Page 36 of Substitute Bride

“Thanks for coming over,” he said, opening the car door for her.

“Of course. I had a good time.” She smiled at him, looking pretty and a little rumpled since her hair had air-dried after being in the pool.

He hoped she was telling the truth. “Good.” He thought about how happy his girls had been, playing with him and Rose in the pool. “It’s good for them.”

“What is?”

He looked down as he realized he probably shouldn’t have spoken his thoughts out loud at the moment. “Having you in their life.”

He glanced up in time to see a fleeting emotion cross Rose’s face, but it was gone too quickly for him to identify. “They must miss their mom.”

James felt a tug of deep feeling in his chest. “Yeah. I mean, they’re too young to remember much about her, but I know they must miss having a mom. They need someone to… to fill that space in their lives.”

“I guess that’s what you were hoping with Genevieve.” Her voice was soft, and it seemed natural for them to be talking about this subject, rather than strange or intrusive.

“Yeah. It was. It sounds absolutely absurd, given how things turned out, but she was different when I first got to know her. She reminded me…” He trailed off, afraid Rose would think poorly of him if she knew what he’d been going to say.

“I never knew Melissa, but she couldn’t have really been like Genevieve.”

“Not in the ways that matter. She was loving and… and generous. But in some superficial ways, Genevieve was like her. I know that’s what Marta and William saw in her, why they thought she was a good choice for me. It just seemed…” He took a breath, glancing to the side, away from Rose. “It just seemed… easy. A natural replacement. I was wrong though. She could never fill that hole in any way.”

He felt a response from Rose rather than saw it, and he turned back quickly to see what she had reacted to.

She’d dropped her eyes, her expression hidden behind her eyelids and hair. It was frustrating. He wanted to know what she was thinking, what she thought about him, whether she thought he was really as foolish as he felt.

He wanted her to admire him, not to think he was an idiot.

After a moment Rose looked up again and opened her mouth to say something when a red car pulled into the driveway, blocking his driver from getting out.

James felt his stomach tighten and his heartbeat accelerate when he saw who it was. What the hell was Genevieve doing here?

She got out of her car, clearly in an angry huff.

“What do you want?” he demanded. He wasn’t going to be taken off guard or let himself be at a disadvantage today.

“I wanted to talk to you,” she said, looking icily from him to Rose. “What do you think?”

“What I think is that you better stop spreading lies around. You know very well that I never cheated on you and⁠—”

“Why am I supposed to know that? As soon as I’m out of the way, you start screwing your slut of a nanny. What am I supposed to think about that?”

He was angered by the crude words, especially as they applied to Rose, but he reined in the feeling so he wouldn’t lose control. “You’re supposed to think that nothing I do is your business anymore. I never cheated on you, and nothing I do after we’ve broken up is your concern.”

“It is my concern!” Genevieve turned her huff onto Rose then. “I can see what you’ve been up to this whole time, trying to get your hooks into him in any way you can. I’m not going to let you do it. He’s not yours. He’s mine.”

Rose was normally so mild that he would have expected her to shrink in the face of that kind of ire, but she didn’t. Something cool and defiant seemed to take her over, and her back straightened palpably. “He’s not anyone’s. He makes his own decisions, and neither you nor I can make him do anything he doesn’t want.”

“Well, he doesn’t really want you. He’s just using you because he’s afraid to be with me.”

James made a choked sound of objection at this absurdity, but Rose was the one who responded. “I don’t think that’s true, but it doesn’t really matter what either one of us thinks. He’ll do what he wants to do. All I’m saying is that you can’t dictate to him or to me what that is.” She was obviously getting into her response, carried away by the momentum of her resentment. Her cheeks had deepened to a dark pink, and her eyes were shooting off sparks. “If we want to be together, then we’ll be together, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”

Ridiculously James felt a swell of pleasure at the words—even if Rose didn’t mean them the way they sounded. And that automatic, irrational emotional response made it perfectly clear that what he really wanted was to be with Rose.

No matter how wrong it was in every way.

“Now get out of here,” James said firmly, turning Genevieve around and pointing her toward her car. “This is private property, and you’re not welcome. I’ll call the cops, if you don’t leave.”

“You can’t treat me like this!”