I couldn’t control who my mother was any more than you could.”
Chip just shook his head. “You can dress it up, but a liar is always a liar.”
Cecelia’s blood ran cold in her veins. “Chip, please, don’t be like this. I didn’t intentionally deceive you. My parents just thought it was best that no one know.”
“Thank goodness for Maverick,” Chip said. “Without him I never would’ve found out the truth about you. You and your parents would’ve let me marry you knowing that everything I believed about you was a lie.”
Her eyes welled up with tears she couldn’t fight. Was Chip about to break up with her over this? She couldn’t believe it, but that’s what it sounded like. “Chip...”
“Don’t,” he snapped. “Don’t look at me like that with tears in your eyes and try to convince me that you are a victim in this. I’m sorry, Cecelia, but the engagement is off. I can’t marry somebody I can’t trust. You’re a liability to every future campaign I run, and I’m not about to destroy my career for a woman who is living a lie.”
Cecelia looked down at the gigantic diamond-and-platinum ring that she’d worn for the past six months of their engagement. She hadn’t particularly liked the ring, but she couldn’t say so. It was gaudy, but it was as expected for someone of his station. She didn’t want to keep it, not when his words were like a knife to the heart. She grasped it between her fingers and tugged it off her hand, handing it across the table.
Chip took it and stuffed it into his pocket. “Thank you for being reasonable about that.”
At least one of them could be reasonable, she thought as the pain of his rejection slowly morphed into anger. She never would’ve confided in Chip if she’d known he would react like this. Now, all she could hope for was damage control. “I hope that I can still count on you to keep this secret,” Cecelia said. “Odds are it will get out eventually, but I would prefer it to be on my terms if you don’t mind. For my parents’ sake.”
Chip got up from the table and shrugged it off. “What good would it do me to tell anybody? I’ve wasted enough time here. Have the waiter put dinner on my tab.” He turned on his heel and marched out of the restaurant, leaving Cecelia to sit alone with their cocktails, a basket of bread sticks and an order for food they wouldn’t even eat.
A hollow feeling echoed through her as she looked at his empty seat. Cecelia thought she would be more upset about her broken engagement, but she was just numb. The truth was that she didn’t love Chip. Their relationship was more about strategic family connections than romance, but it still smarted to have him dump her like this when she was at her lowest point. They had planned a future together. They discussed how after The Bellamy deal they were going to sit down and make some solid wedding plans. Instead of finally getting one step closer to the family that she longed for, she was starting over.
Even if Chip kept his word and didn’t spread her secret all over town, it would be embarrassing enough for everyone to find out about her broken engagement. Everyone would speculate about why they broke up if neither of them was talking. She wondered what Chip would tell them.
In the end, she was certain that her secret would come out anyway. One way or another everyone was going to find out that Cecelia was the adopted daughter of a junkie. Royal was a place where everybody was always in everyone else’s business. They had all the drama and glamour that the Houston society provided, with all of the small-town nosiness that Cecelia could do without.
When the truth came to light, she wondered who would still be standing beside her. The members of the Texas Cattleman’s Club were supposed to be like a family, but they were a fickle one.
Then there was the matter of her real family. How would her parents ever recover from the fallout? They’d built their lives on maintaining a perfect facade. Would their family, circle of friends and business contacts ever forgive the decades-long deception?
Reeling from the events of the evening, Cecelia picked up her purse and got up from the table, leaving a stack of bills to cover the tab. She could’ve let Chip pay for it all, but she didn’t want to face the waiter and explain why she was suddenly alone with a tableful of food coming out of the kitchen.
As she got into her car, she leaned back against the soft leather seat and took a deep breath. At this moment, she needed her friends more than ever. But as Simone had said earlier, she and Naomi were already on a plane to California. They wouldn’t be back for several days.
She couldn’t talk to her parents about this. They would be more distraught about her breakup with Chip than how painful this was for her. She loved her parents, but they were far more concerned with appearances than anything else. She was certain that when word of her broken engagement got around to them, she would get an earful. She could just imagine her mother scrambling to get back in the Ashfords’ good graces.
At the moment, Cecelia didn’t really give a damn about the Ashfords. If they couldn’t accept her the way she was, she didn’t want to marry into their family anyway. So what if she wasn’t of the good breeding that Chip thought she was? She was still the same person he had always known. The woman he had proposed to.
As she pulled her car out of the parking lot of the club, she found herself turning left instead of right toward the Pine Valley subdivision where she lived in a French château-inspired home. There wasn’t much to the left, but Cecelia was in desperate need of a stretch of road to drive and clear her mind.
After a few miles, she realized that maybe all this was for the best. Perhaps Maverick was doing her a favor in the end. It was better that she and Chip break up now, while they were still engaged, than to have a messy divorce on her hands. And God forbid they’d started a family. Would Chip reject his own children if he found out that they were tainted by their mother’s inferior bloodline?
Cecelia shuddered at the thought. The one thing she wanted, the one thing she’d always wanted, was a family of her own. She longed for blood relatives whom she was bound to by more than just a slip of paper. People who would love her without stipulations and requirements. Her parents did love her, of that she had no doubt. But the Morgans’ high standards were hard to live up to. She had always strived to meet them, but lately she wondered how they would feel about her if she fell short. Would they still love and protect their perfect Cecelia if she wasn’t so perfect?
As she made her way to the edge of town, she noticed lights on in the distance at the old Wilson House and slowed her car to investigate. She didn’t realize anybody had bought that property. No one had lived in the large, luxurious cabin for several years, but someone was definitely there now.
She wasn’t sure why she did it, but she turned her car down the winding gravel road that led to the old house. Maybe it was Maverick’s secret hideout. There, out front, she spied a fully restored 1965 Corvette Stingray convertible roadster. She knew nothing of cars, but she remembered a poster of one almost exactly like this on Deacon’s bedroom wall in high school. That one had been cherry red—his dream car.
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