Bargaining with the Bride Page 13

  But this? It was so far out of left field

  She nodded, not sure what else to do, but the burden of response was lifted from her as the doors opened in front of them and the bridal march began.

  She'd dreamed of this moment since she was a little girl. The organs sounding, the people turning to watch her walk down the aisle gracefully alongside her father. Of course, back in those days she'd thought Justin Timberlake would be waiting for her at the alter, but the general feeling of it was still there.

  The anticipation. The sheer adrenaline.

  But clouding all of it?

  Was the undeniable understanding that something was deeply, horribly wrong.

  Sure, it was the church and the dresses and the songs she wanted. It was even the man she wanted standing there waiting for her.

  But at what cost?

  When she got to the alter and her father lifted her veil from overhead, Garret practically rushed to take her hand.

  "I have to tell you something."

  The minister was speaking to the crowd, extolling the virtues of love. Her sister was standing up there, tall and proud and beautiful.

  "I can't do this." Her words had been mumbled. She knew that much, and based on the way Garret's eyebrows were scrunched together, she could tell he hadn't heard her.

  Still, she had to repeat herself. She had to stop this before it was too late. Before they signed on for something over both of their heads.

  "I want to tell you that I've been thinking about our deal."

  She shook her head. Why couldn't she speak? Why couldn't she freaking move her lips? It was like she was in a lake with rocks tied to her heels and she was sinking slowly, watching everything around her get wavier and darker as she descended.

  "I can't." She managed the words clearly this time, and hoped that it might be enough.

  "What do you mean? I wanted to tell you I've been thinking and—"

  "I can't do this." The words came out so loudly that the minister stopped speaking all together. She turned to find the entire congregation staring at her, a sea of women and men with more plastic than water in their bodies and more money than God himself.

  "I can't do this. I'm so, so sorry. Eliza, I—" She glanced from her sister to Garret. He reached for her but she stepped away. If she let him talk, she'd go through with it. She wouldn't be able to leave.

  And she couldn't allow that.

  She needed to go.

  Needed to stand up for herself. If only for this one tiny moment.

  "Rachael, dear," her mother stood from the first pew, her dusky curls hidden today by an overlarge hat. What wasn't hidden was the malice in her eyes or the dull threat behind her sugar-sweet tone. "I think you've just got a touch of cold feet. Why don't you take a moment and we can all start again?" She smiled at the woman around her, all members of the bridge club or the tennis club or whatever hoity-toity Philadelphia society had deemed to come.

  In that moment, Rachael knew she'd made the right decision.

  "I've got to go. I can't do this. I can't." She stepped down from the pulpit and walked past one pew after the other. A part of her knew that Garret was calling to her. And then, after a heartbeat, she could hear his heavy footfalls after hers.

  Which was when she broke into a run.

  This time, though, when she ran, she had no idea where to go. With Lance, she could run to work. With her mother, she ran to her sister.

  But now?

  There was no running from herself, and especially no running from Garret. He'd been in every good part of her life. Her work, her home, her everything.

  That was part of the reason why she loved him so much.

  And that was, undoubtedly, part of the reason she had to leave.

  14

  Rachael heard the door open, but didn't bother to look up. Vacantly, she wondered if it was Garret, back to pick up something he'd left, but even in her addled state, she knew that couldn't be the case.

  As with everything Garret did, his sweep of the house had been thorough to the point of painfulness. The television was gone, the dog bowl, the dog food, Tesla...

  She sniffled again and swirled the wine in her glass, remembering the way the pudgy pug always used to have his tongue lolling out of his mouth. She missed that. Missed...well, everything.

  A creak in the floorboard let her know that the person at the door stepped inside, and she finally willed herself to pick up her head as her sister rounded the corner to join her in the living room.

  "I just dropped off mom and dad at the airport. They wanted to see you...I thought you could probably do with some alone time, though." Eliza spoke to her like she was a mental patient. Though, when Rachael opened her mouth to thank her and hiccupped instead, she wondered if she could blame her little sister for her concern.

  Nobody spoke to Rachael for a week since the almost-faked-wedding, and half of her wondered if her sister only dropped by in order to make sure that raccoons hadn't snuck into the house in order to feast on her corpse.

  "I haven't been able to reach you." Eliza said.

  "No." Rachael hiccupped again, then set her wine glass onto the coffee table and pulled her knees up to her chest. "My phone is dead."

  "Okay." Eliza said slowly, and then stared around the house before taking a deep breath and starting over. "Listen, I'm not sure if I'm overstepping my bounds here, but I have to know if you’ve been wearing this thing all week." Eliza grasped the tulle skirt of Rachael's wedding gown and rustled it.

  "No. Just today. I felt...compelled. It's stupid." Rachael knew she should have felt embarrassed, but she could hardly bring herself to feel anything anymore. She, like the house, was just so...empty. Her lungs were bruised from racking themselves with tears and all the water had long since dried from her eyes. Now, she just sat around the house and stared, wondering how she'd ever thought a fake marriage was a good idea.

  Or how Garret had been a good idea.

  "Probably not very comfortable." Eliza offered, then set her hand on Rachael's knee and added. "Though you do look beautiful in it."

