Chapter 28
Tyler
“Wife? She’s your wife!” Ivy said.
We trudged through the forest on our way to the hunt. I was oblivious to the beautiful landscape as I weathered Saffron’s scrutiny. Part of me wished Saffron were here so I could avoid talking to Ivy, but she had joined the group of women who were ahead of us while Ivy had pulled me behind.
Ivy and Damien had acted as though they knew Saffron, and I thought Ivy at least wouldn’t confront me now, but as soon as the hunt started, she cornered me and gave me a grilling for the ages.
“Please stop saying that. You make it seem like I was hiding some dark secret.”
Ivy threw her hands up in the air, waving her gun around.
Thank goodness it wasn’t loaded. “I don’t know.
Hiding a wife of five years is considered a secret!
” The rush of the stream that we were walking along covered her scream, but I glanced at the group ahead of us to see if they heard us just the same.
They seemed preoccupied with their own conversations.
“It’s no different from what you and Damien did!” I knew I sounded like a petulant child, but it was tough not to when she was being this hard on me.
“Oh, come on. I wasn’t married to Damien for years. And what about all of those women you were with? Were you cheating on her?” She seemed angry on Saffron’s behalf.
“I told you the marriage wasn’t like that. We pretty much lived separate lives.”
Ivy clucked her tongue. “Doesn’t look like that now.”
“That’s because…” I didn’t know how to explain it to her without telling her everything about our relationship. Some of which I didn’t fully understand myself. “…Why are you interrogating me like this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because you have a whole-ass wife we don’t know about. Does Seb know?”
I kicked a rock, and it tumbled down the grass until it hit a tree. “He does.”
“Fuck him, of course he kept your secret. You must have kept his secret child as well.”
“I didn’t know about that! And neither did he. Kendra dropped the child on his doorstep and ran to Paris. That’s not on Seb.”
“What else are you going to say?”
“It’s true!” I screamed.
She sighed. “So what do you intend to do? About the blackmail and,” she pointed at Saffron, “her. Will you divorce her after you find out who’s still blackmailing you?”
“She’s the one who served me papers.”
Ivy’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“What’s there to say? We’re only here together because Massimo has this weird thing with married couples and will only sell his property to a married person. Speaking of which, what are you two doing here?”
“Massimo is looking for financing from Damien. You’re deflecting again.”
“I am not!”
“Do you love her?”
I caught Saffron out of the corner of my eye.
Her laughter trilled through the air. She was listening to Clarita and nodding at whatever the other woman was saying.
She must have felt my stare because she turned and waved at me.
I waved back. Over the past few days, I've been thinking about not divorcing her.
I enjoyed spending time with her. She was a fun hang, and, surprisingly, we had a lot in common. But did I love her?
I turned to Ivy. “It’s none of your business.”
She smirked. “You do!”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ivy could be overconfident about things she knew nothing about.
Just because Saff and I were finally getting along didn’t mean I loved her.
Certainly not the way Damien was in love with Ivy.
I could see in that man’s eyes that she was everything to him.
And Ivy loved him just as much as he did her.
With Saff and me, things were different.
But now that she got it in her head that I was in love with her, Ivy would blabber to the family about Saffron.
“Can you not tell the guys? At least not yet.”
She gave me a look as though to say, do you think I am stupid?
“Thanks,” I said.
“That’s your issue, and I am not touching it with a ten-foot pole.”
“Good.”
The other group, the men, was behind us, and when they caught up, Ivy took Damien’s arm and left me alone. I went over to Saffron. She jumped when she felt my presence and then smiled when she saw it was me.
“What did your sister say?”
I shrugged. “She was surprised, but she seemed to be handling it well. I am not the first in my family to marry in secret. She did the same with Damien. She married him so she could gain her inheritance and so he could gain a controlling stake in the family business.”
Saffron’s eyes widened. “No way.”
“Then they fell in love, so I guess it’s all good now. Then there’s my older brother, who also got married to gain his inheritance but didn’t tell anyone until it got reported in the papers.”
“Oh! Your family is weird. What about you? Is that part of why you married me? To gain your inheritance? Besides, you know… my father…”
“Blackmailing me? Not at all. I didn’t need the money then. My eldest brother, Nolan, invested at the jump, and luckily the company got profitable in a short time that I didn’t need to dig into the trust fund. Even to pay off your father.”
“Wow. You were that successful so early.”
“It was luck. Our first client was a rich Saudi prince with deep pockets who didn’t mind paying triple the price for us to build the apartment building of his dreams. Part of me thinks it was Nolan who arranged that client for us.”
