Page 15 of Shopping for a CEO's Fiancee
“That doesn’t make any of this less real.”
“You’re right. We broke all the rules. Took all the steps and shook them up.”
“There’s so much more to relationships and love than a nested list of steps and procedures.”
“Are you sure?”
I grab her, hard, and kiss her, the impulse driven by something that does not appear anywhere on my personal Gantt chart. This kiss holds the world together. My hands on her soft, yielding shoulders are pillars, meant to hold up the next layer of emotion. We are the moon and stars, her eyes are the atmosphere, her breath the air I breathe.
Laws of attraction keep atoms together, electrons and neutrons repelling and migrating closer, forming differentiated objects that serve our purposes.
Feelings shouldn’t follow the same pattern.
And yet they do. The heart may be a muscle, but it’s also a vessel that pumps blood and magic through cells that I’m kissing with yearning, cells that kiss me right back, with heat and warmth and wetness that curves into me, our skin attracted to skin by nothing more than emotion attached to biological processes.
That feel damn good.
So damn fine.
The earth jolts. I knew we compounded energy, but—
“Sorry about that, Mr. McCormick and Ms. Warrick. Problem with turbulence.”
Amanda gives me a weak smile and asks, “What if that were more than turbulence?”
“Excuse me?”
“What if we had five minutes before the plane crashed. What would you do if you knew we only had five minutes left before we died?”
I give her a look.
“I know it’s silly,” she says. Her expression says it’s anything but.
“I would regret not really marrying you.”
Her eyes move down, unfocused suddenly, her blinking in time to the beat of my heart. I know she’s processing what I just said, integrating the implications, trying to decide whether to believe it or not, shock wearing off.
What fills in the spaces once the surprise is gone?
“You’re wrong.”
“Wrong about wanting to marry you?”
“Wrong about not knowing how to reveal yourself to someone, Andrew.”
What the hell am I supposed to say to that?
My turn to look away. Stare out the window. Pretend I’m thinking through her words when all I’m really doing is trying to hold it together. How can I stare down a Sultan during intense business negotiations but a simple question from my girlfriend shatters me?
Love.
Right?
Cotton and warmth take over, my lungs inhaling Amanda, exhaling confusion. She’s next to me, her eyes guarded yet hopeful, trying to understand me from the outside in. That’s all we can do. Look and listen, touch and hear, filled with the infusion of our lover’s scent and their very essence, until we know them as well as you can know someone whose flesh isn’t yours.
And if you’re really fortunate, you uncover parts of yourself through them that would otherwise remain buried under that outer shell that you present to the world as you.
“What about you?” I challenge. “Five minutes. You have five minutes left before dying. What would you do?”
Her kiss is my response.
And wetness on my cheek.
Alarmed, I reach up, cupping her face with both hands, not breaking the connection our mouths make. Deepening the kiss, I sweep my tongue between her lips, sucking, her sweet teeth nipping at my lip, the softness turning urgent. More tears, and I’m torn. I want to pull back and say all the right words to make her stop crying, but instinct makes me search for an answer with my mouth, my lips, my hands and tongue.
I turn in my seat, seeking her soft curves, wanting her heat against me, needing her.
“We’re not married,” she whispers against my mouth, our foreheads pressed together.
“I know,” I rasp, ready to tell her how much I want to propose, how she’s the one, the only one, and how that feeling makes my chest collapse.
Clarity is so rare. Certainty is slippery. As I kiss her again, my hands integrate with her space, our bodies no longer separate from each other, hearts fusing. She is becoming me and I am becoming her and by God, this is such a familiar feeling. The curve of her spine against my fingers, the tickle of her hair against my nose, the way she inhales as if she’s whispering my name through centuries—it’s already in me.
This is déjà vu through touch.
She’s already mine.
The stupid ritual of getting married, of rings and parties and vows and commitment, is just dressing. She’s right: we’re not married.
And I need to confess how sorry I am for that.
More than that, I need to correct this.
“Thank God,” she adds, laughing softly. “Can you imagine how ridiculous that would be?”
