Page 78 of Frenched (Frenched 1)
I lifted my chin. That was none of his business. “Yes.”
“That wasn’t on your itinerary, was it?”
I almost laughed. “No. I made some…adjustments to the itinerary once I realized I’d be here by myself.”
“Well, now I’m here.” He came toward me as if he might embrace me again, and I put my hands up.
“No. If you want to stay here, that’s fine. I’ll go somewhere else. Or I’ll go home. But we’re not on this trip together, Tucker.” I moved my hands back and forth between us. “Because we’re not together anymore.”
“Please. Please give me one more chance, Mia.” He dropped to his knees again, right in front of me, and took my hips in his hands. “I’ll do anything you want. You want to go to counseling? Fine, I’ll go. I’ll be more adventurous with you in bed. I only treated you carefully because I knew I wanted you to be my wife—I thought you’d like that. I put you on a pedestal, where you belong. I see the way guys treat their women in porn, and I don’t want to be that way.”
I rolled my eyes. “There’s a big middle ground between pedestal and porn.”
“We’ll figure it out, Mia. Just say we can try again, please. I want you to be my wife. I want to marry you. I want the family we talked about.”
I crossed my arms. “And why will this time be different, huh? What’s happened that makes now so different from two
weeks ago?”
“I realized what life would be like without you. And I hated it.” He looked up at me with wide blue eyes and I almost felt my foundation cracking. Then he tipped his forehead to my stomach. “I’m so sorry, baby. Please give me one more chance.”
The pounding on the door startled us both.
Tucker picked his head up and looked at me funny. “Are you expecting someone?”
“No.”
“Mia?” shouted a male voice through the door. My breath hitched. It sounded like Lucas, but what would he be doing here? And holy fuck, how awkward! I knew I better go answer it before Tucker did. “Just give me a second. Stay here.”
I hurried over to the door, my nerves rattling. When I pulled it open, there was Lucas, looking anxious and adorable. Before I had a chance to say anything, he started in.
“OK, here’s the thing. I’m not letting you go.”
My heart stopped beating for a second. “What?”
He grabbed my hand. “I’m not letting you go. I’m not letting you walk out of my life without giving me a chance to make you happy.”
“Lucas, I—”
“Just listen. I got all the way to my apartment on the most miserable train ride ever. I just kept thinking how you should have been beside me. The flea market’s open today, and I thought, Oh, I should take her. Or I’d think, she wanted to see a castle, I need to take her to Versailles before she leaves. But then I’d realize I can’t, because you won’t let me. And I felt it like a punch in the gut. I couldn’t breathe.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Lucas,” I whispered. Actually it was more like a whimper.
“I’m not done. Because then I got home to my apartment, and it sucked. There’s nothing in there that doesn’t remind me of you—not my kitchen, not my couch, not my bed, not my shower. Nothing. And I realized something else—I can’t let you go. I don’t want to. And—”
“Mia, what’s going on? Who’s at the door?”
It was another one of those moments where things seemed to happen in slow motion—I knew Tucker was walking up behind me, and I bet that peacock hadn’t even bothered to button his shirt—because I watched Lucas’s eyes go from warm and earnest to wide and shocked. He dropped my hand, and a second later I felt another one on my shoulder.
“Babe? Who’s this?”
“Uh…” Fuck! What should I say? I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the trainwreck that was Lucas realizing who was in my hotel room and piecing together why. He was jumping to all the wrong conclusions, but my tongue was stuck in the same sludge my brain was. I couldn’t think, couldn’t speak.
“I’m nobody,” Lucas answered, his eyes sweeping back to me. “Just a friend. Mia, I thought you might like to have coffee but I can see you’re busy. This must be Tucker?”
Jesus, he was covering for me. The sludge thickened with shame.
“Yes, I am. Tucker Branch. And you are?” Tucker, a note of reservation in his voice, held out a hand toward Lucas.