“I would have loved an older brother or an older sister. A sister especially. I’ve always dreamed of one.”
“Five brothers and a sister are not as amazing as it seems. Siblings are nosy.” I glanced at Ivy, who kept peeking at us.
“But she seems so nice!” she cried in Ivy’s defense. “I really like her patisserie.”
Saffron strayed a little away from me, and I drew her to my side.
“Tyler.” She cast her gaze at Ivy and Damien, stiffening.
“What? They know we’re together.” To emphasize my point, I knocked her gun out of her hands, letting it fall to the ground, then spun her into my arms and dragged her behind a tree close by.
The rest of the party marched ahead of us, leaving us alone.
I pressed her against the tree and pushed against her thighs for a deep kiss.
The world disappeared as her tongue met mine.
Whatever initial point I had flew out of my head as I drank in her scent. Her sweet, shy kiss made me crumble.
“Tyler…” She pushed me away, and that’s when I realized my hands had strayed to her butt, and I was practically groping her in the woods.
This is why I didn’t want to kiss her. My attraction to her was a potent force I had issues reining in, and I had felt it on that wedding night of ours.
And now that I had tasted her lips, I couldn’t live without feeling them against mine for longer than twenty-four hours.
“If we don’t get back to the others, they might find us naked under this tree,” Saffron said.
My mind went to lurid thoughts. “That’s not a bad idea.”
She adjusted her clothing. “I don’t think Massimo or even Ivy would appreciate that.”
“Whatever you say.”
We rejoined the group. The men had joined the women and were now hunting together.
Saffron and I barely participated, and Massimo was too drunk to notice.
He caught a deer, but that had more to do with his aide than with him personally.
Massimo offered to give me some of the deer as a present, which I accepted under Saffron’s arched gaze.
“What?” I asked her as we were going up to our room.
“Nothing.” She couldn’t hide the judgment in her voice.
“It’s not as if you yourself didn’t eat game meat last time we attended his dinner. If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be here!” I said playfully.
“I did not say anything.”
“Fine. I’ll donate to an animal rights organization.”
She chuckled. We had reached our hotel room, and she leaned against the door while she waited for me to dig the key card out of my pocket. “You seem to have an issue with it more than I do,” she said.
“That’s because I am a city boy.” I opened the door and entered. The suite was spacious and luxurious if you're into garish hunting lodges. The animal theme continued here with leopard-skin rugs, bird mounts, and animal fur on the bed.
“And I am not a city girl?”
“You seemed fairly competent with a gun.”
“My father liked hunting.” Her face fell.
“He liked to take me out to places like this all the time, especially when my mother was still alive. She tolerated it; I didn’t like it.
And after she died, and I refused to go on one hunting trip, he got mad at me.
And that was the last time my dad and I had anything close to a cordial relationship. ”
She cast her gaze down as though she were hiding tears. But when she faced me again, her eyes were dry. “My father has always blamed me for my mother’s death. And I guess he didn’t like that I refused to participate in the same thing we used to do as a family. So that’s where the competency comes.”
“How did your mother die?” There could have been a better time to ask her this, but the question came out, and before I could take it back, she was already answering.
“She died in an elevator.”
“Oh, Saff.” Now I felt even worse for asking such a personal question in this crass room.
Saffron wandered to the bed and sat down. “I was with her when it happened. It was in the apartment building we used to live in. I bid her goodbye as the doors closed, and then I heard her screams. It crashed down to the ground with her in it. I still hear her screams in my dreams.”
That must have been horrifying. I went to sit next to her and tentatively put my arm around her. “What happened to your mother wasn’t your fault.”
And it was cruel for a man to blame his young daughter for something she could not control.
Worse still, the death of a parent. I balled my fist, rage filling me at the thought of what Saffron must have endured.
My father wasn’t Santa Claus; he was mean when he wanted to, especially to some of my siblings, but what Saffron’s father did to her was unforgivable.
Saffron sighed. “I know that now. But it was hard to see it that way when I was twelve. Our relationship got so bad that I was no longer living with him most of the time but staying with my aunt instead.”
I took her into my arms. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell she needed a hug.
She embraced me fully. I heard a choked sob and then felt the shoulder of my jacket getting wet.
Tears. I let Saffron cry out her pain. After a while, she disentangled from me and rubbed her eyes.
“I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that. ”
I was glad I was the person she told. That she had trusted me with this part of her that she never showed anyone else.
It made me feel happy and wanted. Needed in a way that was different from how my brothers and sister needed me.
How my friends needed me. Was this the love Ivy was referring to?
For the first time in my life, I was not afraid of the answer being yes.