Chapter 3
Gray
"I would really appreciate it if you could be done with this whole no-breathing thing. I don’t like it.” I held her inhaler up to her mouth. “Big breath in for me, baby,” I coached before propping her to a sitting position against the headboard. “Slow and easy now…let the medicine go to work.”
Her greeny-gold eyes held mine for just a moment, before she rested her head down on her knees in exhaustion. “Graaay—”
“Shush now. Don’t try to talk. You’ve officially scared the ever lovin’ shit out of me, Pink. Breathe…steady and slow. Do you need another hit? Just nod if you do.”
She nodded and lifted her head for the inhaler, proving she was able to comprehend my panicked babbling. My hand visibly shaking as I helped her take another puff was my wake-up call that my feelings for Reese ran so much deeper than I’d ever let myself believe.
Jesus Christ, this was terrifying.
I also felt like the biggest shitheel on the planet for being the cause of the goddamn asthma attack in the first place. I fucked up with her tonight and there was no denying it.
“The paramedics are on their way, baby. You’re doin’ great.”
“No—please—I don’t want to—” she protested.
“Yes, you are going to the ER,” I interrupted, speaking as calmly as I could manage. “You need to be checked out by a doctor.” I left off the part about never sleeping again, if she didn’t get examined by a medical doctor at a fuckin’ hospital tonight. It was a miracle I didn’t need a change of shorts right now. When she started wheezing and sucking in a whole lot of nothing? My heart—just, stopped.
A few tears rolled down her splotchy cheeks, flushed red from the rush of oxygen she was finally taking in as the rescue inhaler did its job. Thank holy fuck. “I’ll be with you every second,” I said while rubbing circles over her back with my palm.
She leaned her forehead against my chest and I felt her relax as her breathing steadied, the panic in both of us easing away. The best damn feeling in the world.
I would hold her like this forever if I had to. I couldn’t stop touching her now that I’d started. She was mine to take care of. She’d always been mine. This was the woman I was going to marry and make babies with—even if she didn’t believe it quite yet.
She would.
I’d been waiting for months to make my move. I’d almost lost her once before to that idiot archaeology professor, and I wouldn’t be letting that shit happen again. After he left her, I’d given her some time to get over him. Even if I’d wanted to go slower with Reese, time was a luxury I just didn’t have anymore. Neither of us did. The sand in our hourglass was just about gone for fulfilling the terms of her grandfather’s will. Only the two of us could make those very beneficial terms a reality by first, getting married before she turned twenty-five, and then second, by having a son whose surname would legally change to Pinkarver-Lash in order to carry on the Pinkarver name in the bloodlines.
And two months was all the time I had left to get her to the altar, and my ring on her finger.
***
I MET REESE Pinkarver when she was ten years old, at a party held in the rose garden at Mount Laurel. My family’s historic plantation just outside of Charleston was the perfect setting for our introduction, because the significance of the place helped drive home the importance of precisely what was expected of me. Mount Laurel is the birthplace of Grayson Thaddeus Lash I, former President of the United States of America, and my esteemed grandfather.
I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman—so technically an adult while definitely still very much a kid in the head—when my father, Grayson Thaddeus Lash II, pointed her out to me in the rose garden, and told me the wide-eyed little girl with the blonde curls holding onto her mother’s hand in a death-grip, was the person I would marry.
It wasn’t even a suggestion by any means, but a requirement. She had been chosen specifically for me, he said. It only made sense that the direct descendants of presidential bloodlines running as blue as ours, were strengthened by making more little Pinkarver-Lash’s to add to the ever-expanding family tree.
At the time, I let my father’s—You’ll marry that girl someday, Gray—nonsense go through one of my eighteen-year-old ears and right on out the other. I did not care what he or anyone else required of me. I was young, dumb, and full-of-cum, just like every other male in their first year of college. I was all up my own ass perfecting my skills with women who were my own goddamn age for one thing. Being matched up with a child was downright disturbing. Having my life laid out for me without my input or consent was fucking infuriating. Marrying any person was a foreign concept I couldn’t even entertain. Having children?
I was not hearing any part of what he had to say.
Dad could go after one of my sisters in forging his political dynasty with some other sap-bastard, Son-of-America. My own parents had shown me just how painful marriage could be during the course of my whole life. There was no shining example of a loving relationship for me to draw an experience from, so his words meant very little to me.
As the years passed, Reese and I met at more garden parties, charity balls, and even an event or two at the White House. We actually forged a friendship over time, as I made more of an effort to get to know her while she grew up before my eyes. I found her delightful, and she seemed to look up to me almost like the big brother she never had. The two of us were connected family acquaintances with an easy friendship, and nothing more than that. There were no awkward moments, nothing weird between us whenever we did happen to run into each other somewhere in Charleston or the DC area. The edict my father had given me so long ago in the rose garden at Mount Laurel was pretty much forgotten in the past where it stayed buried.
Until two years ago when Reese and her family showed up to my father’s funeral.
No longer a shy little girl clinging to her mother for security, but a confident beauty who’d grown into a lovely young woman. My whole opinion of her, and how she might fit into my life, changed dramatically with the event of my father’s death.
I found a great deal had changed for Reese, and for me, in the thirteen years since the garden party down at Mount Laurel when my dad told me she would be my wife and the mother of my children someday.
