Chapter 1
Last November
When Preston Fields invited me to his wedding on the island of St. John, I had no intention of showing up, but then Mike reminded me Taylor would be at the wedding as best friend of the bride, and my heart wouldn’t let me pass up the opportunity to lay eyes on her again.
So here I am, stepping through the gate of the private estate they rented in Peter Bay for the small wedding.
Music blares from around the back of the two-story house, and I start walking in that direction when a flash of tan legs and blonde hair runs down the stairs.
She doesn’t stop until she reaches the edge of the patio overlooking the beach below where a wedding arch is being constructed on the sand.
I stand, mesmerized by her as she takes a deep breath and holds it.
Watching her is my favorite pastime.
She’s barefoot and wearing a matching pink silk short set with her hair already perfectly styled.
Half of her hair is pulled up out of her face while the rest of the curls flow down her back, longer than I remember.
My palms itch to reach out and run my fingers through the locks to see if they still feel as soft as they once were.
As I watch her repeat the process of inhaling a deep breath over and over until she seems to settle, it strikes me how different she appears from the woman I knew—despite all the physical ways she’s the same— and I suddenly need to know every little change.
Why is she running? Granted, she’s been doing that for a while.
Did it start when she ran away from me? Did something else happen to make her run?
When did she start breathing exercises? The woman I knew was fearlessly confident and unapologetically balls to the wall.
Is this maturity or anxiety? It all swirls in my head as I try reconciling the woman in front of me with the woman on a beach with me ten years ago.
Needing to regain some semblance of control over my own runaway thoughts, I clear my throat.
Her spine stiffens, but she doesn’t look at me as she says, “Why are you here? This is an elopement with their closest friends and family. I’d hardly call you a close friend.
” I roll my eyes and shake my head at her attempt to be a hard ass.
A smirk pulls at my lips, the small primal part of me thrilled in the knowledge that she can sense me with one single clearing of my throat. “You might not, but others do.” Not entirely true, but also not untrue. I was invited even if I hadn’t planned to attend. “I brought the plane,” I clarify.
“We have a plane; we don’t need yours.”
Fields informed me Taylor had arranged a charter flight but didn’t want to interrupt everyone’s travel plans for the honeymoon, hence why he called me.
“They wanted to head back to Long Caye for their honeymoon. An ode to where it all started.” A reminder it’s not only Preston and Ivory’s story that started on Long Caye. It was partly ours too. Or was it the beginning of the end?
It’s also a reminder of how she came back into my orbit after all these years.
When she called two and a half years ago, I stupidly hoped she was done running and it would lead somewhere.
But she meant it when she said it was a favor for a client and nothing more. Nothing had changed her mind about us.
But that didn’t stop me. I’ve been strategically making moves to bring her back into my orbit.
If the phone call was a sign from the universe, I was merely helping it along by making sure the degrees of separation were smaller than ever before, but she must’ve been intentionally avoiding me because despite the fact that I know she visits Nashville often and I now live there, we’ve yet to come face to face.
“Grant, glad you could make it.” Preston interrupts our standoff, though Taylor appears lost in her own memories when he walks up and shakes my hand.
Taylor glares at him, clearly angry for being left out of the loop, so I hold my hands up in surrender. “I just came to drop off the plane. Not trying to intrude on your day.”
“Nonsense,” Preston says. "Part of the reason why I called and requested the plane was so you’d stay for the celebrations.”
Mike told me he anticipated that was a piece of Preston’s motivations but I didn’t pay him any mind.
Miller, his best friend and teammate, walks up next with a jovial smile on his face. “Yeah, boss man. He could have chartered his own plane.” He slaps me on the back and says, “Welcome to the inner circle.”
I wasn’t part of their inner circle, despite Preston’s and Miller’s efforts to befriend me since they were traded to my team, the Music City Troubadours, a little over two years ago.
Being their team owner meant keeping a respectable distance from my second baseman and catcher, even though they were only a few years younger than I was.
It was ingrained in me at an early age not to mix business and friends.
Now that I think about it, it was another lesson from my father.
Maybe his logic was as flawed as his leadership skills. Something to dissect later.
“Shouldn’t there be a vote before we start inviting people into the inner circle?” The venom in Taylor’s tone is lessened by the shake in her voice. “And who wants to hang out with their boss anyway?” Add in a foot stomp and her temper tantrum would be complete.
“Probably the same people who decide to hang with their coach.” Mike walks up and nods his head at me. “But this one went and fell in love with my daughter, so here we are.” Unlike the others, he knew I was enroute because I texted him earlier.
“Ugh, Daddy Mike. Not helping,” Taylor groans and looks at Mike with affection.
“Daddy Mike?” I rip my sunglasses off and stare down my friend and team manager. Jealousy hits like a tidal wave. She’s mine. If anyone’s getting called Daddy, it’s me.
