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“Same here,” Peyton replied, liking Serena despite the conversation they’d just had about her situation with Leo.
Serena said her goodbyes, and as soon as she was in the house and Peyton was alone with Leo, he came to stand in front of her, forcing her to tip her head back to meet his concerned gaze and the frown creasing his brows.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his eyes searching her face. “Serena didn’t say something to upset you, did she?”
Peyton shook her head and pushed up from her chair. “No, not at all,” she replied, keeping things vague for now. But once they were alone, she intended to get some answers to all the questions Serena had left unexplained about Amanda and why she’d ended things with Leo the day of their wedding.
Chapter Ten
“Did you have a good time?” Leo asked as they walked into the guesthouse a while later after leaving his mother’s place.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t had any time to talk on the ride home. As soon as they’d turned out of the residential neighborhood, Leo’s partner, Eric, had called about a minor fender bender one of their drivers had had while going to pick up a client. It wasn’t an emergency, but Eric wanted Leo to be aware of the issue, and their conversation about handling the insurance aspect of the incident had taken up most of the drive back to her parents’ place.
“It was a really nice evening,” she said, strolling into the living room and sitting down on the couch. “You have a great family. Including Daisy and Serena . . . Speaking of which, what’s going on between Serena and Dylan? I know you said they were best friends, but from the way she looks at him, I’d bet money she has a thing for him.”
“You noticed that, huh?” He grinned as he sat down beside her on the sofa. “I think it’s obvious to everyone but my idiot brother. She wants to get married, have kids, but Dylan swears he’s perfectly fine being single and a bachelor. It doesn’t help matters that, in his last relationship, the woman he was with used him for his money and what it could buy her. He was so caught up in the girl and his business that it was Serena who finally brought it to his attention. So, I think that has just made him wary and guarded with women in general.”
It sounded like the two brothers had that in common, for very different reasons. Before she lost the nerve, she asked the question that had been on her mind. “Has what happened with you and Amanda made you guarded with women?”
His entire demeanor changed, grew tense. “Who brought her up tonight?”
Now that she’d put the subject out there, she wasn’t going to back down, despite how irritated he suddenly appeared. “Does it matter?”
He frowned at her. “Was it Serena?” he guessed, his tone gruff.
Peyton shifted on the couch, tucked her feet beneath her, and turned to better face Leo, who was sitting ramrod straight. “She’s just looking out for you because she cares,” she said, not wanting to get the other woman in trouble. “She told me that Amanda broke things off with you on your wedding day. I had no idea that’s how things ended between the two of you.”
He swore beneath his breath and rubbed his fingers across his forehead, clearly not happy Serena had shared that personal bit of information with her. But Peyton had opened Pandora’s box, and now there was no taking back what she’d started. And besides, she didn’t want to. This was one part of Leo she wanted and needed to understand.
“What happened?” she asked softly, and before he could state the obvious she left me standing at the altar, she got more specific. “What would make her end things on the day of your wedding?”
“Just the fact that I wasn’t enough for her,” he replied bitterly.
Peyton reeled at his response. “I find that hard to believe.” What more could the other woman have wanted from someone who was responsible, hardworking, devoted, and had clearly loved her?
He laughed, but the sound lacked any humor. “It’s absolutely true. And honestly, looking back at the week before the wedding date, I should have seen the signs that something wasn’t right, that she was off and distant and not herself. But I wrote it off to nerves and being stressed out over the wedding preparations.”
“That would be a logical assumption,” she agreed.
He shoved his fingers through his hair, furrowing the thick strands. “The thing is, Amanda was born and raised in South Carolina before attending college here in San Diego, and her mother wasn’t happy that she was marrying me and moving to California permanently, when she’d expected her daughter to return home after graduation. Her mom had even made a few comments that I should move to South Carolina so Amanda could be near her family.”
Peyton blinked in surprise. “Didn’t you two talk about your living situation before getting engaged?”
“Of course we did,” he said, a cynical edge to his voice. “I knew Amanda was close with her family, and before I put a ring on her finger, I wanted to make sure she realized that I couldn’t move to South Carolina. My business was just starting to do well and was building steadily to the point that Eric and I were making a decent profit. And since Amanda and I wanted to start a family fairly soon after getting married, being financially stable was important to me, and I was very close to that point a few months before our wedding date. It made no sense to leave everything here and start over in South Carolina. Amanda agreed and never gave any indication that she wasn’t okay with that arrangement, so I never thought it was an issue.”
He gave his head a brief shake, his normally smiling lips now in a flat line as he continued. “Her mother, Monica, insisted we get married in South Carolina so she could plan the wedding and reception since they had so much extended family who lived there, and I was fine with that because it’s what Amanda wanted, too. I honestly didn’t see any red flags.”
Hearing the self-blame in his voice, she reached out and placed a hand on his arm, needing to touch him. “That’s because you weren’t looking for them,” she pointed out.
“True.” Finally, he started to relax, the stiff set of his shoulders easing a bit the more he talked. “So, fast-forward six months of planning for a big, fancy wedding that cost more than my Mustang. Five days before the date, my family and I flew out to South Carolina, along with the close friends I wanted to be there, and like I said, she was distant and not her normal happy self around me. I remember asking her if she was okay, and her forcing a smile and saying she was just tired and stressed. It made total sense to me and I figured she’d be back to normal after all the wedding stuff was over.”
Peyton smiled to herself. Leo was a guy. Of course the reasons for her odd behavior had made sense to him.
“I thought everything was fine, and the day of the wedding I was standing at the front of the church, waiting to see how beautiful Amanda looked walking down the aisle in her dress . . .” His voice turned hoarse. “And instead of that happening, her maid of honor came up to me in front of all of the guests sitting in the church waiting for the ceremony to begin and said that
Amanda needed to talk to me. I remember being so confused at first, because she was supposed to be walking down the aisle literally any second, and it wasn’t until Aiden, who was one of my best men, put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Go talk to her, and I’m here for you if you need me,’ that my stomach started to churn.”
Hearing the rough edge in his voice, Peyton had to swallow back the tight knot in her throat, her own emotions invested in this man’s pain.
