Marrying the Master (23 page)

He said he’d been protecting you
.

She
believed him. But was that enough?

Who are you kidding
—
enough for what?
It wasn’t like Roman was begging her to be his
real wife. It wasn’t like this was a real relationship.

Lola
closed her eyes and tried to compose herself while Jake clinked his glass in
that characteristic aristocratic way of his.

“I’m
told I need to tell a story about the groom,” Jake began. “I’ve never been a
best man before, and I imagine after this I won’t have to worry about being one
again.”

Jake
looked over at the two of them, and Lola thought she saw…no, she couldn’t be
sure. The man was unreadable, as always, but there was a hint of something.
Jake was one of the only people who knew that this wedding—or their
relationship, or whatever it was—was
fake
, and
yet Lola knew him well. Jake hated deception. Hated lying. Had this thing about
integrity.

Lola
hadn’t thought about what they’d asked him to do until just that moment. And
yet, the look he gave them…

“I
wasn’t sure what kind of story might be appropriate for this setting,” Jake was
saying. Already there was a smattering of laughter. No one really knew what was
appropriate at a Volare wedding. “But I think I have a story that might, in a
way, be about the bride and groom. It’s about how Volare got started.”

The
room quieted down, and even Lola perked up. Most people hadn’t known that there
was a story to Volare’s founding beyond the fact that Roman and Chance had wanted
a club of their own. Lola had known there was something more to it, but only
from the look that Chance had gotten on his face when she’d asked about
it—something that had told her not to ask about it again.

Now
it appeared that Jake knew. Lola felt Roman tense all around, and turned to
look at him. He was rigid, his jaw pulsing. She took his hand in both of hers,
and pressed them together.

“Lola
wasn’t there,” Jake said. He was looking at the two of them now. “This was
years ago. But I think—in my own humble opinion—that it is part of
what made Roman the man for her now. Years ago, in a terrible, pretentious BDSM
club that shall not be named, there was a woman who was in trouble. Her
safewords were ignored. The Dom involved was popular, the regulars cowed, the
place apparently devoid of ethics.”

The
rest of the room watched Jake in near total silence. Lola watched Roman. What
was it about this story that made it so personal?

“Everyone
likes to think that, if confronted with such a situation, they would do the
right thing,” Jake went on. “The truth is that most people do not act. Roman
was there, however, as was Chance. They acted. They took action that night, and
the next night, and so on, until that club was gone. And they took care of that
sub.
Roman
took care of the sub. And
then they built a place where that would never happen again.”

Jake
paused, and Lola saw the ghost of something, something powerful, pass across
Roman’s face.

Roman took care of the sub.

He
had protected her. That should be a good memory, a proud memory, but Roman’s
face…

Oh my God, it was Samantha. That’s
how they met.

Lola
fingers dug into Roman’s hands with the shock. It was one of those leaps, one
of those jumps her mind sometimes made without sufficient evidence, and yet
when she looked into Roman’s eyes as Jake talked about the nameless sub, she
knew
. She could read him and his grief
and the all the years he’d carried it with him right then and there.

Roman
had always been Samantha’s white knight.

And
then, in the end, he felt that he hadn’t protected her from the thing he
believed killed her.

It
was stupid, and irrational, in exactly the way broken hearts are stupid and
irrational, and it made Lola’s heart break for Roman all over again. And for
herself, too, because right then she knew she could never replace a
ghost—not so long as Roman carried that around with him.

Everyone
else was watching Jake. Lola was watching Roman. She reached up to take his
face in her hands, and was honest to God surprised when he turned to her all on
his own, his eyes indescribably sad, as though he felt himself failing all over
again.

“No,”
Lola whispered. “Don’t grieve. You were always her protector, Roman. Every
woman should be so lucky.”

And
she kissed him so he wouldn’t see her tears.

The
toasts got bawdier and bawdier, and the drinks kept flowing, and Lola could
have kissed every single person who made Roman laugh and forget about his
grief. She didn’t know why Jake would call that a story about the
current
bride and groom—in fact,
she was pretty sure she’d have to find a way to kick his ass as soon as the
wedding was over—but she was determined to make Roman forget all about
it.

Roman
didn’t have any family, in the strict sense, but it was clear as the night went
on that his friends were his family—Volare had become his family. Which
seemed, to Lola, perfectly right. With each story and each toast, she began to
see, even more than she already had, how Roman had touched or changed the lives
of almost everyone there.

Sneaky
guy. He kept making everyone laugh, too. And when there was a lull or attention
was directed elsewhere, he’d turn her head back and kiss her.

He
knew she’d figured it out. He knew she knew, and he kept thanking her, over and
over again.

Lola
was just thinking how she could learn to live with the bittersweet realization
that Samantha would always be around. That maybe she didn’t need all of Roman,
if this, right here, being in Roman’s arms like this as he seemed to damn near
read her mind, as he lightly stroked her skin, as he brushed his lips against
her neck, if this was the best she could do?

Maybe
she could learn to live with that. Maybe she could be happy with that.

She
was thinking about all the ways to make that work when the one person who would
never allow her to settle for anything waltzed right back into her life.

“Where’s
my cousin?”

