CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Stevie fe lt half-dead . The house that he had bought for them in Montana was gorgeous. Her sisters and her father were happy enough with it, even if they were all baffled by the sudden change. But everybody was tiptoeing around her, refusing to question it. She knew why. They felt like if it had been her choice nobody could express disappointment that they’d had to move back to icy, snowy Montana rather than remain in Olympus.
Everyone was concerned about her.
She was annoyed about it. Because she wanted to rant and rave about her broken heart, but she also didn’t want her family to feel guilty.
It was Daisy who finally came and found her one afternoon while she was brooding at the kitchen table and drinking tea, looking out at the vast, glorious mountain view below.
It really was a beautiful house.
“Are you ever going to talk about what happened?”
“There isn’t any point.”
“Isn’t there? It’s something that happened to you.”
“But… I don’t want any of you to be upset.”
“But you’re upset. Don’t you understand that matters? Don’t you understand that your feelings are important?”
She scowled. “No. I have to take care of everybody.”
“No you don’t. And for a while, he took care of you. And it really is terrible that you lost that.”
She felt her heart began to crack. She felt tears begin to spill down her cheeks. She laid her head down on the table. “I loved him, Daisy. I still do.”
“Why did you leave?”
“It was him. He sent us away. He… He doesn’t want to love me. He’s afraid to. But I think he does. And I’m afraid… Just saying that out loud sounds silly. Like I’m full of myself. Like he had to send me away because his love for me would be too powerful and he couldn’t control it. It sounds ridiculous.”
“No, Stevie. It doesn’t.” Daisy sat down at the table and put her hand over Stevie’s arm. “It doesn’t sound ridiculous. Because you are that amazing. Can’t you accept it? You have that prince running scared because he’s never felt anything like it, because he’s never met anything like you.”
She blinked. She had wanted to feel special. Maybe not like this. But suddenly, she did. Because she, Stevie Parker, of Bozeman, Montana, had been too much for that playboy prince, with all his lovers, and all his travel, to handle.
She was special. She was.
Tears spilled down her cheek, and she huffed out a laugh. “Well. I’ll be damned.”
“Look what you did, Stevie.” Daisy looked around them. “You saved us.”
“Maybe I did.” She let a sense of pride fill her chest, alongside the pain. “Maybe I did.”
Prince Adonis could take an awful lot from her. But he could never take this.
* * *
Adonis was jet-lagged and angry by the time he landed in Los Angeles. He didn’t know what he was doing here. He blamed Stevie.
But it had been weeks, and he was miserable. Stevie had sent a message through Miriam that she was not pregnant. Miriam had looked at him like he was the very villain of the tale. He was beginning to feel like he was.
Every time he took a breath, it was like he was being stabbed with a dagger, and would a hero hurt quite so much over his own decisions? He had no way of knowing.
But without even really thinking it through, he ended up making a plan to go to Los Angeles and find his mother.
It wasn’t difficult, of course. It was a matter of having the right people liaise with one another and make a meeting spot that was agreeable to both parties.
His mother had insisted it be high-profile. He found it irritating, and yet… It was the relationship he had cultivated with her. Revenge through headlines. So perhaps he deserved it. But now they would be meeting, and it would create buzz for her.
He had never wanted buzz less.
But still, he found himself walking out onto the terrace of a well-known restaurant that overlooked the ocean. And there she was, seated at the table, wearing a large, wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses on her face. As if she didn’t want to be recognized, but was screaming it so loudly everyone was certain to look and make their best attempt to do so.
“Adonis,” she said. “It has been a very long time.”
“Yes. I believe I was a child.”
He sat down at the table, feeling tense. Feeling…no connection to the woman sitting across from him. Why was he here?
“Yes. You were.”
She took her sunglasses off. Her blue eyes matched his, and they were unreadable. Did she feel anything looking at him?
“I came to tell you that I am angry with you.”
“Did you?”
She took a sip of her water.
“Yes. You abandoned me. When I was a child.”
“I did,” she said. And for a moment, he thought he saw a sheen of tears in her eyes. But just like that, they were gone. “Adonis, I made a decision. And whether you believe it or not, there’s no negotiating custody with royalty. I decided to make a different life. But the life had to be separate. It was a decision that I made.”
“Do you ever regret it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “All we have is the life we chose to live. Regrets don’t solve anything, do they?”
Except, they did. Because he had them. Because he hurt. And he wanted her to hurt alongside him.
Because he… He wanted to know that everything he had done over these last years had made an impact on her. Had made some kind of difference. And he realized that was…a truly pointless sentiment to carry around inside of him. To wish pain on somebody because they had made him feel wounded. Maybe it was fair, maybe it was even understandable. But… Why?
“Are you saying my father wouldn’t allow you to see me?”
“Adonis, do you want your relationship with your father to change?”
“He’s dying ,” Adonis said. “That will change things anyway.”
“And all you will have is your memories. What’s the point of damaging them?”
