Chapter Sixteen
He had to help her, of course. She needed help, and her big promotion was obviously hanging in the balance. He trusted her and believed she’d understand why he avoided the land mines of Seattle.
As they settled into her cozy suite, finished a light dinner, and started a fire, Garrett poured a big glass of red wine and offered it to Jessie.
“Can’t,” she said. “I’m going to be up all night writing. But knock yourself out.”
He had a feeling he was about to. He took a deep drink and walked over to the fire, standing in front of it, wishing it weren’t gas.
That was so fake. Like his marriage.
“I’m ready when you are,” she announced.
He looked over his shoulder to find her on the bed, her laptop open. He wanted to be near her when he told his story.
Wordlessly, he crossed the room and set his wine down. He took the computer, slid it out of her hands, turning to place it safely on the dresser.
“You can listen only. You can find your theme or emotion or whatever, but everything I tell you is absolutely confidential, and you’ll see why. Then you can write your story.”
“Okay.”
Kicking off his boots, he eased himself on the bed and wrapped his arms around her to bring her close and whisper his confession.
“I was married before.”
She blinked in surprise. “You were? How could that not come up in any search about you?”
“Because it was annulled. So, legally, I’ve never been married. But, technically, I was married. Briefly. Like, a week. Actually, nine days. And a few hours.”
A smile flickered. “But who’s counting?”
“Obviously, I was.”
She studied his face in the firelight, and he imagined what she saw. The stark pain of the memory, no doubt. It felt good not to hide it anymore. “So, why was it annulled?”
“Don’t you want to know anything about her first?”
She stroked his face, the touch already soothing him. “You know I’m a why person, not a what person.”
“It was annulled because…it was a mistake. A big, crazy, impulsive, fat mistake.” His voice caught when he said the last word, because it really hadn’t been a mistake for him. “A Las Vegas mistake.”
She choked softly. “Like, you eloped? To Vegas? When you were living in Seattle?”
“Old enough to know better, right?”
“And recent enough to explain the hurt in your eyes.”
He closed them instantly. “Yes,” he admitted. “It hurt very, very much.”
“A Las Vegas ‘mistake’ isn’t usually mired in, you know, deep emotion.”
Of course she’d go right there, to the heart of the situation.
“I mean, I’m generalizing, but there’s usually more infatuation or alcohol or desperation than…love,” she said. “Am I right?”
“No alcohol. I was completely infatuated. And she was desperate. All in all, a bad combination.”
“What was she desperate for?”
He turned his head enough to look at her. “A father for her baby.”
He could hear her breath catch. “You better start at the beginning.”
“Her name was Claudia Cargill, and she was the chief financial officer of FriendGroup and deeply involved with the long negotiation process for them to acquire my company.”
“Claudia?” She lifted a brow, and he imagined her brain clicking through what he’d just said. And came up with conflict of interest, no doubt.
“I fell hard and fast and furious for her, not going to lie. From the moment I met her, I was attracted. She’s beautiful, smart, funny.”
“And she was pregnant?”
“She didn’t know that when we met. We were both single and working very closely together, side by side for long days and late nights.” So many of both, he thought, pausing to sit up and take a much-needed drink of wine.
“It started as a friendship and developed into more,” he continued, lying back down. “But we didn’t sleep together,” he added, because it was so important she know that. “We both were waiting for the deal to go through. If someone on either side found out we’d had sex, the whole contract negotiation would come under scrutiny and might not even have gotten past shareholders. You don’t sleep with the woman handling the finances of a multimillion-dollar deal.”
“But you wanted to.”
“Yes.” Could she hear the understatement in the single syllable? “And then the bomb dropped two days before the deal closed.” He turned to her. “She was six weeks pregnant.”
“And…obvious question coming.”
“Yeah.” He stuck his hand in his hair and dragged it back. “She said it was a one-night stand before she met me.”
“She said? But it wasn’t?”
He rolled on his back and stared straight up at the ceiling. “Yes and no.”
“Garrett,” she chided softly.
“I know, I know. It was a one-night stand. She got drunk, got crazy, got…pregnant.”
“Oh wow.”
He understood the reaction and knew she probably had a million questions, like why would someone be so careless?—except he doubted she’d been careless at all.
“What about the father?”
Yeah. The father. “I assumed, based on things she said, that she didn’t really know the father, that he was a stranger and she didn’t want to tell him.”
He felt her tense. “Not that I’m judging, but I’m judging. This does not make me like the woman. Not that you’re asking me to.”
He wasn’t, but he understood. “She was scared, Jess. Just terrified at the whole idea of being a single mother. And I really cared for her. I…I thought I loved her.” He blew out a breath, as if that could get rid of the self-disgust and regret rolling through him.
“I did love her,” he corrected. “And I suggested we get married, as fast as possible, the very minute the deal closed with FriendGroup and PetPic. She could put my name as the baby’s father on the birth certificate, and I would be, legally and morally and spiritually and emotionally, that child’s father.”
