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“I’m not mad.”
“I can call Granny and tell her then?”
“About this?” I squeak.
“About the marriage contract.”
“Oh! Oh, yes, right.” Right, yes. How could I have forgotten?
“I warn you. It means that a JP will show up here, as well as Granny and all my brothers and my men again. Can you handle another round with them?”
I feel my smile coming again. It seems to be getting more and more use. “I think I can handle them. They’re not so bad. And I’m sorry for drugging you. Or rather, attempting to.”
“Ditto.”
I hold out my hand again. He stares at it for a second before his big palm graces mine. Our fingers lace together like an old, sturdy boot. “Truce?” I ask, concentrating on that instead of my pounding heart, the electricity zinging up my arm, and the fact that this feels nice. Nice, as in, normal nice. Like my hand could get used to his hand.
That’s a bad thing.
This time tomorrow, I hope I can be out of here and on a plane with my shocked parents, going somewhere nice to start over. It’s not what I foresaw for my future, but I’m a realist, and I guess I’m over my own hefty shock that was keeping me from moving forward. I no longer want revenge against Alden, either. I feel like we’re even.
“Truce,” Alden says softly.
We both drop our hands and stand there. I study the floor. I feel very normal, considering everything that’s happened to me over the past few days, plus what’s going to happen tomorrow. Those vows are just for a contract. They might be real and legal, but they can also be easily undone.
“It’s kind of hard for me to believe that, uh, standing here right now, in a bathroom after something like this, that we’re the offspring of two really bad men.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean that…well, shaving your chest in a big manscaping and sprucing things up sort of panic is a very human thing to do. How many people duck into a bathroom ahead of time or do a panic sniff at their armpits or their breath or…okay…You get it.”
“Oh.”
My eyes shoot back to Alden’s face. He looks…I don’t know. He looks a little bit sad, but his face is totally neutral, with a hint of a smile even, so I’m not sure why I feel this way. Right now, he’s not my captor. He’s not just some crazy jacked god or a butthole of all buttholes. He’s just Alden. A regular person who I’ve probably met before.
“Gah!” I blurt as it finally hits home. Alden looks at me questioningly. “We’ve probably met before,” I explain. “When we were babies.”
“That’s probably very true.”
Thinking about that makes me wonder how he even found me since my adoptive parents changed my name. “Months of planning probably went into this, didn’t it?”
Alden reluctantly nods. He thinks I’m going to get mad again, but I’m not. I just want to know.
“So you’re new to Seaside? You bought this house just because you wanted to keep tabs on me and be close for when you needed to execute your plan?”
“To be clear, that word is a terrible one. Execute.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Just wanted to confirm.”
“Uh, anyway, on a scale of one to ten, how easy was it for you to track me down?”
Alden blushes. He actually blushes. His cheeks aren’t even close to the red of his chest, but there’s a definite flush there. “Granny greased someone’s pocket at the adoption agency. They didn’t keep electronic records from that long ago, or they never did, so I couldn’t hack what wasn’t there. But after that, it was incredibly easy.” He looks pretty shamefaced admitting it. He isn’t bragging about this.
“Did it feel weird for you to find out we were promised to each other when you got that package? It would have been like your dad reaching out from the grave, meddling with your life. How did that lawyer even find you if you changed your name and you’re very hard to track down?”
“I’ve wondered that too. He knew a lot of money was on the line for him, so he probably had a real professional working on it for a good long while.”
“It’s crazy to think that if they had never found you, I wouldn’t be standing here right now. Right now, I’d be getting home from my shift at the library, watering my plants, probably making a sandwich, doing a few dishes, and then settling down to read. All very normal.”
Alden’s lashes flutter as he blinks. “I’m sorry I wrecked that for you.” And he is. This time, I can tell he means it.
I’m surprised to find that I’m no longer angry. I knew the steam had gone out of me a while ago, so I’m really not mad anymore. Maybe this is the acceptance stage. I’ve already gone through denial and anger. What’s the last step? Oh, right. Action. Four stages of change here, people. I don’t know if they still use that model, but we were taught that in elementary school.
