Page 32 of You Know You Wanna

I’d popped the question. She’d said yes. We’d screwed, we’d traveled, and we’d partied, and then she’d gotten pregnant. We provided our parents with the expected grandchild, but it had been shortly after that everything had started going to shit.

With the responsibility of becoming a father hanging over my head, I’d begun spending all my time at the office and Jacqueline had refused to acknowledge that our lives were about to change. At first, I’d thought it would pass.

I’d thought that I’d make a couple good deals and get us squared away nicely, but it turned out that making money had only made me want to make more money. As for Jacqueline, she figured that if I wasn’t going to be there, she didn’t have to be either.

We bought a nice big house and hired a squad of nannies to raise our baby, and ultimately, even during the times when I’d tried to slow down, she’d refused to do the same. She’d also refused to work, to stay at home, to spend time with Laurene outside of regular shopping trips, and as it turned out, to sacrifice the frequent sex.

She’d simply stopped having it with me. In her defense, I was busy.

As I thought about our lives together now, it seemed so unreal. So stupid really, the way we’d approached things and just expected it all to work out. Our marriage had been doomed before we’d even said our I-dos, but hindsight was twenty-twenty, and now Laurene was the one whose life was being turned upside down because of it.

Jacqueline was chattering on about all the people she’d met and the parties she’d been to, but I hadn’t heard a word she’d said and I cut her off when I realized she’d been talking all this time. “Are we seriously going to send Laurene to that boarding school?”

“Where else would she go?” she asked sharply. “I want to live abroad, Remington. That’s always been my dream and I’m tired of putting it off.”

“Yeah, but it’s not only about you anymore, is it? It’s about Laurene, and she really doesn’t want to go. Trust me.”

A car door slammed at her end of the line and I suddenly heard what sounded like a party in the background. She spoke over the thrumming bassline, squealing at something before talking to me again. “Listen, Rem, I just got to a friend’s house and I can’t talk about this right now, okay? I have to go. Send her my love!”

She hung up without even waiting for me to say goodbye, and I groaned as I tossed my phone down on the couch. Somehow, even from the other side of the world, she’d managed to aggravate me even more than anything else today, and that was saying something.

How was it possible that she couldn’t have taken ten extra minutes to talk to me about this before she went into the party? This was our daughter’s future we were talking about.

I wasn’t blameless in all this. I was willing to accept that, but we were in our fucking thirties, the parents of an almost teenager who wanted to have a say in her own damn life. Taking ten minutes wouldn’t have killed her. Even I would’ve taken that time away from work to have the conversation with her.

Hell, I was taking time away from work to have it.

In the end, this was just another prime example of how different we’d become over the years. We’d grown so far apart that neither of us understood the first thing about the other anymore, but for Laurene’s sake, I was going to have to try again.

I would just have to pick a better time to do it.

16

BIRDIE

The storm took on a life of its own as the night wore on. At first, it had only been rain, but thunder rumbled constantly in the distance, and lightning streaked across the night sky, illuminating the trees and the mountains with flashes of white. The rain kept falling and the wind kept picking up.

I wasn’t afraid of storms. In fact, I found them quite calming. Usually, I got my very best sleep on nights like tonight, but it wasn’t happening for me right then.

Sitting on my porch watching the rain sheet down, I sipped a cup of tea and stroked my fingers over the blanket on my lap. That kiss was playing on a loop in my mind, and try as I might, I couldn’t put it out of my head.

It had been the best kiss I’d had in years. Perhaps even ever. Yet, I had no idea if it’d meant anything at all to him—or to me, for that matter. And if it had meant something, I didn’t know what that something was.

The only thing I knew was that my body was still humming in the aftermath, aching for him in places it shouldn’t have been aching. Squirming in my chair, I shook my head at myself and tried focusing on the storm and only the storm.

It was a big one, a beautiful show of light and sound being put on by mother nature herself. When another flash of lightning lit up the sky, my lights flickered twice and then the power went out. I sighed, but I wasn’t too worried.

The backup generator for the resort would kick on in a minute, and while it didn’t include my cabin, it would provide enough ambient light that I wouldn’t be sitting in the pitch dark. Only a few seconds later, the lights on the paths around the resort came back on. The ones in the lobby and around the swimming pools followed, and the darkness was lit with a soft glow again.

As I leaned back, I caught a glimpse of movement coming down one of the paths and I frowned, not quite trusting my immediate suspicion, but as he kept walking through the rain, I realized I was right. Remington Ford was out in the storm—and he was coming directly toward me.

I stood up, wrapping my fingers around the porch railing and squinting into the downpour. “Remington? Is that you?”

“It’s me!” he called. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. What are you doing here?”

He kept walking until he was right in front of me, but he didn’t come up the stairs onto the porch, and I frowned, noticing that he looked stressed again.