39. Garrett
Chapter Thirty-Nine
GARRETT
R ainer’s phone buzzed. “They’re coming back up.”
Garrett, dressed in last night’s shirt and pants, jumped up from the couch, only to be pushed back down by a firm hand.
“Garrett, I say this with love,” Rainer began. “But you have to get a fucking grip. Emma may be coming up to pack her clothes for all we know.”
His displeasure must have shown on his face because Rainer scowled at him. “Hey, none of that shit. You need to be calm and collected and most of all honest .”
“I will be.”
Rainer held up a finger. “Not your version of honest.”
He deserved that but Garrett couldn’t help getting defensive. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that your instinct is going to be to withhold shit that will upset Emma. I don’t think you should do that.”
Rainer ran his hand through his hair. “I’m not saying dump everything on her all at once. But make sure she knows you’re willing to tell her whatever she wants to know when she wants to know it.”
The sound of the door opening interrupted his lecture. Garrett sprang up again but stopped himself from running to Emma when Rainer surreptitiously shook his head.
She walked into the penthouse behind George almost tentatively, her hands in the pockets of his trench coat. Her hair was mussed, and she still looked pale and shell-shocked, but she was there.
Thank Christ . The relief took him down at the knees, so it was a good fucking thing the couch was close at hand.
She came back. And Garrett was ready to do just about anything to keep her here.
Too bad it was a head injury and not a bum kidney. Because he had two kidneys and she could have either one.
There was a long silence.
Rainer cleared his throat. “I guess we should be going,” he said, signaling his new bride.
Garrett tore his eyes away from Emma long enough to turn to George.
“Thank you,” he said, the words heartfelt.
George stepped forward, her pixie face all up in his.
“Emma wants to talk to you but if she changes her mind at any point, she knows she’s welcome at our place—even after we go on our honeymoon.”
She twisted to look at her husband. “I gave her a key.”
Rainer flicked his eyes to Garrett, but he nodded at his wife.
“I understand,” he murmured.
“Good,’” George said, her pixie face incongruously hard. “I’m trusting you here. Don’t fuck this up.”
She stopped to hug Emma on the way out, whispering something about a Cadillac. Then he and his wife were alone.
“Emmy,” he began.
She held up a hand, her eyes narrowed on his face. “Why do you do that? You know that’s not my name.”
He opened his mouth and then quickly closed it. “Uh, I don’t think we should start there.”
Emma crossed her arms and glared at him. For some reason it instantly made him feel better.
She took a step back and he compensated, edging closer. “Thank you for coming back.”
“Like I could leave… you have my cat.”
“That’s a very good point.” Garrett tried a smile. “In the future, please consider Meowmus Maximus and the lifestyle he’s grown accustomed to.”
She didn’t smile back. “Are you stalling?”
Instantly sobering, he shook his head. “No, I swear. I want to explain. I was just trying to lighten things up.”
Her brows rose. “Should they be light?”
“Some parts are. But others are… upsetting.” He swallowed hard, blinking. “Really fucking upsetting.”
Her lips parted, reacting to his show of emotion.
She licked her lips. “How did we end up sleeping together if we were enemies?”
He held up a finger. “Rivals,” he corrected.
Emma fisted her hands. “ Garrett !”
“I’m trying to explain here,” he said. “But there’s so much. I don’t even know where to start.”
Emma moved, edging around him. She sat on the ottoman facing the couch.
Shoving his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching out, he sat down across from her.
She looked him up and down. “Let’s start with the elephant in the room. You realize we just consummated our fake marriage, right?”
His face went slack as images of the previous night flooded his brain.
Emma kicked him with a sneakered foot. “Stop that, Mr. Most Eligible Bachelor. You’re supposed to be freaking out right now.”
His lips twitched and she shook her head, annoyed. “You’re lucky I signed a prenup. Else, I could take your mega-millions and waltz out that door and no court would stop me.”
He sobered, letting her see what he was feeling—what he had always felt for her—on his face.
“You can have it all. Just don’t leave. ”
Judging from the apprehension in her eyes, that was the wrong thing to say. When she spoke, her voice was hoarse. “Start at the beginning.”
God, that felt like a thousand fucking years ago. “The beginning was in high school.”
“Okay.” Emma took a deep breath. “Start in high school.”
He closed his eyes, letting himself go back in time to that first day.
“You had just skipped two entire grades. The school admin transferred you into half of my classes. That wouldn’t have been a big deal, but one of them was drama and we were covering Shakespeare’s major works that semester.”
From her expression, it was clear she didn’t understand. “Why was that a problem?”
“Because Mr. Joyner, our drama teacher, didn’t let us choose our scene partners. He drew names out of a hat.” He sighed. “And I chose yours.”
The corners of her mouth tightened. “I know I’m not supposed to take offense, but offense.”
He huffed. “Yeah, that was pretty much your reaction when I asked Joyner to let me swap partners.”
Garrett leaned forward when she continued to scowl. “Emma, we were doing Romeo and Juliet . We got the kissing scene.”
“Again,” she said in a clipped voice. “ Offense .”
“You were fourteen , Emmy,” he said gently, trying to explain. “But you sure as hell didn’t look it.”
“Oh,” she muttered, looking down at her lap. Or rather her chest. She had been almost that developed at fourteen.
He also remembered a similar look on her face in Joyner’s office that day.
“The age difference between fourteen and seventeen was too damn big. And there were enough people who were gross and inappropriate about you.” He gritted his teeth. “That and I knew if I started kissing you in any context, I would never stop.”
She raised a brow. “Because you didn’t want to be one of the gross people.”
