Chapter 30 #2
I cave and walk with him to the surprisingly quaint mom-and-pop joint a couple blocks away, and yeah, once I’m up and moving, I feel the fatigue. I could just curl up in that booth.
Emerson waits until we’ve gotten a round of samosas and pakora before asking, “So, was that Sinclair’s way of making sure you don’t get into trouble with me while you’re here? By proposing to you on your flight here?”
“Oh, it was yesterday, actually.”
“My apologies. I assumed you’d only just watched the video.”
I hang my head sheepishly. “Right, yeah. That was today. But he proposed to me yesterday.”
Emerson scrutinizes me with his dark, intense eyes. Smoldering gets said a lot about his eyes. He’s one of those men who makes everyone feel seen, right down to their skin, in the best way possible.
I felt so special that his eyes, his smolder, were real for me. Like I was better than everyone else because he actually saw me, it wasn’t just his resting face.
But I never loved him. Never even questioned if I loved him.
“You don’t look like a blushing bride-to-be,” he observes.
“I said no.”
“Hmm. So you don’t want to marry him.”
I squirm in my seat because, as much as he states it as a fact, I know it’s a question, and it’s a question he already knows the answer to.
“It’s complicated.”
He lifts his water glass, swirls it like a glass of wine, but the restaurant only has plain water and a cooler stocked with Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite.
“Isn’t it always?”
“Is it?”
Emerson looks me dead in the eye and says, “Molly decided to marry me because her agent thought it would help her career if she could use my last name. She gave me a very compelling argument for why I wouldn’t want to be fodder for top bachelor lists while launching a production company. Here we are.”
I shake my head and sip my Coke to keep from laughing. “Sounds like me.”
“Oh? Is Sinclair trying to get himself removed from the eligible bachelor lists, too?”
I snort. “I don’t even know if he’s on those lists.”
“I assure you, he is.”
“Huh.”
I stare down at the selection of fried food in front of me. It’s good. I need to eat. But it’s hard to get myself to do when my stomach’s full of bees and I’m missing . . .
Everything.
“Was this video some terrible tactic, then? Engagement warfare?”
“A little, I guess. But he recorded it a month ago. He just didn’t send it to me until today.”
“Ah, so he biffed the proposal, then.”
“You know I don’t like big fusses. I don’t need a fancy proposal.”
Emerson’s sly grin would have charmed my pants off a year ago, but it doesn’t do anything for me anymore except make me feel silly in a purely platonic way. “So he really biffed the proposal, then.”
“Yeah, I guess that ‘really’ was what I needed there. He stupendously screwed it up. Like, he didn’t even ask me. He told me?”
Emerson grimaces.
“Yep.”
Emerson scratches his chin in the most theatrically thoughtful way before dunking a bit of pakora in tamarind chutney and popping it in his mouth. “He loves you.”
I want to play dumb and get him to say why he thinks that, but it would just be an ego stroke. “He does, yeah.”
He tears into a samosa, making himself busy to keep his next question casual.
“Do you love him?”
That’s the question, isn’t it?
The question I never asked myself of Emerson, because I always knew I didn’t. But Blaise?
It’s such a big thing.
Love.
He’s a difficult man. Even at his best, even when things are running as smoothly as possible, he’s difficult.
He creates problems. He’s still collecting those stupid football things to mess with Lin, and they’re not even really Lin’s.
They’re property of the team, they’re just not expensive enough for anyone to intervene.
I mentioned it to Wren, Lin’s partner, and she says Lin’s noticed they’ve been vanishing but figured it was someone from the equipment crew misplacing them.
He gets in fights.
He pushes buttons.
He handles problems the worst way possible every time, and he just got himself injured for it.
But he loves so hard. He’s obsessed with Donovan.
I know what’s expected of me as a football wife.
I see the other women either hire a ton of household staff or quietly step away from their jobs in small ways, getting assistants or scheduling around the season or leaving their jobs entirely so they can be the primary caregivers and household managers.
I respect them all for it. But I think Blaise would lose his mind if I told him not to worry about taking care of Donovan.
And he loves me just as hard. He was ready to accept that I’d extorted him for tens of millions of dollars just as soon as he decided it wasn’t to run off with.
