Chapter 18
Xander
A few days after the globe incident, Penelope and I boarded the jet to Singapore. Under the guise of a honeymoon, we’d secure
the property piece of the inheritance stipulation.
We packed the bags we had at my beach house and had them sent back to my Manhattan penthouse. Her things were all over the
house. Like the second she let herself unpack, she sprawled out.
I normally enjoyed my time alone; it was nice to turn off for a little while. I always thought I’d have trouble having someone
else around during those moments of solitude, but I didn’t. These past few weeks living together, I was seeing a side of her
that I never got to see. Penelope, while pulled together and organized in front of others, was kind of a mess when she was
alone. The brave face she put on disappeared when she was in the comfort of her own home.
Literally and figuratively.
“Anything I should know before we get there?” I eventually asked, even though I wasn’t all that worried. People tended to
like me.
Despite being confined to a jet for the last fifteen hours, she didn’t say more than a few words to me. When she wasn’t sleeping,
she was either working with her headphones or pacing. I didn’t mind, I liked the quiet, but it seemed like she might need
someone to talk to.
“Actually, yes. That’s what I was working on.” With a deep breath she looked back down at her laptop. “You were right.”
“Right about what?”
“We need to be convincing. To some degree. Even the tabloids seem disbelieving. So I’m making a spreadsheet of our interests
and preferences. We haven’t needed it much since we’ve been spending time around people who know the truth, but still.” Her
fingers moved along the trackpad. “I should learn the pieces of information a wife would know.”
Penelope had been in my life for five years now, but I wasn’t as close to her as I was everyone else, because she kept a distance
from all of us. Even so, she knew where I grew up, the broad strokes of what happened to my parents, my general interests.
I knew about her mom, and that she had two half siblings who never visited. Silas made sense because it seemed like he was
an antagonist to her. But she had a half sister.
“You have siblings,” I stated, wondering if she’d tell me more, knowing that I was supposed to stop myself from doing that.
I wasn’t supposed to be getting in deeper, I was supposed to be trying to move past her. But dammit, I couldn’t help it.
And after what happened with the globe, I wanted her to know that she didn’t need to worry about being perfect or anything
other than what she was, not with me. She had a safe place if she needed it. One she could trust to see and accept her for
exactly who she was.
“Silas is a terror,” she noted quickly. “And Arabella.”
She sighed.
“Arabella?”
“Arabella is utterly perfect.” She smiled, almost proud but a sadness rang through. She looked up from her screen. “Beautiful,
graceful, and happy to marry the man chosen for her.”
“Do you miss her?”
She shrugged. “We grew apart after I went to uni.”
“Why?” I pressed quietly.
She shuffled in her seat again, struggling to answer. “She wore her marriage like a medal when I saw her last, at her wedding.
And I... obviously, I took a different approach. We became different people.”
“Were you close before?”
“As girls, yes.” A melancholic smile drifted along her cheeks. “I did her homework because she always struggled in school
and she’d sneak me treats and gifts whenever she was showered with them. We were thick as thieves. After university, I was
supposed to move back to Singapore, but I didn’t...”
“Why not?”
“It’s hard to go back, but at the same time it’s the place that feels...” A distant look passed over her. She looked out
the window for an extended beat. Then, she took a deep breath, rolled her shoulders back, and shuffled in her seat. “We should
also know more basic things.”
I wanted to know more, but I took the hint. I quietly reveled in the fact that after years of knowing her and stringing together
the parts I got piecemeal, I got to know all of that at once.
She was uncomfortable, so I switched to what was easy and safe and my default setting. A playful banter. “Like...”
“Like where we met,” she answered.
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, and waited until she looked at me. “You remember when we met.”
She remembered that the yellow dress was her first day at the firm, so she had to remember when we met at the bar. I took
that moment to remind myself that there were a lot of nights that meant something to me that seemed to fade in her memory.
She sat up straighter in her chair and looked down. “I’m only trying to make sure we’re on the same page.”
“We got together a few months ago; fell madly in love. This summer we decided why wait?” I rattled off a perfectly reasonable love story.
Her eye twitched just slightly at the ambiguity of that short answer.
She let out a quiet huff and typed a few things into her laptop then looked back at me. “What is your favorite color?”
“Who is going to call our marriage into question if you don’t know my favorite color?”
“What is the harm in just picking one?” Her tone tightened.
“Fine, green.”
“Green?” She raised an unamused brow. “Like your eyes? Isn’t that a bit on the nose?”
I had to stop instigating, but with her, it was so damn hard. “Spend a lot of time thinking about my eyes, Poppy?”
My attempt to make her smile failed. “Pick any other color,” she demanded.
“Fine, yellow.”
“Yellow?” She looked up, her fingers tapped along the side of the table. “Why yellow?”
“You told me to pick one.” I tilted my head back against the leather seat with a groan.
“Fine.” She looked down at her screen. “Your favorite color is yellow. How did we get engaged?”
“That one’s easy,” I answered and snapped my fingers. “You blindsided me in your foyer.”
She closed her laptop. “This isn’t a game.”
“Then why am I having so much fun?” I laughed.
Just as I was about to apologize, noticing her patience waning, I caught it.
The tiny reward I got when I managed to successfully disarm her. The smile that played tug-of-war against the side of her
cheek.
“Send me your psychotic spreadsheet. I won’t mess this up for you,” I leaned forward and whispered.
Her eyes met mine and my entire chest warmed when her grin broke loose. Whenever I did that—made her smile, really smile—time
stilled. And my mind would go completely blank; a blissful state of amnesia for the fleeting second she granted it to me.
It was always gone too soon.
Her eyes left mine and she straightened in her seat.
“Fine.” She tucked her laptop into the side pocket of her purse and glanced out the window. She twisted the handle between
her fingers.
The plane began to make a few gradual dips and we got the alert we’d be landing soon.
I ignored the dull ache that always followed after those moments. “Don’t worry, Poppy. Families love me.”