Chance
Dalton strode right into the middle of the room, head whipping around like he
couldn’t be bothered to wait for an answer. All six-foot-something of the
broad-shouldered, military-trained man looked pissed off. Lola, still wrapped
in Roman’s arms, froze.

She
hadn’t told Chance anything.

She
hadn’t been able to
find
Chance to
tell him anything. His company just kept saying he was unreachable except for
emergencies, and she figured he was off in some warzone somewhere. Besides,
“phony engagement to your best friend—don’t worry, it’s fake—but
kind of worry because we
are
having
sex and I don’t know what that means” didn’t seem to rate as an emergency.

Roman
didn’t stiffen, but she did hear him sigh.

Chance
locked on them. Lola wished she could actually burrow into Roman’s chest and
just let him deal with it.

“I
hear there’s a fucking wedding?” Chance bellowed. The whole party had gone
quiet.

Roman
gently disentangled himself from Lola, kissing her cheek as he did so, and rose
to face the music. Lola forced herself to look at Chance—and found him
smiling.

“My
best friend and my cousin,” he said, shaking his head. Then he wrapped Roman in
a giant bear hug, winking at Lola over his shoulder. “About damn time. Get over
here, dummy.”

Lola
got up amidst the cheers and applause and let her cousin practically break her
ribs with his hug, but her eye caught Roman’s, and he appeared to be wondering
the same thing she was: did Chance know the ceremony was fake?

It
still was, right?

It
took quite a while for the party to settle down after Chance’s surprise
arrival—if “settle down” was really the right phrase; the festivities and
flirtations had been going on for a while, and by now the place was charged
with so much sexual tension it was practically palpable. And Lola was finding
that being with Roman in front of Chance was like trying to speak a foreign
language. She hadn’t realized how accustomed she’d gotten to
playing
up her sexual role with Roman until she was faced with the prospect of doing it
in front of her freaking cousin, which just broke her brain.

It
wasn’t that Chance was one of those guys who couldn’t handle seeing their
female relatives with a guy; he knew that Lola ran the sex club he partially
owned, after all. Chance was what you call equal opportunity liberated, and he
respected Lola as her own person, making her own decisions. If he hadn’t, she
would have made sure that he learned to.

But
seeing her with
Roman
?

Lola
couldn’t put her finger on why, but that seemed different. And yet she just
responded to Roman
that way
. She
always had, but since this whole wedding fiasco had started, she’d discarded
whatever mental filters she’d had in place with regard to Roman, and now she
didn’t know how to get them back.

And,
to add to it all, if she acted like that in front of Chance, would she be lying
to him? She drew the line there. She did not want to lie to her only family.

So
she was mostly sitting perfectly still and not speaking at all.

“You’re
awfully quiet,
Lo
,” Chance said.

“Oh
God, who told you?” she blurted out.

Roman
laughed, choking on his wine, and Chance grinned.

“A
lot on your mind, Lo?”

She
smacked him in the arm. “Talk, Dalton. What do you know?”

Chance
poured himself another big glass of wine, still grinning. “I called Ford when I
got into town to check in on business. He brought me up to speed. This is like
a Broadway production you got going on here.”

Lola
turned to Roman, momentarily reminded of something that had bothered her
earlier in the evening. “Roman, where is Ford? I thought we’d see him here.”

Roman
seemed to think about it before answering. “He’s in Los Angeles on some
business,” he said with finality.

“I
have to admit, though, I
kinda
liked the idea of the
two of you together for real,” Chance said, smiling. “Would simplify my
holidays.”

Lola
smiled back at him. Chance had apparently inherited the adventure gene from
both of his parents—Marcy and Rob were currently in Mali with the Peace
Corps. There weren’t many traditional Dalton family outings.

Lola
watched Roman and Chance joke around, two guys she never would have guessed
would end up as best friends, and decided she didn’t want to rock the boat just
yet. Whatever she and Roman were, well, she could figure it out for herself
before she talked to Chance. All in all, this was probably a good thing, right?

She
could handle this.

She
didn’t need a guy to be totally head over heels in love, with eyes only for her,
to be happy.

So
she was feeling cautiously optimistic as she looked down to check her phone.

It
was a text from Ben.

BEN:
Did you get my delivery?

Without
even thinking about it, she texted back, “
What
delivery
?”

BEN: To your apartment.

Lola
paused, trying to think of the best way to handle this. A very big part of her
did not love the way that Ben pursued a woman he believed to be in a
relationship—it just reminded her of Ben’s own infidelity. But Ben in
general felt like this big open door in her life, something she needed to
close, if only because, for some unfathomable reason, the man still had some
hold over her.

She
replied to his text.

LOLA:
I haven’t been to my apartment in weeks.

BEN:
I should have known. I’m sorry.

LOLA:
I don’t know what to say.

BEN:
Say you’ll give me another shot.

Lola
blinked. She hadn’t meant to give Ben an invitation or to encourage him or to
lead him on, but she’d kind of done it anyway. Why? She wasn’t someone who did
things like that. Yet here she was, sitting here with Roman—the man she
unequivocally wanted and who she couldn’t say whether or not he wanted her back—while
she was texting Ben—the man who had told her that he wanted her all the
time, no matter how inappropriate.

Shit.

Lola
had to be brutally honest with herself: Ben made her feel better because Ben
was willing to say the things Roman wasn’t. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t ok, but
it was true.