He knew how important my dad was to me and made sure to visit him the first second he could.
He fought for me to keep my wig at the hospital when I gave birth.
He rescued me at Ani-Con.
I fish the ring out of my pocket and roll it between my fingers. It’s beautiful. Simple. Unusual. Elegant. He could have gotten me a fake diamond from Walmart, and I probably wouldn’t have known the difference, but he knew this was the one for me.
“Is that the engagement ring?” Emerson asks.
“I think it’s my wedding ring.”
“That’s . . . not the right order.”
My lips crack into a smile that turns into a soft laugh that grows into something I have to cover my face for, just so I don’t irritate the other diners. Emerson doesn’t know what I’m laughing about, but Blaise would.
I miss him so much right now.
But more importantly, I missed him last night. I was so mad at him, but it took everything I had — and several reminders that he’s recovering and on babysitting duty all week, so he needed his sleep — to keep from calling him.
“Oooh, you’re in love with him,” Emerson taunts like a teenager.
Like a teenager, I blush. “Stop.”
“Tilly, why are you even here?” Emerson chuckles. “Go home. Go stop torturing your big, bad fiancé. You don’t even need this money anymore, do you? You can’t tell me he wouldn’t buy you the moon if you only asked.”
I groan and tip my head back. “Right. That. He’s broke.”
Emerson recoils. Hard. He even reaches for the ring, and I let him take it from me, even though I already know he’s going to see it in a different light now that he knows that.
“It’s not like you think,” I promise him. “Someone’s been blackmailing Blaise for the last year. His position on the team is precarious. They don’t want a troublemaker, so he’s been paying the blackmailer off, just hoping the Jugs wouldn’t find out.”
Emerson whistles under his breath, but the server drops off a basket of naan, and he doesn’t hesitate to grab a piece and munch on a corner of it. He’s a spectator. I get it. “What kind of secrets do they have on him that he’s willing to pay off, what, that’s gotta be millions of dollars, right?”
“It’s about me, actually. Someone got recordings of our night at Ani-Con, and I guess they’re bad. We, ahh, we did a lot that night.”
“Yeah, you were always adventurous—wait, recordings from my room?” Emerson suddenly hops to his feet and snaps his phone out. Unlike me, he makes sure he commands the attention of everyone in the restaurant. I doubt he even does it deliberately. “The room I got you?”
“Yep, that room.”
“Shit!” he hisses, and even that is overly dramatic. He projects it. Neighboring diners gasp in offense, even though none of them look like they’d be scandalized by it if it were said any other way. “Tilly, why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrug helplessly, unsure what to say. “I . . . I don’t know why I would? You weren’t the one getting—”
“I asked you if you had anyone try to blackmail you!” he yells, waving his hands wildly. I’m pretty sure the reason everyone is looking around is they’re trying to find the cameraman. Clearly, this is a performance.
“What do you—?” I start, only to remember that time he came to Wilmington and we went to lunch together with Donovan. It was such a crazy day, what with Blaise pulling Blaise nonsense, that I’d forgotten everything about our conversation at lunch. “What happened?”
Emerson drops back down to the table, leans in close to whisper, although everyone’s attention is on us so I’m thinking a couple people are about to catch some gossip.
“A bunch of guests at Ani-Con had blackmail letters sent to them. Anyone who did anything suspicious. They caught, god, Gary Crush was filmed sucking Ben Harris’s dick, and Taylor Reede had this whole naked party?
Like, everyone was supposed to come dressed in something that wasn’t clothing, and then it just all fell off throughout the night?
Oh, and Genesis played the mirror game and had a bunch of guys snort lines of coke off her stomach. ”
My eyes widen at that.
“Yep. A couple paid off the first round, but then they realized it was happening to everyone and hired a team to shut them down and—”
“Wait, the blackmailers were busted? But we just got another demand right before the season started!”
Emerson nods. “Yeah, that’s why I asked you about it.
They never actually found the blackmailer.
The guys they hired scared the blackmailer so hard they returned the money, so they decided not to go any further with it.
You know, the more you push, the bigger the risk it’s all going to get leaked just out of spite. ”
“Do you still know how to contact the scary anti-blackmailers?”
“It turns out I do.”