Chapter 29
THEO
“Why did I keep it a secret?” I repeated quietly, then scoffed down a humorless laugh and shook my head. “I don’t know, Raquel. Maybe because I was afraid you’d react exactly the way you are right now.”
She looked back at me, her eyes glassier than I’d ever seen them but her head held high. “I’d rather have heard it from you.”
“I know.”
“Then why not just tell me?” she asked, her voice cracking around the edges. “Why wait for Avery to spit it out at the very last time he should’ve been thinking about something like that? We’re fighting for our lives here, Theo.”
“I know.” I inhaled a deep breath, desperately trying to stay calm, but I had no idea why Avery would do this to me. I knew he was angry about my offer to help, but this was taking it a few steps too far. “I was going to tell you myself. Honestly.”
“When?” Both of her eyebrows shot up. “Seven seconds before your brother swooped in on his massive jet to take you to your wedding?”
“No.” I shoved my hands into my hair, my head shaking over and over again. “I just didn’t know how to tell you, okay? It’s not really easy to explain.”
She snorted. “You’re telling me. It wasn’t easy to explain what happened with Hunter and Farrah either, Theo. But I did it because I wanted you to understand.”
“And I didn’t want to pile on with everything that’s happening with your dad right now.
” I held her gaze, my heart doing its best impression of a fucking sledgehammer.
“When was I supposed to tell you that my family has this weird tradition of arranging marriages? Just after your dad’s diagnosis?
Or would you have preferred me telling you yesterday, when you’d just found out that you might lose everything? ”
“Don’t you dare use him as an excuse.” She narrowed her eyes to slits, but I saw the anger flashing in them. “Are you or are you not getting married?”
“I’m not,” I said, giving it to her straight. “Not yet, anyway. It is something I have to think about, though. Avery was right. All my brothers are married now, which leaves me. I am next in line, but I’m not hiding.”
“So you are getting married.” She blinked a few times rapidly, her gaze finally dropping away from mine. “Eventually.”
“Eventually, yes,” I said, feeling like I could physically see her pulling back from me.
It was like I could see those guards slamming back into place behind her eyes, the walls rebuilding themselves brick by brick.
It was the worst sight I’d ever had the displeasure of witnessing, and desperation clawed at my throat to make it disappear.
“I was serious about not going back to Chicago, Raquel.”
Her eyes snapped back up to mine. “That’s not really an option, is it?”
Fuck. She really is fast on the uptake, isn’t she? “No, not really. Not without consequences, anyway.”
“Consequences?” She sniffed. “That makes it sound like they’ll disown you if you don’t go back, and I won’t be responsible for that.”
Truth be told, they wouldn’t disown me, per se, but that didn’t make it any less true that I’d been living in a fantasy with her.
A beautiful, intoxicating fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless.
I had to go back to Chicago and fulfill my obligations to the family, one of which was that I had to get married.
I just wanted to keep living the fantasy, though.
“I want you,” I said roughly, needing her to know that I didn’t care about the consequences. I’d accepted them as soon as I’d told her I’d be staying. “I want this. Us.”
She nodded slowly, tears shimmering on her eyelids, but she didn’t let them fall, just lifting her chin a little higher and hugging herself a little tighter.
“Avery was right, Theo. I’m from a blue-collar family.
There’s no way of getting around that. If your family does arranged marriages, I’m going to go ahead and assume that they don’t arrange marriages to people like me. ”
I swallowed hard, but she kept going, the hurt in her voice growing with every word she said. “You won’t find anything in my family history that will change that. We’re not long-lost relatives of the Rockefellers or secretly connected to anyone important. We’re just the Thompsons of Quartz Pass.”
“That doesn’t matter to me.”
She swiped her tongue across her lips, her head tilting as she nodded again. “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but it will matter to your family.”
“I don’t care.”
“But I do,” she said with a vehemence behind her words that made it crystal clear that she didn’t just care. She cared a lot. “I barely make sixty thousand dollars a year, Theo. I went to trade school. I’m the furthest thing from a socialite you can get.”
“That doesn’t matter to me either. If I wanted a socialite, I’d be happily married by now. Don’t you get it?”
“What I get is that you’ve been everywhere, all over the world, and that’s your life. You have brothers with jets and you drop comments about tiles in Greece like that kind of things is normal. Meanwhile, I’ve never left Arizona and I don’t want to.”