  She'd thought she'd been out of tears, but the second her sister offered her that pitying smile, she was instantly proven wrong. Streams ran down her face, and breathed deep, trying to staved off the fresh sting of her depression.

  Through her sobs, she thought she heard her sister mumble something about having said the wrong thing, but then her warm, toned arms were around her, and Rachael sank into the embrace, thanking god that her sister was there to fill some of the emptiness that surrounded her.

  When the tears finally dried again, she made an excuse to go change and pulled her wild curls back into a sloppy bun. In sweats and a T-shirt, she still looked like a walking disaster, but at least she didn't look like she'd walked straight out of Dickens anymore.

  She descended the stairs to find her sister perched in the corner of the couch where Garret always used to sit, but Rachael pushed past the stab of memory and sat beside her sister.

  "So, how were mom and dad? Did they want to drop by and offer their I-told-you-so's?" Rachael raised her eyebrows, but Eliza shook her head.

  "Maybe, but I wouldn't have let it come to that. I think dad was worried. Mom...was mom." Eliza said the words with ill-disguised disgust.

  "Angry that their money went to waste?"

  Eliza shrugged. "The way I see it, you can't have cost them more money than I have in the long run. Trips to come help me escape from Turkish prisons, wondering if I'd been abducted by sheiks... I'd say they got off easy with you." Her sister offered her a genuine smile and Rachael returned it.

  "Maybe so, but at least you got an adventure out of it. And a story."

  "I think somewhere along the way, you got a pretty good story, too. It'll just take some time to tell it, that's all." Eliza patted her hand, and then held it for a long moment while silence rested over them.

  She'd known what Eliza had said was meant to comfort her, but the idea of Garret just being a
n anecdote? Some story to tell? The knife of a thought stuck between her ribs and twisted, making it hard for her to breathe.

  When she'd finally shoved the idea aside, Rachael leaned back into the cushions and closed her eyes. She had to force herself to ask the questions she still couldn't figure out answers to. "So what do I do now? He was my boss. It's not like I can go back to work and be around him when I still lo—" She caught herself and breathed deep before starting again. "I can't be around him. And now I have no reason to stay here and no place to go. It's not like I can pick up and go back home and be around our parents. Frankly, I have no idea how you live with those people."

  "Necessity. Let's not speak of it." Eliza answered.

  "So, I'm stuck. No reason to stay here or to go anywhere else. No job. No…anything." Rachael blinked her eyes back open and stared at her sister's lined face. "So what do I do?"

  Eliza offered her a half smile. "Have you ever considered joining a traveling circus?"

  A laugh bubbled from Rachael, surprising both of them. "Not yet."

  "I would work on either stilt walking or gymnastics and try to make a life of it." Eliza shrugged.

  "I know you would."

  After a pause, Eliza sighed and said, "Do you want my real advice?"

  "Yes."

  "I think you need to really consider what it is you care about. What it is you want, I mean. You were going to marry Lance for mom and for Lance, but not for you. What do you want? What would make you happy? Really think about that, and then once you figure it out, you need to go after it. In the end, that's going to be the only thing that matters.”

  Rachael bit her bottom lip. She knew what her sister was really saying, even if she wouldn't give the directions aloud. Following her lead, Rachael asked, "But what if that thing...the thing I want? What if it hurts me to go after it?"

  Eliza patted her hand again. "If I were a betting woman, I would say it's probably going to hurt a hell of a lot more if you don't try at all."

  * * *

  It felt like ten years since Garret looked up from the papers, but when he finally did, it was to find his brother leaning in his office doorway.

  He rubbed his eyes, and then glanced at the clock.

  "It's ten," his brother said, and then held up the box in his hand. "And I have a feel you haven't eaten."

  "No, no, I had..." He scratched his head, and then rubbed a hand over his face. "Tuna fish. Yeah, that's it. Tuna fish."

  "Seven hours ago." He plopped the bag onto the desk, and Garret rushed to pick it up again and sweep away the papers beneath. What if grease got on them? Or food stains? All his hard work, all that effort would go entirely to waste.

  His brother craned to look at what he'd been working on, but he flipped over the paper. It was none of his business. When he had results, he'd let him know. Until then, this was his work and his alone.

  "Why are you here?" Garret asked, though his confusion didn't stop him from picking a sandwich out of the bag on his desk. Now that he thought about it, he was a little hungry. His stomach growled in agreement as he pulled the brown paper away to find the food beneath.

  "Your secretary had been sending me messages."

  "Not her too. What did I tell you about sleeping with the staff?"

  He guffawed. "I'm not sleeping with her. Not my type. Besides, word on the street is that you've made some compromises in the fraternization department yourself."

  His brother craned to look at the papers again, and Garret opened a drawer and swept the whole lot into it. It would be a bitch to organize and color-code them again later, but that would be nothing compared to what might happen if his brother read the file.

  "I don't know what you mean." He pulled the second sandwich from the bag and thrust it toward him, them motioned for him to sit.

  His brother followed his lead, but not without some slight hesitation. "Don't play dumb with me. Are we business partners or not?"