That’s about the time “it got weird” between us—and I can honestly say the blame was one-hundred percent on me. It wasn’t Reese’s fault I’d been raised with certain expectations from birth. A law degree from Harvard was one of those expectations. A career in the family business of politics was another. I’d accomplished the Harvard Law degree, and was working my way up the political food chain with my new term as Attorney General for South Carolina solidly in place. It was also assumed that my crowning political achievement would be the governor’s mansion someday, and it very well could be if all of the pieces fell into place as they were supposed to.
The most important piece of that puzzle was in the back of an ambulance being administered a breathing-treatment for an asthma attack, brought on by me being the demanding asshole I was pretty much most of the time.
I’d have to work on that with her, because Reese certainly didn’t deserve an asshole for a husband.
And I would be her husband. That wedding shit I’d said no to before? It was happening.
My lovely Pink deserved the best husband in the world. She deserved the best of everything life had to offer. Hell, she deserved to be First Lady of South Carolina, and maybe even more, someday.
And she was getting me in the process, even if she wasn’t sure she wanted me yet.
She might not be sure, but I was certain she felt the attraction between us. It was definitely there that night two months ago when I came to see her…and we ended up in my suite at The Jefferson for the night.
Reese felt something for me, or she wouldn’t have reacted so strongly when I showed up tonight. She wouldn’t be gripping my hand so tightly right now, or let me hold her while waiting for the ambulance to show up at Oakley’s house.
“How are we doing, baby?” I leaned down to ask against her ear so she could hear me.
Her eyes flickered open, and she nodded up at me before mouthing three words I understood as clearly as if she’d been able to shout them. ‘Stay with me.’
“I’ll be right here the whole time. I won’t leave you,” I assured her with a confident wink solely for her benefit, even though I didn’t feel so confident on the inside.
My emotions were all over the place, and for good reason. I’d waited far too long to make my move with Reese. By the time I was ready to settle down, she’d already found her professor with the PhD in Pre-Colonial Amazonia or some ridiculous shit, and to my horror, agreed to marry him.
I’d blown my chance with Reese, and then it was too late. Someone else had won her heart by being there with her. While I was down in South Carolina finding my footing as head of the family after my father’s death, someone else was stealing my woman away.
I learned an important lesson about priorities. I also learned never to assume the outcome of a relationship with another person. My feelings for Reese became crystal clear the moment I realized someone else was taking her to bed every night. She didn’t belong in any other bed but mine. It sucked to realize I’d lost her, but I did accept that I was fully to blame.
I’d pushed her away once before, and regretted it ever since. She had tried to offer comfort to me when my father died, and I didn’t handle myself well at the time. If I’d done things differently with her, we’d surely be married by now with a child or two, or at least working on it. But nope. I was just too fucked up in my own head to see that I was denying myself the one person who was exactly what I needed.
So, Reese found someone else and she moved on. I tried to move on as well, but I found I sucked at that too.
I buried myself in work and forged ahead with my campaign for Attorney General of South Carolina, which I easily won. The night the election results came in and we started celebrating, I’d learned what a hollow victory it was without Reese by my side sharing it with me.
And then four months ago a miracle happened.
Dr. Doolittle went to Brazil and decided to stay there without her. Money won out over love in his case. I had a strong suspicion that Reese’s grandfather paid the professor to break off their engagement. I never knew any details about a deal, and went the extra step of telling Theodore Pinkarver up front, that I didn’t ever want to know. I kept myself at a distance until that fool was out of the picture. My involvement never extended any further than praying for some powerful juju to make Dr. Doolittle decide to take the fucking money and leave.
Tonight wasn’t the first time I’d asked Reese to marry me. I’d posed the question to her once before, but my timing was bad because she’d just had her heart broken. I’d also been an ass by presenting it as more of a business plan hatched by our families, than something I really wanted. And then we ended up having a night of spectacular sex after a lot of wine and…yeah—
This was where the confusion came into the picture for me. I knew I wanted Reese, but I wasn’t sure why I wanted Reese. Did I love her, or did I love the idea of merging our families into a magnificent political dynasty? I needed to get my shit together and figure that out so I could explain it to her. She deserved the truth most of all, and I wouldn’t lie to her by telling her I’d been in love with her for years. It hadn’t been like that for me. My feelings for Reese had surfaced with more of a slow burn than anything else. The one thing I was certain about was how much I wanted to make a life with her. There was no one else for me.
She’d had some time to think about it, but not nearly enough. We were just getting started figuring everything out so maybe it was best to have a meeting with her grandfather to clarify exactly what was at stake here.
It was only fair that she hear from him, what had been decided for the two of us a long time ago.
Our families wanted us together, and I wanted her, so…
The ambulance coming to an abrupt halt brought me out of my little trip down Memory Lane and back to the present—the emergency bay of GWU. The rear doors opened up to the outside, and I was relieved to see there was a gurney waiting to take her right in. The EMTs did the transfer efficiently, reporting her medical stats for triage to evaluate where she should go next as I followed closely behind.
“Her name?” the intake nurse, Barb according to her ID badge, asked me as we rolled down the hallway toward what I hoped would be a private room.
“Reese Pinkarver.”
“Age?”
“Twenty-four. She’ll be twenty-five in two months.”
“And you are?”
“Grayson Lash,” I answered, bracing myself for the question that would come next.
Right on cue, Barb shot inquisitive eyes up from her clipboard. “Like the president?”
I nodded once, and left it alone.
“Your relationship to the patient?”
Ahhh, a question I was more than happy to answer for Nurse Barb. I’d given the same reply to the EMTs when I’d demanded to ride along with Reese inside the ambulance.
“My fiancée.”