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“I have to know, Cortez.”
“Why? Your prenuptial agreement ensures he won’t get a penny of your money.” I scrubbed my face with my hand, wishing I had a better argument to talk her out of what she was asking. “Go out and find your own happiness instead. Knowing will only make you bitter.”
“It looks as though she’s finding her own happiness as well.” My cousin motioned with her head toward the hallway where Kensington was being escorted to a different dining room by Lincoln Mulrooney, the managing director of Whitby Press.
Evidently, she’d seen me when she came in. That would be the only explanation for the change in dining rooms.
“What about finding your own happiness, Cort? How will you do that when you are so in love with her?”
I brushed my lower lip with my fingertip. I could feel Kensington’s pain, and it was my fault. What had I been thinking by showing up here tonight? The only thing I’d achieved was add to the sorrow Kensington and I were both already feeling.
My cousin was, thankfully, the most talkative person in our family, so we didn’t suffer through awkward silence while my mind was elsewhere.
In the same way I knew when she arrived, I also knew when Kensington left.
“Shall we?” I said a few minutes later.
Serena reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. “Cortez, as much as you don’t want to see me hurt, I don’t want you to be either. Tell this woman how you feel about her. I know you will be happy you did. So will she.”
I was in the midst of a workout the next day when I received a call from Grinder.
“Hello, my friend. I assume all is well with you and Pia?”
“You don’t have to assume, Rile,” he laughed. “You know they are. You probably also know the reason for my call.”
“Enlighten me.”
When Grinder asked me to stand beside him as his best man, I was overcome with unexpected emotion. “I would be proud, my friend.”
“Neither of us is good at this kind of conversation. Actually, you probably are, but I’m not. However, it’s important to me that you know why I’m asking.”
He paused, but I was too choked up to speak.
“You’re the one who convinced me I could be this happy, Rile. If you hadn’t been your typical bloody blunt self, I may never have had the courage to face my demons head-on, but more importantly, to share them with the woman I love so that, together, we could overcome them. Not mine, but hers too. Thank you, Rile. I know Pia shares my appreciation for you and reveres you in the same way I do.”
“You would have found your way with or without my influence. You and Pia are meant to be together. You have been since the day you met.”
It was on a summer holiday with
his parents when my friend and business partner had met the woman who would soon be his wife. They’d both been sixteen at the time, and while life had handed them each more than their share of tragedies, the fact that they were together and happy was all that mattered now.
“When is the wedding?”
“The first week of May.”
29
Kensington
The first week I spent at Whitby Press was equally exhausting and exhilarating. Linc arranged for a desk to be added to his office, and every day for the last month, he and I had worked side by side as I learned about the publishing house that had been in my family for generations.
I still had no idea what he saw in me that made him believe I was cut out to work here, but he spent enough time praising and reassuring me over the course of the last six weeks that, little by little, I stopped doubting myself.
After our dinner at Five Hertford, we both backed off of anything flirtatious, and I was grateful. I still found him attractive, but I wasn’t attracted to him. I wondered if it was too soon after Cortez, or if I’d always feel that no man who could ever take his place in my heart.
It wasn’t into Whitby Press alone that I’d thrown myself in order to keep my mind off the man who had broken my heart. I’d also become a volunteer at Great Ormond Street Hospital for children. Known to most as GOSH, the almost-two-hundred-year-old facility was one of the world’s leading childhood disease research centers.
As Cortez had suggested, I found the thing I was best at was offering support to the parents of children in hospital, the mothers in particular.