“The point is, that I would know the truth.”
“Of course he wanted you to have the ability. That was how he presented it. And he didn’t want to see me. I hurt him. But the end result was our total estrangement. But I accepted it. And because of that, I have to own the pain that it caused. I suppose.”
“We can make a decision about whether or not we see each other now,” Adonis said.
“Of course. You never seemed as if you wanted to.”
“I didn’t. I wanted to hurt you. The way that you hurt me.”
“Adonis,” she said, looking down, and then back up. “You never hurt me. You were a child. And you were caught in the middle of something complicated. Seeing you in the headlines, I hoped that you were having a happy life. I enjoyed seeing pictures of you. And I liked to think that perhaps you had a little bit of fun because of me. I know you didn’t get it from your father.”
That rocked him. Took a knife and twisted it in his chest. His mother had made up a story that made her feel better, about what he was doing. He had been acting out because of her.
But not for the reason she thought. And he didn’t feel any triumph over any of it. He didn’t want to have hurt her, actually. Because what he was staring at was the impossibility of two people who hadn’t been able to deal with themselves on a deep enough level to stop their actions from hurting their child. From hurting themselves. His father had been sadder for having lost his mother. His mother had been…sadder for having lost him.
And Adonis found he didn’t have the stomach to try and make anything more painful. Suddenly, he felt like a burden was being lifted from within him. He didn’t look at his mother and see somebody shallow. He saw a beautiful, fragile woman who had done her very best to construct a new life with the tools she had been left.
Wasn’t that what they all were doing?
Him. His father. Stevie. Weren’t they all just trying their hardest with what they had been given?
Except… He had chosen fear. And that was very like his father. When he could’ve opened things up, changed them, to make his wife happy, to make there be a two-way relationship, he hadn’t done it. Because he hadn’t been able to get past his own pain, and hadn’t Adonis just done the same to Stevie?
“I’m getting married,” he said. “And I want you to be there.”
His mother looked shocked. “I thought your engagement was off.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it. My next stop is going to be her. But… If she says yes, I want you to come.”
“Your father won’t be happy.”
“Then he’ll have to be unhappy. I think everyone has been far too unhappy for too long. Something has to change. And somebody has to take the first step. It wasn’t going to be me. But Stevie… Stevie told me that I needed to fix this. Because I have let it decide who I am for far too long. She was right.”
“Adonis… Go and get her. So that I can be at your wedding.”
“I will. And… Mother, I hope to see you there.”
* * *
Stevie was planting flowers in a pot. No, she wouldn’t be able to put them outside yet, but it felt like a defiant thing to do. To plant new life in the face of all this icy cold. In the face of the dead, stagnant feelings in her heart. She would not be crushed. Of that she was certain.
She was so committed to her endeavor that she didn’t hear the door open. But there he was then, standing there like an apparition. Like a flower in the snow.
“Adonis…”
“Stevie, I came to tell you that I did what you said. I went and saw my mother.”
The rush of dizziness and relief that she felt was inexplicable. Because he hadn’t said anything about the two of them. And yet. She knew it was connected. She did.
“Oh.”
“It was in the media, but I’m certain that you didn’t see it, because you don’t care about that. And you never did.”
“I didn’t,” she said. “I only ever cared about…” She felt her heart begin to fracture. “I only ever cared about you.”
“I know,” he said, kneeling down where she was, putting his hand over hers, over the potting soil. “I know. And I cared about you, but I didn’t know what to do. I chose the fearful thing. What felt like the easier thing? And I told myself that because it hurt it was the right thing. I think I inherited a streak of martyrdom from my father. I regret embracing that. I thought that because I lived a seemingly indulgent life I was not like my father. But I am. Inflexible, self-protective. Though, perhaps even more truthfully, I’ve taken pieces from my mother and my father, and fashioned them into a wholly unique, dysfunctional human being who doesn’t know how to give or receive love. But I want to. Because I do love you. I didn’t know how to accept that you loved me. I didn’t know how to show it. But it matters. It matters so much. Because I can’t live without you. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to continue on this legacy of isolation. I want you to marry me. And I swear to you, I’m not going back on my word, not again.”
Stevie believed him. Because now it was easy. Because now she knew. Her own power, the power of what was between them. Because somehow, she felt stronger for having had to face the loss of them. It hadn’t destroyed her. It had hurt. But she had come out with even more love for herself, and because of that, it made it easy to accept what he offered now.
“Yes,” she said. “I want that. I don’t care about being your princess. I want to be your wife. Because I love you.”
“I love you too. It is as gloriously simple as that.”
“And yet very, very complicated,” she said.
“Yes. But you know, I think we can handle it. Because for all that we are very different, we are also the same. The same heart.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We are.”
“Do you think that you…could fly us to the wedding?”
She tilted her head back and laughed. “I mean, are you sure about that? You don’t think we might end up on a mountainside again?”
“If we did, I’d marry you there. In fact, I think maybe I should.”