I go cold. I am a wall at my company’s ice bar. I am an iceberg. I become liquid nitrogen.
Ridiculous.
Right.
I can’t breathe. My throat closes, mind a whirl of all the business work Gina has texted and emailed to me, a helicopter cutting through the perfect familiarity of two seconds ago and shredding it with blades that become claws.
“Andrew?” she asks, snuggling against my shoulder, the angle awkward, her ear over my heart.
Can she hear it break?
“Right,” I choke out, plastering on a smile. I force a low rumble of a laugh. “Ridiculous.”
She lifts the window cover and a shaft of sunlight streams in, catching her ring, the wave bouncing right into my eye, blinding me with pain. I have to look away, the afterimage etched in my sight.
I close my eyes, the distance between her warm skin and mine widening with each breath, even as we stay in place. She is pressed against me, still snuggled in, yet I’m a football field away within ten minutes.
That day I said I wouldn’t let her love me, I lied. I told myself one hell of a whopper, and then I crafted it, an artisanal masterpiece of fakery, in order to get her to leave me with my pain and fear. Having a witness to my weakness was worse than bearing it alone.
It’s crazy. I know. Wanting to be married to her is illogical. Impetuous. Silly and immature, a flouting of convention and societal understanding of what marriage is supposed to be and represent. We made a spectacle of ourselves in Vegas, and in the midst of drug-induced spontaneity, we committed an act of utter synchronicity.
For one of us, at least.
By the time we arrive in Boston, we’re still sitting next to each other, and she’s sleeping, her cheek against my shoulder, but we might as well have the Berlin Wall between us.
And one of us has to defect.
Chapter Nine
The realities of learning to run a Fortune 500 company come crashing down the second we land in Boston. Gerald’s there to greet me with the limo. Amanda and I exchange strangely distant kisses. Lance takes her home at her insistence.
She claims she has a doctor’s appointment she forgot about, but it seems contrived.
I invent a meeting with investors from Vilnius. She doesn’t question it. Her weekend is “full” with vague events with her mother, and mine is nothing but work catch-up.
We both clearly need some space.
Our parting lingers in my troubled mind as Gerald pulls away from the airport, the other limo disappearing with a finality that makes me sick. We’re not on bad terms. Not even a bit.
Ridiculous.
That comment, though. Might as well tell me I’m bad in bed. Both are about as true, and both are distinctly impossible.
“Sir?” Gerald asks. “How was Vegas?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Pretend I didn’t, sir.” He smirks. The guy has worked for us for years. I don’t know much about him, other than the fact that he was a Navy SEAL and he teaches art on the side. Dad likes to hire chauffeurs with military or law enforcement backgrounds. We haven’t had a safety issue since I started working for Anterdec, so this is one of my father’s policies I plan to continue.
“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” I add, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Anything new here?”
“No, sir.”
“How goes the art project at the community center?” Declan’s closer to Gerald, and helped secure a grant from our company’s foundation for a proposal initiated by Gerald.
The guy shaves his head and has a face that shows a violent life. Crooked nose, deep scar below his right ear into the jaw, and a hardness in the lines of his face. He’s built like a nuclear bunker.
But when he smiles, he becomes a marshmallow.
“The kids love it. The pottery wheels and kiln make a huge difference. Some of the kids are preparing to sell their works at a juried art show. Another one got accepted into a full-tuition summer program for art camp.”
“That’s great.”
“And your brother has offered to model again for my classes. Not for a while, but this fall, after the honeymoon.”
I groan. Gerald laughs. “What’s my brother trying to prove?”
Gerald wisely shrugs and goes silent for the rest of the trip to my place.
I spend the night alone with my laptop. It doesn’t mind being married to me. My laptop is the perfect wife, actually.
It turns on whenever I want it.
It greets me by name.
It remembers everything.
A few strokes of my fingers and it gives me anything I demand.
It doesn’t talk back.
I am one floor below the penthouse apartment, overlooking the Seaport District. Lights blink in the distance, different colors from boats sending signals I can’t read. Just like women.