I took a step toward her, silently imploring her to listen and really hear me. “None of that matters, Raquel. I’ll take you everywhere you want to go and if you don’t want to go anywhere, I’ll stay right here with you.”
“It does matter. Of course, it fucking matters.” She sounded so miserable that my heart twisted itself into what felt like a pretzel, and I could see she was in the same kind of pain, blinking hard as she tried not to cry.
“It matters because no matter where you go, you’ll still be you.
I won’t take that from you. You’re a Westwood, whatever that means, and I know how much you love your family. ”
“I love you,” I said. “I meant it when I said that. I do. I love you, Raquel.”
Her lips parted, her eyes widening as she stared up at me.
For just a second, I hoped that maybe that would be enough to fix what had broken between us.
I honestly didn’t give a shit about the money or the jets, and while it was true that I loved my family, I was also still hopeful that I’d be able to work something out with Alex.
What Raquel and I had was real and he wasn’t some disconnected monster who didn’t care. He simply believed in our family traditions. I could talk to him, reason with him, and hopefully, get through to him the same way Jesse had.
I just needed time, but the ache already slicing through my chest said that maybe the fact that I loved her didn’t matter as much as I’d hoped it would.
A moment later, that suspicion was confirmed when she looked up at me again, the devastation in those striking gray eyes just as real as it’d been when I’d arrived at her house last night.
“I think you mean that,” she whispered.
I took another step closer to her. “I do. Of course, I fucking do. I want to be here with you. That hasn’t changed.”
She searched my gaze, her head dropping back for a moment as she inhaled a deep breath, but when she refocused on me, I didn’t see hope or relief in her eyes. Instead, there were only questions and, as it turned out, none that I had any answers to.
“How?” she asked. “You made staying here sound so simple before, but it’s not, is it? It’s not as easy as you just making the decision to stay.”
“No.”
“Then how?” she asked. “You might want to stay here, but do you have any idea if or how you can actually do it?”
“No, I don’t know.” Loving her was easy, but everything else was a mess. “I can try, though. I could?—”
“Raquel.” Avery’s voice cut across the foyer from the parking lot, his tone stern and protective.
She glanced at him before looking back at me, but as soon as her eyes met mine again, I knew she was about to leave. Between what he’d told her about what my family does for a living and our arranged marriage customs, she didn’t see a future with me anymore and I couldn’t blame her.
So I reached for her hand and pressed the check into it, needing her to accept at least this. If nothing else, she should have this dumb piece of paper that had somehow been the catalyst for the end.
“Take it,” I said. “I don’t care about the money.”
I just wanted her to not lose the shop, but when her fingers closed around the check, she shoved it right back into my hand instead of taking it. “I can’t accept this.”
Those tears that had been welling on her eyelids seemed to be right on the verge of tipping over, but I never saw it happen. She let go of the check after pressing it firmly into my palm. Then she turned and walked away.
Every instinct in my body rioted as I watched her go, but I didn’t follow. Raquel deserved better than wishful thinking and I couldn’t give her that. As she reached Avery’s truck, he opened the passenger door for her and turned to look at me.
I could see his lips move, probably chirping something at me, but I couldn’t even hear what it was over the roaring in my ears. Raquel snapped at him, her voice carrying faintly above the roaring. “Stop. Just stop. I don’t want to hear another word out of your mouth.”
He lifted both hands in surrender as she climbed into the truck, and a few seconds later, they were gone. I stood completely still, like I’d been planted right there in the entryway, with my chest hurting and my heart racing, my mind spinning so fast that I couldn’t keep up with my own thoughts.
Did I just lose my girl? Over not taking my money? That has to be a Westwood family first.
Back home, people often got angry because of our money, but usually it was because they wanted it. Yet somehow, I’d managed to lose the love of my life because she’d refused to take mine. Honestly, if I hadn’t been actively dying inside, I might’ve appreciated the irony.
“Mr. Westwood?” the cashier behind me asked. “Would you like to discuss investment opportunities while you’re here?”
I rolled my eyes and shoved the check into my back pocket, not even bothering to answer the guy. Instead, I just turned around and walked out into the Arizona sunshine, genuinely wishing that I’d never even broken down here in the first place.