If only she knew the hell she’d gone through. He’d wanted to put his fist through every mouth breather who’d eye-banged her.
He gestured to his chest before dropping his hand. “You have a figure like your mother’s. Very… hourglass. And she had a reputation. When you were in middle and high school, she ran through a lot of men. Not boyfriends. Hookups.”
She sighed, looking at the ceiling. “So that reputation spilled over on me.”
Garrett grimaced. “Did she tell you any of this?”
Emma shook her head. “No. But I’m not surprised. She still… dates.”
He nodded, steering the conversation back to safer ground. “You overheard me asking Joyner for a new partner and became angry. Justifiably. Things deteriorated fast. And I didn’t help matters improve. I intentionally made them worse by being standoffish.”
“You were an asshole.”
He sighed. “Avoiding someone because you’re deeply in lust and can’t do anything about it looks remarkably like assholeness.”
She almost smiled. “I’ll bet it does.”
He raised a brow. “In my defense, you took that ball and ran with it. From zero to mortal enemies in a matter of days.”
“I can’t imagine that,” she said, laughing suddenly. But her humor subsided quickly.
“You’re not that different,” he said, reading her thoughts. “The core of you has not changed.”
She didn’t look convinced, but she appeared willing to let things slide in favor of enlightenment.
“But we did,” she said. “We became much closer.”
“Yes.” He let out a long exhale. “Our need to keep competing and sniping at each other finished when I graduated and went off to Stanford.”
She tilted her head. “I thought we graduated high school the same year.”
“We did,” he clarified. “You went from freshman to junior and ended up in over half my classes because it was a small school. There weren’t many classes to begin with. But you blew through the available curriculum too quickly. You technically graduated with me. But your mom thought you were too young to go away for college. That was why you took courses online in the library for another couple of years before leaving Verdant Falls—I’m not sure what your status was.”
He knew that because he still kept tabs on her back then, although he’d been thousands of miles away.
“That’s right. I took a gap year,” she said softly. “The school assumed I was going to travel but I was working and saving up for living expenses and preparing. I wanted to go to business school.”
He nodded. “As did I. I was on my way. And then you graduated and went off to New Haven for college. Your aim, and mine, was to graduate and go to Wharton or Harvard for business school. But that was years away yet for both of us.
“We had to get through college first. You somehow managed to come home for most of the holidays and school breaks. I think you drove down with a friend who lived in another part of the state and took the bus for the last leg.”
He leaned back on the couch, reminiscing for a moment. “I remember the first time you came to one of my parties.”
Surprise flared in her eyes. “I did? Without being invited?”
“Not by choice.” He grinned. “Your friend Katie dragged you.”
Her brows rose.
He shrugged. “There wasn’t enough to do in that town, so we made our own fun. I was having a spring break blowout at my family’s cabin on the Verdant River. A few of us had family cabins out that way, and we took turns throwing parties. It was a regular circuit, but my place was the biggest, so we typically ended up there. Most everyone under the age of twenty-five made an appearance sooner or later.
“You didn’t come inside at first. You were avoiding the crowd in general and me in particular. But Katie told me she’d brought you, kind of running it by me—as if I would mind—so I went looking.”
His voice softened as his mind replayed the memory in his head. It had been the first warm week of the year and she’d been wearing a yellow and white checkered sundress with a halter top neck.
He’d wanted to strip it off her and lick every inch of her body. But he’d played it cool that night.
“You were at the edge of the hill, looking down at the river. I walked up to you and we spoke for a few minutes. We called a truce.”
Emma frowned. “Just like that?”
“We were no longer classmates.” And she was eighteen going on nineteen and he no longer felt like he had to gouge out his eyes for looking at her the way he did.
“I asked you to bury the hatchet. You were reluctant at first, but the mosquitos were eating you alive, so you came into the den and we had our first real conversation over a glass of wine and a tube of Benadryl cream.”
Her lips parted. “And I slept with you.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Not for years . We became friends first.”
“Friends?” she echoed in disbelief. “ Years ?”
“It’s not as hard to believe as it sounds,” he told her, willing her to sit closer to him. “We had more in common than not. We were both driven, gearing up for careers in business. We also liked the same movies and food. I had traveled to places you wanted to go to.”
He paused before biting the bullet. “You grew up without a dad and had a difficult relationship with your mom. I grew up without a mom and my father barely spoke to me.”
This last visibly shook her. “Oh,” she said with tight cheeks. “Sorry. I get along with my mom now.”
“You did most of the time back then too,” he was happy to share. “But not always.”
She was so confused. “What did we fight about?”
“The men.”
His cheek twitched at her expression of consternation. “For the record, I don’t think her reputation was deserved. Had she lived in a big city, her love life wouldn’t have been the subject of so much gossip.”
“But we lived in a small town.” Her mouth was hard .
“That’s right.”
Fuck, he didn’t want to be the one to tell her this. But Emma was finally listening to details of her past. She wasn’t shutting him down. And this was part of the things she needed to know.
“There were rumors of her being involved with married men. Including this scuzzbucket named Theodore Bronson… my aunt’s then husband.”
Emma blinked, her face reddening. She recognized the name. “ Shit .”
Yeah, he felt the same way. “We didn’t know about that liaison at the time. We didn’t talk about our parents that night at all.”
Those confidences had come much later. “That night we discussed your first year at school and the classes we were taking. And when you came back for the next party, during summer break, we spoke again, and I finally asked for your number. We started texting.”
Her full lips pursed. “If we got so close, why does everyone still assume we’re enemies today?”