Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 140874 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 140874 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
“I had to talk myself into my first marriage. I thought I was going to break Elizabeth’s heart the way I broke Valerie’s. And I did. I may not have been technically unfaithful to her, not physically, anyway, but I was in love with another woman the entire time I was married to her. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Elizabeth, I did.” He paused. “But I loved you more.”
He’d met me once, for a few brief hours. And loved me for six unrequited years. And that scared me as much as it touched me. “Neil. You have to understand something. Every day, I worry that I’m not living up to the expectations of the man who spent six years building me up in his mind.”
“It must be an awful pressure.” He reached for my hand, and squeezed it. “But you don’t meet my expectations. You exceed them. Every day, I fall more in love with the Sophie who found me again. Not the Sophie from that airport seven years ago.”
I had to ask now. I couldn’t hold it back any longer. “So why are you being so weird about getting married? When you proposed to me, I thought, ‘no one is ever going to love me as much as this man does.’ And then in one conversation, I couldn’t be certain of that anymore.” I swallowed, warning myself off asking, desperately not wanting to bring Valerie’s machinations into this. “Has someone said something? Expressed disapproval or—”
“Of course they have. Sophie, I’m a fifty-year-old billionaire marrying a twenty-five-year-old. Everyone has expressed concerns.” A slight smile touched his lips. “But it’s not them. It’s this fear…that perhaps I want you too much.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Do you remember why I was in LAX?” he asked, after a pause.
“Yeah, you had some interview with a Japanese car company guy. And you couldn’t rent a crew for your jet in time to make the meeting.” I wracked my brain for some detail I had possibly missed.
“During the layover, I got a crew. I didn’t take the flight that was delayed. I could have left at any time after three o’clock that afternoon. But I took a risk and rescheduled the interview.” His laugh was hoarse, and hollow. “I chose a funny, strange woman I met in an airport over an interview that ended up establishing Auto Watch as a hard-hitting example of auto journalism, on a scale I’d never hoped it would achieve. I knew how important it was. And even back then, I picked you.”
My chest hurt. His declaration was at once touching and terrifying. He’d known me for only a few hours then. He’d been able to choose staying with me in that hotel room over his magazine—and Auto Watch was as much his baby as Emma was—but he hadn’t been able to stay with me when he thought it meant my future was at stake.
“Are you…” I frowned. How would I put this? “Neil, this thing with the wedding. Are you running out of the hotel room again?”
He looked away. “I think so. Perhaps I’m always going to be caught between wanting you, and trusting myself to want you within reason.”
“So stop second-guessing yourself.” I put my hand on his knee. “And stop worrying about what you think is best for me. I’m the girl who was going to run away to Tokyo without any money and without speaking a word of Japanese. Do you think I don’t know my own mind? Okay, I don’t always make the best decisions, but this isn’t one of those times. I love you. You have cold feet. Fine. If you don’t want to set a date yet, that’s fine. I just want to be with you. If it means never getting married—”
“I want to marry you,” he interrupted. “I want the white-picket-fence life—sans the two point five, of course—but it terrifies me. I’ve never done this right. I was so sure of things when I proposed to you. I’m sure of buying a house and settling down with you. It isn’t like when I married Elizabeth.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Certainly.”
“Why did you marry Elizabeth?” I thought I already knew the answer, but I wasn’t sure he did.
He blew out a long breath. “I suppose I married her because…I thought she was as good a chance as any at happiness. I was never going to see you again, I didn’t even know how to contact you. I couldn’t very well track you down like some demented stalker, could I? So, I settled for a woman I did love. Just not as much as I loved you.”
“And you want to marry me because you want to marry me. And that’s all.” It seemed so simple, now that we’d talked about it. I wished we had before. “It sounds like there’s a pretty big difference. There are no ulterior motives behind it, no settling. You proposed to me because you love me. You finally have the woman you want, and you’re afraid of her? That doesn’t sound right.”