“I-I want that. I want … us. I just wish it didn’t look like I married you and then cheated on you with my boyfriend. How do we explain it?”
“We say you didn’t know.”
“Well, neither did you.”
If this was to truly work, we had to be honest with one another. I didn’t want to start my life with Lauren on a lie.
“It is time I told you the truth.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Lauren
* * *
The truth. Alexei had always had a slippery relationship with it, yet I had felt a change in him, an openness that presaged promise for our future.
“What do you mean?”
“That isn’t the entire story.”
I moved away from him, to behind the desk, needing the protection it would give me. Here, in the midst of my crumbling business, I readied myself for the blow to come.
“What’s the entire story?”
He inhaled deeply, obviously readying himself for battle. “I knew we were married, but I wasn’t ready to hear all the reasons why we shouldn’t be.”
I had suspected it, hadn’t I? That he lied. That he knew all along. “You knew the morning after? Or you made it happen at the time?”
“I did not trick you into marrying me. I was as drunk as you, but marrying the woman of my dreams did not seem like a mistake. The next morning, you were so horrified that it might have happened, so even though I knew?—”
A chill washed over me. “You decided I didn’t need to have that information.”
“Admit it, Lauren, you would have demanded we get it annulled. I needed time to come up with a strategy.”
He was right. I would have insisted we fix it with a signature and a goodbye. Instead, he let me think nothing happened while I went about my day. My month. My year.
While I met someone else. A user. A criminal.
“You knew we were married but you still let me date someone. You … you let me hook up with that loser.”
A flash of pain scored his handsome features. If he had any regrets, that was probably one of them. That I had been with another man while married to him, not because of the damage to me, but the damage to his ego.
“If I had told you, what would have changed? You would have insisted we divorce, then spent another fifteen years ignoring me. I didn’t have the bandwidth to chase you, Lauren. To put all my effort into persuading you that we should be together. I had to set what I wanted with you aside until I fixed things with my father. I already knew he was ill—I just didn’t know how much until I got that call from his neighbor.”
I shook my head. “That’s not good enough, Alexei. You can’t hold the cards close to your chest, keep this massive secret that affects me, and tell me you did it—what, for my own good? Again?”
He leveled that frigid blue gaze at me. “We would have missed our chance.”
“Yes. Where you see the universe pushing us together, I see the signs pointing in a whole other direction. We missed our chance because it was never meant to be. And this confirms it!”
His expression turned to stone. “I don’t believe that. There were obstacles to overcome, but that’s what makes this worth it. The harder it is, the sweeter the victory.”
Fucking athletes! “This isn’t the playoffs, Alexei. I’m not some prize to be won after you’ve worked your ass off. You say you do these things—push me away, lie about being married, blackmail me into dating you—all because you apparently know better.”
“I don’t. Apparently, I know very little about women.” He sounded so glum. I didn’t believe it for a second.
“This is not a man versus woman thing. Honesty isn’t confined to a single gender. I could cut you some slack for how you played things at graduation all those years ago. You were young and had a lot going on. We both did. Neither of us were mature enough to handle what we were feeling, the intensity of it. You believed you were protecting me from your father’s enemies, and I’m prepared to honor that. But …”
