Heart Improvement: A Brooklyn Heights Bachelor Romance

Chapter 19 - Chelsea

“I’ll get us an Uber.”

Scott pulls out his phone. I push his hand down.

“Put that away. We have to talk.”

He sighs and puts his phone away.

“Can we walk and talk?” he asks.

“We are going to walk to your parents’ house?”

He shakes his head.

“It’s too far. But let’s walk and figure it out together.”

Figure it out?I think in disbelief. They want my mom to come out here next week to go wedding dress shopping. Next week. My mother.

“I think better when I walk, that’s all.”

“Fine.”

I follow him down the street. We make it to the corner with neither of us saying anything.

“Can’t we just say no?” I blurt out as we wait for a car to pass.

“I don’t think so.”

“How can we not say no? I mean, they can’t tell us what to do. What if they asked us to, I don’t know, murder someone?”

“Well, we could say no to that. But…”

There’s a but.

“But what?”

“There was a clause about the network having discretion over the wedding decisions.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. You were at the meetings—”

“Yes, I was.” I stop dead in my tracks. “They never said anything about the wedding in any of those meetings. Not once.”

I am very sure about that, so I say it very emphatically. Extremely emphatically. My ‘you don’t know who you are messing with’ voice. The voice that sounds more like Sam than me. Scott doesn’t respond so I start searching my brain frantically. We had four straight weeks of meetings, three times a week. I’m sure nothing was ever said about the wedding. Not a single solitary word.

“I’m really sorry, Chels.” Scott is looking down at the sidewalk, not at me. “I should have anticipated it.”

The sight of him dismally apologizing piles on top of my despair about the situation. I grab his hands.

“Don’t blame yourself, okay? We’re both in over our heads. These people are slick. They were probably planning this all along.”

“Thanks.”

He looks at me, right at me. His eyes—I pull my hands away.

“What are we going to do?” I ask in my business tone.

No one would ever guess I’m quivering inside from the feel of this hands holding mine. At least I hope not.

“I don’t know.”

He starts walking again. Right, walking is good for thinking. I follow.

“Why do you want to go see your parents? Do they give you good advice on this sort of thing?”

He laughs, but quickly covers it with a cough.

“They do give me good advice. But, uh, this sort of thing has never happened before. I just think I have to tell them something about what’s going on, since you are getting a wedding dress next week.”

He’s right. And if my mom has to come and go shopping with me, I have to tell her something too. But what?

“You want to get a sandwich?”

“You’re hungry?”

“Aren’t you?”

I have to think about it. The adrenalin hasn’t shut off since the meeting this morning. I don’t feel hungry, I’m wired. But my head is throbbing.

“I should probably eat something,” I admit.

We get some sandwiches and find a bench in a small park to sit on.

“Can I say something?” I ask.

Scott is doing his usual—and unfortunately adorable—assessment of his food before eating it.

“Sure.”

He takes a bite.

“Whatever we tell them, our parents—”

“So, we are telling them?”

“I thought we didn’t have a choice?”

“We don’t. Sorry, continue.”

“Whatever we tell them, we should keep it as close to the truth as possible. Makes it easier to keep the details straight.”

“Right.” He stops inspecting his sandwich and looks right at me. “Have you done this before?”

“Pretended to be engaged? No.”

“But?”

“Okay, Sam and I may have snuck off to Milwaukee a couple of times without my parents knowing.”

“Oh, really?”

I punch him in the upper arm.

“We had really good reasons.”

“I’m sure you did.”

He grins at me. I shake my head at him. We eat and think. Then we start figuring out our story. We decide to tell his parents—and mine—that we felt an instant connection as soon as we met. Like we just knew. But we were going to wait a while, until the opportunity for the show came up and it seemed like fate was rooting for us.

“Even then, though, we weren’t exactly planning on getting engaged anytime soon.”

“But we figured we would eventually, so we went ahead with it.”

“We were planning on a long engagement.”

“Definitely over a year.”

“But now we are in this pickle.”

“Because of the contract.”

“So we are playing along but when the show wraps we’ll take a breather.”

“I like it,” Scott says. “You’re a good…”

“Liar?”

“I’d say storyteller. Whose parents do we tell first? Mine or—”

“Yours.”

“One Uber, coming up.”

While we are waiting, we head into a bakery. I insist on buying a box of cookies. While those are being wrapped, I spy this chocolate bomb thing and get that too.

“Share it with me,” I tell Scott as we wait for the ride.

He takes a bite and hands it back. The chocolate on my tongue is like a shot of courage right in my arm. The car pulls up and he opens the door for me.

“Ready to meet the parents?” he says.

Absolutely not. But we’ve come this far. I give him a thumbs up.