“Oh.” She put her hand on her chest in shock. Maybe something else. “That is so incredibly noble.”
Was it? He’d loved her. There was nothing noble about it.
“She agreed.” Not for love, but he’d convinced himself that would come. “The FriendGroup acquisition went through, and Claudia and I secretly went to Vegas and got married at the Chapel of the Bells.” He turned to add a rueful smile. “It was good enough for Mickey Rooney.”
She didn’t smile back. “What happened, Garrett?”
“Nothing,” he said wryly. “Not even on our wedding night. She was sick, throwing up every couple of hours, and I fed her saltines and club soda.”
“Of course you did.”
“Because I’m an idiot.”
“Because you have a good heart. Then what happened?”
He snorted softly. “We came back from Vegas, and she insisted we not tell anyone yet. Not my family, not anyone. Which pissed me off enough that we had a huge fight, and she dropped the bomb on me. She was still in love with the father of her child, who she finally told me was the man I currently worked for.”
“Jake Chamberlain,” she said with the sound of someone finally putting pieces together. “When you said Claudia…I wondered if she was Claudia Chamberlain.”
Of course she’d done her homework. She knew exactly who Jake Chamberlain was, along with his beautiful, photogenic wife.
“Now Jake is the one you should interview,” he said, bitterness in every word. Because the short-lived marriage wouldn’t even be part of a profile of Jake. The man couldn’t bare his soul about things he didn’t even know had happened. “Get a hold of that ego and, man, you’d have yourself a story. What Jake wants, Jake gets.”
“So is that what happened? He decided he wanted her for himself?”
“They’d dated off and on a long time ago, then broke up about a year before I showed up on the scene. They were cool to each other in public, and I knew they’d had a thing at one point, but he is such an arrogant prick, I honestly didn’t think that thing had been serious.”
He swallowed and shifted, the old pain searing again. Claudia had lied so completely, so effectively…until the minute she’d said “I do” in that chapel. And right then, he could see she regretted the decision. It took her a day or so to come clean with him.
“After that argument, I left her house, just…destroyed. I had to look at that man every single day and know he was the father of a child I was completely prepared to treat and raise as my own. I went home to stew, and she went to Jake.”
“And told him you got married?”
“And told him she was pregnant, leaving out the whole ‘I married Garrett Kilcannon’ part.”
“That’s horrible!” she said.
“Not for Jake,” he replied. “Seems he wanted a baby and wouldn’t dream of not marrying her as soon as humanly possible.”
“But she was married to you.”
“Enter Shane Kilcannon, attorney extraordinaire who is now an expert on how to arrange a fast and secret annulment.”
Confusion darkened every feature as she sat up now. “So, you just let her go?”
He looked at her, not sure how to answer that because, sure, he looked like a pushover. But he’d only done the right thing for someone he thought he’d loved.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “What if Lola’s owner walked in here now and said ‘I want her back.’ What would you do?”
She blinked at him. “I’d let her go.”
He tipped his head, case made.
“But Claudia isn’t a dog, and Jake isn’t her owner.”
“But Claudia didn’t love me. I was a substitute. She was happiest with Jake, and I wanted her to be happy more than I wanted her to be my wife.”
“Because you are made of good,” she said, stroking his arm. “So she never told him that you married her?”
He sighed again. “No, and her reasoning actually made a lot of sense, and it protected me. If it got out that we had a personal relationship, stockholders could have blocked the acquisition, or at least sent it to court for years. It would have cost me millions, really, and I think she thought silence was being fair to me for what I’d been willing to do.”
“Or it made her feel a little less guilty.”
He had to concede that. “Yeah.”
“Is she happy now?” she asked.
“I think so. She left the CFO job and runs the Chamberlain Foundation, donating millions internationally. She’s a good mother to Rania, and somehow manages that huge, narcissistic asshole, Jake. And that is why you can’t share this story.” He sat up like she was, taking both her hands. “I promised her I would never tell anyone but Shane.”
“Would Jake be upset with her?”
“I think he’d go crazy. He’s explosive and unpredictable, and it would be horrible for her foundation, her reputation, and even the FriendGroup stock could take a hit. Shane made sure that marriage was not on any book, anywhere, and people would want to know why. They might wonder if I’m Rania’s father. It would be out there for that child to read when she grows up.” He shook his head. “Too many lives are affected by this, Jessie. It has to stay secret.”
“It will.” She took his hand in both of hers. “I give you my word.”
He nodded thanks. “There were actually a few days when we were still married that she was celebrating her engagement to Jake.”
“God, I bet that was wretched.”
Wretched didn’t begin to cover it. “My mother died about three weeks after the annulment was final.”
“Oh, Garrett.” Her eyes welled with tears as she squeezed his hand. “I’m so sorry.”
“When Dad hinted at the possibility of what he wanted to do, I was all over it. Waterford was the escape I needed, because I couldn’t stand to be out there. So we broke the contract for me to run PetPic as a subsidiary.”