  Garret bit into his cheesesteak, choosing to focus on the cheesy goodness instead of the swill his brother had apparently come to spit.

  "Look," he held up his hands in mock innocence. "If you don't want to talk about Rhonda—"

  "Rachael," Garret corrected, and then wished he'd bitten his tongue off.

  His brother raised his eyebrows. "Right, Rachael. If you don't want to talk about that, it's no skin off my ass. I don't care if you sleep with the entire research department. Frankly, I've always thought you and four-fingered Frankie would be an adorable couple."

  Garret sighed, ignoring the joke. "If this isn't about Rachael, then why are you here?"

  He waved the end of his already half-eaten sandwich at him. "I'm here because you're scaring the staff. You don't come out of your office; you forget to tell the secretaries to leave, and half the time to fall asleep at your desk. You have to go home. Live your life. For god's sake, your secretary has sent me mayday signals every day for a week. What is so important that you've holed up in here to kill yourself over it?"

  He curled his fingers around the handle of the desk drawer where he'd stuffed his papers, but then release it again.

  "Nothing." He bit into is sandwich, but suddenly he didn't feel quite so hungry.

  "Right." Brooks said slowly, but didn't bother to argue. Maybe he knew better than that.

  They finished their sandwiches in silence, and when the paper was stuffed in the trash, they both sat back in their chairs and surveyed each other.

  "I always admired how hard you work." His brother broke the silence, and of all the things Garret had expected, that certainly wasn't one of them.

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah. You were always so driven. Focused on your goal. Never giving up. I always wondered how nice that must be to be so sure of yourself all the time."

  Garret laughed. "Of the two of us, I think we know who is more sure of himself, and it is most certainly not me."

  Brooks cracked a smile, "Oh, I'm a master of the ladies, that's not what I mean. I mean that you work really hard. And you deserve to...enjoy yourself. Think of yourself instead of the company for once. After all, if you take this company away, what have you got?" Brooks leaned further back in his seat, his eyebrows raised.

  "I thought you didn't come here to talk to me about Rachael."

  "Who said anything about Rachael? You're the one who thought of her." He stood, then reached for his jacket. "I wonder why that is, by the way. Of all the things to think of in the world..."

  "You're not as clever as you think you are."

  "And neither are you. The only difference between the two of us is that I know my short comings." He shouldered on his jacket. "Do you?"

  "Thank you for the sandwich." Garret made the dismissal as clear as possible, but his brother still lingered in the doorway for longer than necessary, staring down at him as if he were deep in thought.

  After a long pause, he said, "Any time." Then he turned on his heel and left.

  When Garret was sure the coast was finally clear, he pulled open the drawer of papers again and spread them out in front of them. If he was honest, staring at them gave him no more pleasure than it had all day long. All he did was read he notes over and over again, and as much as he tried to convince himself that it was purely for research, he couldn't bring himself to focus on replication.

  Instead, he studied the handwriting on the forms, the way the smooth curls of her handwriting clashed with his own blocky lettering.

  He absently traced a "y" as he read over one question for what felt like the thousandth time.

  What would you say most attracts you to the subject?

  He breathed deep, scanning his own answer.

  The subject shows traditional signs of humor and understanding. She is well kept, hard-working, and compassionate.

  What had he been thinking giving this to her to read over? Like it was any other case study? He cringed at his own stupidity, then smiled as he looked over the notes Rachael had scrawled in the margins.

  Ab
ove "well-kept," she'd written, "stop! You'll make a girl blush." Beside "compassionate" she'd simply drawn a picture of a stick figure rolling his eyes.

  She was right, of course. His answer sounded like it had been auto filled by some kind of robot.

  It doesn't matter. It's over now. We won't use these results and Rachael will be gone. One failed experiment is certainly nothing to obsess over.

  He pulled the manila envelope from the corner of his desk and dragged it toward him.

  Maybe his brother was right. He needed to let this all go. Rachael was gone, but he could still find a way to live. To focus on himself.

  A week had already passed since their disastrous almost-wedding. Surely the refractory period would come to an end soon. Then he could stop picturing the way his things had looked in her house. Or the way she'd looked in the morning. Or how she'd felt...

  Yes, then Tesla would stop moping around the apartment and he could bring himself to unpack his things.

  This, like everything else in life, was just a matter of time.

  He piled the papers together, and then tapped them along the edge of his desk until they were uniform. Still, one paper was bent and he shuffled through until he found the culprit.

  He shouldn't have looked at it. He knew that much. Still, the sheet was practically covered in curly-cue writing and he couldn't help reading it over one last time.

  What distinguished the subject from other potential mates?

  Garret is trustworthy and dependable.

  A knife twisted between his ribs, but still he read on.

  With other men, I was always afraid to be judged, but with Garret I feel like anything other people found lacking is simply something else for him to explore. It seems like it would be a weird thing, like I'd feel like someone's science experiment. But I don't, somehow. Instead, I feel like the most interesting person in the world. Like everything I have to say is fascinating, even if I myself don't think so.

  He read over the answer again, and then tried to convince himself to stop. It was none of his business. This was confidential. He was never supposed to see her answers. That had been their deal.