AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Henry smooths back strands that escaped my ponytail, tucks them behind my ear.
“I didn’t listen to what I knew about you. You’re amazing and beautiful, and you take my breath away. And you said things will turn out. You gave me your word. It’s good enough for me.”
I press trembling fingers to his lips. “The circumstances are what they are.”
“To hell with the circumstances.”
I tighten my arms around him, press my forehead to his chest. “Thank you.”
Smuckers waits patiently below us, panting. Just another day for Smuckers. He looks like he has to pee. “He has to pee,” I say. “But not on flat pavement.”
“So. Freaking. Romantic.” Henry pulls Smuckers to a light pole. “Come on, boy.” The light pole is way more Smuckers’s peeing jam. “So romantic,” he whispers.
“You’re not mad?” I ask, circling my arms around from behind him. “About the meeting?”
He turns in my arms and rests his hands on my hips. “Mad?”
“From me doing the Smuckers says thing?”
“Baby, I have spent a lot of time on the wrong end of the Smuckers says thing. I have not enjoyed it. In fact, you could say I’ve pretty much hated it. Couldn’t wait to be free of it.”
I swallow.
“But seeing the Dartford brothers victimized by it?” He leans in. He brushes a kiss over my lips. “Priceless.”
After Smuckers finishes fake covering up his pee with pretend dirt expertly kicked from his hind legs, we head over to the limo.
I slide in and Henry slides in after me, sitting right next to me. He shuts us into the small space and puts up the window.
“Here’s something else I need to tell you,” he says. “You made that joke, and I know you were being funny, and I reacted like an idiot.”
“You care about the company—”
“No, I know you wouldn’t do something like that, paint the cranes like that.” He takes a strand of my hair.
I squeeze his hand. Would he say that if he knew I was Vonda? “Thank you.”
The driver pulls out.
“Painting the cranes? That’s a move my mother would make. And it sent me down a rabbit hole of fuckedupness that you said it.”
I nod, easily imagining her doing something like that. Delighting in it. “I get why you cut her out of your life.”
He straightens. “You think I cut her out of my life?”
“She was always talking like you did, like—”
“Vicky, she cut me out. She didn’t want to see family. Her doormen had instructions to turn me away. You think I didn’t try to see her? At least get her out of that shithole?”
“Right,” I say, shocked at how stupid I was to have kept believing Bernadette’s side of it. “I can’t believe I didn’t put that together. I mean, you’re the most loyal person I’ve ever met. I should’ve realized.”
“Bernadette talked a good game.” He’s so casual about it, that’s what breaks my heart.
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be,” he says. “She knew how to have fun, how to make you feel like the only person in the world.”
Even as he says it, I hear the but. I’m thinking about my own mom. “But it wouldn’t last,” I add.