“That’s the part the Forbes story covered.”
He nodded. “I didn’t care. I gave up millions to get out of that contract, but I didn’t care. I had to get home. Liam and Shane and Darcy weren’t under the same stipulations, obviously. It was easy to buy out their deals, but I had been PetPic’s owner. To all the world, and to Jake Chamberlain, and to both companies and the whole industry, I looked like a complete liar, untrustworthy and undependable.”
“But you were protecting yourself.”
“I was protecting Claudia, really. The farther away I was, the less chance of the truth ever coming out.” And less chance of him having to witness the grand and glorious couple that was Jake and Claudia Chamberlain.
“Wow.” She took a few minutes to let it all process, falling back on the pillow next to him. “That’s quite a story.”
He leaned close to whisper in her ear, “I can feel the chisel marks on my chest, wall-breaker.”
“And how does that feel?”
How did it feel? Liberating, he thought. “Really damn good, Jessie. Thank you.”
“Your secret is safe,” she promised. “But I’m not going to lie. Now I’ve found it.”
“Found what?”
“The spark. The life. The truth. The theme of Garrett Kilcannon.”
“You cannot share that story in any way, shape, or form,” he insisted.
“I know. I won’t. But I’ve definitely found what your profile was missing. A theme that captures the essence of you.”
He hated to think what that might be. “Idiotic, love-struck, foolish? You going to use a doormat for my photo?”
She looked at him, slowly shaking her head. “No. But I’m going to write. Now. While it’s all fresh. Okay?”
So not okay. He put his arms around her again, a little surprised at how he couldn’t conjure up Claudia’s face but could only get lost in the big green eyes that looked back at him. “Please don’t leave. Not yet. Not now.”
He kissed her, long and tenderly, aching for more.
“My boss wants eight to ten thousand words by morning.”
And he wanted eight to ten hours of holding her and making love by morning. But he let go. “You want me to leave so you can concentrate?”
“No.” She put her head on the pillow and pulled him back next to her, letting their lined-up bodies touch from top to toe. “I want you right here waiting for me.”
“I’ll wait,” he murmured, coasting his hands over her and resting them on her backside. “I’ll wait all night.”
“I’ll be right at that desk…”
He slipped his hand into the waistband of her jeans, sucking in a soft breath at the silky skin. “Later.”
“Yes, later,” she promised on a sigh. “Let me get something up to New York and you rest.”
Reluctantly, he let her go. “Write it right here, and I’ll read it.”
“No way.” Then she inched back. “You do trust me, don’t you? You believe I would never betray you?”
He didn’t answer right away, considering the question deep in his heart. “I do trust you,” he finally said. “I never thought I’d trust a woman again. Anyone, to be honest.”
She gave him one last kiss and slipped away. A moment later, she sat next to the fire and he could hear the tap of her keyboard, the sound of a rhythmic, comforting, emotional beat.
He closed his eyes and fell asleep, feeling free for the first time in years.
* * *
Now it all made sense. Everything made sense. The change in him was an act of self-preservation. The closed-up man was damaged, like one of his rescue dogs had turned on him and attacked him after all he’d done was offer love.
Of course she could capture that without revealing one word of his secret. The profile would write itself now, with her deep knowledge of who he was and what made him tick.
And what made him tick didn’t just make a great story. It made him a great man.
On the bed, Garrett breathed with the steady, slow sound of a man who had nothing weighing him down, and that made her smile. And ache to climb in next to him.
But first, she had to write the story of a man who lived to help, who longed to protect, who loved to save anyone or anything that needed saving.
One word flowed into the next, sentences became paragraphs, and those became vivid snapshots of a compelling, colorful man. Without so much as a sideways phrase about anything that had happened to him in Seattle, she painted her portrait, focused on his work at Waterford.
His family. His dogs. His doggone hat. His rescues.
When she finished at three forty in the morning, she had tears in her eyes as she emailed her draft to Mac with her favorite subject line: Read it and weep!
Then she closed the laptop and zipped it into its case, done with work for at least the short-term foreseeable future.
The redheaded prince might win the slot, but Jessie was proud of her work. Stretching and working a crick out of her neck, she stood in front of the gas fire, eyeing the man asleep under a comforter on her bed.
That’s where she wanted to be now. With him. Sleeping, just sleeping, and holding him.
She climbed carefully on the bed and slipped in next to him. He moaned a little, and his eyes fluttered.
“You all done, Lois Lane?”
“It’s Jessica Jane, and I am. Go back to sleep. It’s four in the morning.”
He moaned again and wrapped a strong arm around her, falling right back to sleep.
She stared at him in the firelight, at his strong features and soft mouth. The fact was, there probably wasn’t a person on earth she knew as well as she knew him now. His strengths and weaknesses, his goals and values, his whole precious heart.
He’d laid it all out for her in a week, and she had…fallen for him.
She closed her eyes and drifted off with one last thought.
Claudia Cargill Chamberlain, you are a fool.