would be nothing at all in the Ferrari.”

“No!” I knew what “nothing at all” meant. It meant he was having visions of blasting down the highway at insane speeds.

He frowned at me. “Sophie, I’m retired. I have to make my own fun.”

“Your own fun should never include super cars and speeding tickets.”

“Then we have vastly different ideas about what constitutes ‘fun’,” he grumbled.

Since we’d flown in to see the property before, I’d never gotten a look at the driveway and front gate. And there really was a gate. A towering black wrought iron gate set into an intimidating, twelve-foot high, native-stone wall. We stopped at the security box while Tony entered the code, and the gates swung inward. We drove through, and they closed behind us. On the other side of the wall was a guardhouse, with a uniformed security guard sitting inside.

“Is that totally necessary?” I asked, looking out the back window.

“On a property this size, with the house as isolated as it is, I really feel more comfortable with some security.” Neil rolled down his window. “The scent of the ocean. I can’t believe I might have retired in Somerset and missed this.”

“I can’t believe we have security guards.” I was a little uneasy, and I wasn’t letting it go yet. “I mean, do I have to do anything special if I want to leave? What if I want to be spontaneous?”

“They’re security guards, not jailers,” he said patiently. “You can come and go as you like. I know you aren’t used to it, but you must remember that your life is vastly different now. One of the adjustments you have to make, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, is remembering that with money comes a certain amount of caution.”

“I guess I can see where you’re coming from. You buy a seventy-eight-million-dollar house, you don’t want anyone fucking with it.”

“There is that, but more importantly, I wouldn’t want anyone fucking with
us
. Your name will be in society sections when we publicly announce our engagement, and when we’re married. And there are people out there who aren’t stable.” He looked back to me, and his expression softened, so I must have looked completely terrified. “Darling, I didn’t mean to frighten you. Nothing has ever happened to me, or to Emma. Elizabeth didn’t have any troubles. But when Emma was young, there were some letters, some… Well, there were threats.”

“Against Emma?” I could only imagine how that had made him feel. He loved Emma more than any other human being on the planet.

He nodded. “I’m a bit more cautious now. But not excessively so, I wouldn’t think.”

“Nah, probably not.” I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that some of the realities of my new life were a bit more severe than merely having to cope with spending money.

“Besides, we’ll never see them up near the house, unless there’s an emergency. There are only four of them on each shift,” he reassured me.

The driveway was lined with tall red pines, the ground beneath them recently churned up.

My jaw dropped. “You didn’t!”

He looked smug at his little surprise. “I told you, we were doing some renovations. I thought you might like something to remind you of home.”

The same trees surrounded the trailer where I’d grown up. The fact that he’d noticed, remembered, and had full-grown trees transplanted onto our property astounded me.

“You know, you’re really something else.” I grinned at him, and he grabbed my hand and dropped a kiss on my knuckles.

My legs were grateful for the stretch when we pulled up at the front door and climbed out of the car.

“We won’t be needing anything else today, Tony. Thank you,” Neil told the driver. “Take some time to get settled in.”

Tony would be living in the apartment above the porte-cochere, but those rooms hadn’t come furnished. Tony’s U-Haul was parked near the service entrance. I hoped he had someone to help him move the stuff in. I wasn’t above lifting furniture.

“Wait.” Neil stopped me at the door. “I’m supposed to carry you over the threshold.”

“I think that’s just when somebody is married,” I reminded him, but I stood still anyway, waiting for him to scoop me off my feet.

Instead, he leaned down and hefted me over his shoulder like a sack of onions.

“Hey!” I laughed, all the blood rushing to my head. “I’m entering our new home for the first time upside down.”

“I’m carrying you over the threshold,” was all he said in his defense, and when we stepped into the foyer, he set me on my feet and kissed me. “Welcome home.”

When we’d been to the house before we’d bought it, it had been someone else’s house. It was ours now, and it still felt like someone else’s. Someone else’s furniture, someone else’s art on the walls; I felt like I shouldn’t touch anything.

Neil stood behind me and ran his hand down my arm, over the sleeve of my coat. “What do you suppose we should do now?”

I knew what he was getting at, and he probably expected me to say, “Do it in every room of this enormous mansion,” but I had other plans.
 

“I’m going to run around and touch everything.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Well, I wasn’t expecting that answer, but here we are.”

I jumped up and down and clapped my hands before tearing off like a five-year-old. I ran into the master bedroom and rolled around on the new mattress in the huge four-poster bed. I clomped my way up the stairs in the tower room and ran out onto the circular deck that surrounded it, not caring a second about the cool wind off the sea. In the dining room, I shrugged my coat off and ran around the table, tapping my fingers on each of the fourteen chairs before I headed off to every single guest bedroom and bathroom.

Upstairs, I found the hardwood bridge that lead from an upper sitting area to the loft above the den, and I was standing there, admiring the view of the sea out the two-story windows, when I realized I wasn’t entirely sure how to get back to foyer. Or the bedroom. Or a bathroom, and that would become an issue shortly.

“Hey!” I shouted, and it echoed off the glass. “Hey, Neil?”

No answer. How did I figure I was going to shout across thirty-five-thousand square feet?