Where the fuck did that come from?
“Taylor, you have to stop calling me that.” Mike shakes his head with a wry smile, clearly amused with my reaction and the nickname. We will be talking about this later.
“I need to check on the girls,” Taylor says abruptly, skirting the perimeter of the patio as far away from me as possible on her way back to the stairs.
“Oh, Taylor!” Preston calls after her. “Don’t tell Ivory about the honeymoon. It’s a surprise.”
“My lips are sealed.” Her eyes bounce to mine and I get the impression she means she’s keeping more than Preston’s surprise a secret.
When Mike heads upstairs to get Ivory for the ceremony after lunch, I follow Preston’s parents, down to the beach where a few chairs are set up in front of the arch decorated with white linens and flowers.
A speaker is set up on one of the chairs and Miller fiddles with the music before joining Preston where he stands with the officiant.
Her scent catches on the breeze, and I smell her before I see her.
A mix of gardenia and vanilla seeping into my senses, taking me back in time.
Her proximity sets my soul on fire as the visions of a similar beach wedding assault me while she stands in front of me now.
Her eyes lock on the gold ring on my finger—a physical reminder of the connection we share.
It hurts.
It heals.
It frees me from a purgatory I’ve been living in.
Because as I watch Preston and Ivory exchange vows on that white sand beach, I’m transported to a beach in Belize where I’m exchanging my own wedding vows with the love of my life.
She’s beaming up at me on the edge of a pier.
The wind in her wild hair, a flower tucked above her ear and a simple white dress hugging her body as the captain marrying us recites the words of her favorite poem.
The same words the officiant reads now about two souls predestined and forever intertwined.
Just like hers and mine.
Applause breaks me out of my trance. I clap on autopilot.
“Get a room,” Miller shouts. Preston and Ivory break apart and raise their arms, eliciting more cheers from our small crowd.
“Let’s party!” Taylor storms past me and back to the house without making eye contact with anyone around her. I wonder as I watch her walk away if she was remembering it the same as I was.
Does she regret our time together?
Does she remember it fondly or is she jaded by the pain of it all? That would have been easy to lean into, and it’s a trap I almost fell into more than once after she left, but to be jaded and hate her felt like hating myself.
I couldn’t do that.
I couldn’t regret her.
Never.
Not one single day did I wish it away.
Not the pain.
Not the heartbreak.
Not the loneliness.
None of it competed with what it felt like to be loved by her. To love her.
I may have been her once upon a time, but she is my always.
She’s had me wrapped around her finger since those first early days in New York and seeing her now is no different.
All throughout cocktail hour and dinner, I feel it.
It doesn’t matter how long it’s been. It doesn’t matter that she clearly wants nothing to do with me, or how much space is between the people we are now and the people we used to be, I’m drawn to her with a magnetism I can’t explain.
After dinner has ended, and Preston and Ivory have snuck off to do what newlyweds do, Taylor rises, excusing herself from the group sitting around the outdoor dining table.
Seeing my opportunity to confirm if she still feels this spark too, I follow her into the hallway.
“You haven’t told them, have you?” I call out after her.
She stops in the middle of the hallway she had been retreating down. Her back goes rigid at my accusation—no, not accusation. Truth. Because it’s clear after spending all day with them that her friends have no clue we already know each other or exactly who I am to her.
“No,” she hisses. “And I’d like to leave it that way. Especially right now.”
“Then you may want to stop looking at me like you want to kill me. You’re raising suspicion with the daggers you’ve been glaring at me out there.”
She huffs, leaning back against the concrete wall. “I wasn’t prepared for you to show up here, today of all days.”
The pull to get close to her is too great, so I step into her space.
“You were remembering it too,” I say, crowding her against the wall, and with my left hand, I brush the hair loosened by the breeze out of her face. Her eyes connect with the gold band on my finger as she sharply inhales. I don’t wear it often, but it’s always with me. Just like the memory of her.
“Why are you wearing that?” Her words are barely audible, the pulse in her neck rapidly firing.
Leaning in, I wait for her eyes to connect with mine before I speak. “Married people wear wedding rings.”
Her eyes drop closed. As if my words hurt.
“It’s not a real marriage.”
A weaker man would be deterred by those words. Not me. I’ve stayed away for as long as I can—biding my time since her phone call, making chess moves behind the scenes. That stops now.
Reminding her just how serious I am, I say, “The marriage license in my safe says otherwise.”
She opens her mouth to fight me, but I push away from the wall and start back down the hall towards the celebration without letting her speak.
Seeing her today, sitting next to her, and witnessing the way my presence still affects her—the way I still affect her—the pieces are falling into place. Sooner or later, she’s going to be mine again.