was only one thing he could think to say. “I love you, Jules.”
She didn’t answer in words; she even refused to look at him now. Finally, after what seemed hours, she spoke. “I don’t know you…”
He couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, couldn’t even breathe. He was about to lose the love of his life because of a damned reporter!
When she spoke, it had nothing to do with what he’d just said. Or maybe it did. “Thank you for making me feel like a queen tonight.” She looked up then, and he saw her eyes glimmering with tears. She kissed his cheek, and it froze him through with its gentle good manners and definite farewell. “Spend time with your mother while she’s here. Tell her about your inventions, and the deals you’re making. Or you can talk to Elise. She seems a lovely person, and wouldn’t just accept ‘it’s only work, I wouldn’t want to bore you with the technical details.’”
He might have been angered further still by her mirroring of his words if he hadn’t heard the truth inside them…that he’d done more than merely hurt her by his months of silence. The slight hiccupping rasp at the end of each sentence was a sure sign Jules was close to tears, if she wasn’t crying already.
Though emotional by nature, Julie never cried for effect. She didn’t know how to manipulate him. She was crystal clear, impulsive and giving, funny and adorable—
And walking out the door.
He ran after her. “Julie, I won’t let you leave now, not like this. We have to talk.”
She kept walking. “I can’t take any more tonight.”
He grabbed her by the wrist to stop her walking out, but she pushed at him with her free hand. “I need time, Matt. You gave me the night of my life—the best and the worst. I’m feeling pretty betrayed right about now. I need to get my head around it.”
Shock held him immobile, rendered him speechless. As death knells to love went, betrayed ranked among the worst words.
And then she was gone.
He was wrenching her car door open before he knew he’d followed her. “Don’t do this to us, Julie! Damn it, Elise is only a friend—she was only ever a friend. I never loved her. She knows that. Ask her! I love you, only you!”
She stared up at him and hiccupped again. “How can you love me, if you don’t trust me with your life?”
God help me. “It wasn’t like that. Please don’t go, Jules. Stay. Talk to me,” he said, dropping his voice for the last sentence, suddenly conscious of his mother in the house behind them.
But the tears streaming down Julie’s face told him that talking was the last thing she wanted to do now. At least with him.
Gently, with finality, she closed the car door to her little compact and drove away. No wrenching gears, no racing out. She just left.
She left, and Matt stood there staring after her, reading his future in the past fifteen minutes and without a single clue what to do about it.
CHAPTER TWO
Eight Weeks Later
NEVER in his life had Matt thought he’d be reduced to fighting this dirty. But here he stood outside The Wedding Belles, Julie’s place of work, ready to—
Stop thinking about it. Just do it.
Standing next to his car, Matt tightened his jaw and flipped open his phone. “Hey, Callie, I’m outside. Is everything ready?”
“All systems up and running,” The Wedding Belles’ florist, Callie, replied, with a low laugh. Then, after a short silence, she whispered, “I’m used to doing… unusual things, and this has to be the most romantic way I’ve ever helped out a friend. But are you sure about this? This really is a federal offence.”
“Not if she’s willing, and since she’s my fiancée, I think we can assume she will be,” he replied lightly enough to reassure Callie. But inside, the gripping of his stomach, clenching over and over, signaled his desperation. Would Julie be willing once she knew what this was really about?
He’d pushed her to the edge over the past few months, been a fool to keep so many secrets from her—but he knew this one last secret could destroy them. He’d been trying to tell her for weeks, but after the night of their engagement party, even the thought of telling her made him freeze inside. His tongue glued to his mouth, he retreated behind his old friend and ally, silence.
A real man bears his burdens and mistakes alone. And he puts them right alone. His grandfather’s words.
After everything he’d put her through, to tell her now could be the end of them. But damn it, he wouldn’t let her walk out on him. Whatever it took, he’d keep her with him.
Callie’s voice started him out of his morbid thoughts. “Personally, I love what you’re doing. I wish Jared had thought about doing this to me,” she laughed, “but a couple of the girls are scared about becoming accessories to some kind of felony. And Jared’s worried, too.”
He didn’t blame Callie’s husband…in fact, he couldn’t blame any of them. “I won’t force her into anything she doesn’t want to do,” he said. But it was the biggest lie he’d ever told. He’d keep her in the car, in his house, in his life. Whatever it took to win her, he’d do it, short of a real abduction. He wasn’t that crazy.
He was just a man about to lose the woman he adored with a dozen words, and desperate enough to take the biggest risk of his life.
He’d spent a score of sleepless nights during the past eight weeks since the engagement-party disaster, trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, searching for the elusive miracle that would allow him to tell her what he should have told her at the start. But he’d been so lost in the happiness he’d never known before meeting Julie that the right time and the right words had never come.
Now it was too late.
At exactly 4:47 this morning, as the first threads of dawn had stretched their fingers across the sky, he’d squared his shoulders and faced the fact that he’d screwed up. Big-time. He should have told her about this long before he’d asked her to marry him, even before he’d found out McLachlan’s was in trouble. Now she didn’t want to know.
He’d thought giving her time would help. He’d crossed the country on a six-week nonstop selling tour after the fatal night of the engagement party, showing off the land prototype of his converter, and had sold its practical applications to two major players. Finally McLachlan’s was safe for future generations. Now his mother could have the comfortable retirement she deserved…and his workers and their families were secure.
He was finally free to tell Julie everything— to make her hear it. He’d been coming over to The Wedding Belles’, to her office apartment, and calling every day, from wherever he’d been—but she was now the one fobbing him off. She’d been avoiding him since the night of the party, and was using his own defence of “Don’t worry, it’s just work” against him.
The
