Since He Really Feels (He Feels) (12 page)

“Hey,
Julianne,” Nick smiled tentatively up at me. “We were just checking out some of our competition for a potential future project.” He clicked the mouse a few times, and Bree finally backed the fuck up.

I pressed my lips together consciously so I wouldn’t say what I really wanted to.

I continued to keep my mouth shut even when we were in the car together.

“You okay, baby?” Nick asked.

I realized I was staring out the window, lost in thought, and we were nearly at my sister’s place. I didn’t want to fight with him, especially not when he was about to meet my sister for the first time.

“Yeah.
I’m okay.”

“Did you have a good day today?”

“It was fine.”

“You’re quiet,” he murmured.

“Because I don’t want to fight.”

His hand found my leg. “What’s there to fight about?”

“Nothing.”

“Talk to me, Julianne.” His voice was soft and soothing, and a wave of emotion traveled the length of my spine.

I sighed. “I didn’t particularly care for walking into your office and seeing Bree’s breasts pressed against your shoulder.” It was blunt, but it was the truth.

He sighed in frustration and removed his hand
, leaving me with a cold and empty feeling where his hand had been.

Neither of us spoke for a moment, and then we were pulling into Jamie’s driveway. I didn’t want my fiancé to meet my sister when there was tension between us. I wanted things to be normal again. I just didn’t know how to make it normal.

Just when it felt like we turned a corner, it was like we ran into another wall.

I
grabbed the door handle, and then I felt Nick’s hand on my arm. I turned to look at him. His striking hazel eyes lit up as the last remaining sunlight of our day made its way behind the mountains, and his attractiveness in that moment was jarring. Sometimes I looked at him and found him so sexy that it knocked me on my ass, and this was one of those moments.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

I nodded. “Of course.” I turned in my seat, and his fingers linked with mine.

“Why did you change your mind about moving up our wedding date?”

My heart skipped a beat. This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have a moment before we were going to walk into my sister’s house so Nick could finally meet her.

“Because I want to marry you.
Like yesterday.”

“Why, Julianne?” His voice was a soft whisper.

“Because I love you.”

“Why else?”

I sighed.

His answer was his own frustrated sigh.

“What?” I asked, trying to keep the annoyance out of my tone.

“I just want to make sure we’re doing this for the right reasons.”

“Nothing about why I want to marry you is wrong.”

“I just
don’t want to rush it if we’re doing it to stake a claim on each other.”

I thought about that for a moment. Maybe he wanted to tie me down to alleviate his fears that I was going to leave him for Travis – which I would never do – as much as I wanted to tie him down to alleviate my own fears that he was go
ing to fall under Bree’s spell or any one of the hundreds of other women that would likely be knocking down his door if he was single.

Even though I knew in my heart that neither of those things would ever happen, he was absolutely right. Getting married to possess each other was wrong. Getting married because we were deeply in love and wanted to commit our lives to each other was right. And I knew that was my true motivation in marrying him.

“You still want to marry me, don’t you?” I hated that I sounded like I was pleading.

“I can’t think of anything I want more in this world than to marry you. I love you. I want you to be my wife. I want
our wedding to be everything you dreamed it would be, and I don’t want anything else to be the focus of our day except our love for each other.”

“I love you, too. And that’s all I want, too.”

“Then let’s give ourselves a couple more months to plan.”

“So not
August?”

He shook his head, and I felt conflicting feelings of relief and sadness.

“Let’s check the calendar later,” I said.

He smiled and leaned over the seat for a kiss.

All stupid drama aside, I just wanted to marry the man of my dreams. It had nothing to do with Bree or Travis or anybody else. This was the man I was meant to spend the rest of my life with, and I could not wait for that to begin.

Besides, I thought to myse
lf, just because he had a ring on his finger didn’t necessarily mean a girl like Bree wouldn’t still offer herself up on a silver platter.

The really odd thing about all of those revelations was that we still ended up apart.

It took awhile, but the wedge that had started dividing us eventually broke us, and I wasn’t sure how we were going to find our way back to each other.

We were fine at my sister’s house. In fact, Nick really bonded with Brandon while Jamie and I fussed over the baby. I saw our future together, the four of us having dinner while our little ones played together.

Even that night when we got home, everything was mostly back to normal.

It wasn’t until the night of our surprise engagement party that the wedge that had started forming between us turned into an irrecoverable gulf.

CHAPTER 10

NICK MATTHEWS

Dinner with Jamie was fun. Julianne’s sister was
hilarious, and her brother-in-law, Brandon, was a good guy. He was the type of guy I could hang out with, make small talk with, watch sports with; and he seemed happy to have another man joining the family. We talked sports, in particular baseball since spring training would be starting soon, while the girls talked all things wedding. I met Brady, Julianne’s nephew, just before Brandon took Brady in for bedtime, and Jamie took us into her brand new baby girl’s room to show us the beautiful, sleeping Hadley.

I’d never really thought about having a family. I figured it would happen someday, but I never thought far enough into the future to really consider the possibility of children. But now that I’d met the woman I wanted to share my life with, I imagined for the first time what my house would be like with a wife and some kids running around. I thought about Julianne and what she would look like pregnant someday with my baby. And I liked those images.
A lot.

Julianne told her sister that we were pushing our wedding date back, and I saw the secret look of panic that passed from sister to sister. But I knew that we had made the right decision. I understood Julianne’s frustration with Bree. Bree had been overly flirtatious with me since the day I’d met her, but a ring on my finger wouldn’t change that. She was harmless, though, and I didn’t feel right about setting a wedding date
so soon when I had a feeling that the main reason Julianne had been so flexible in moving up the date was because of Bree and her “breasts pressed against my shoulder.”

To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed. I was engrossed in my work and establishing my name at
a new company; and besides, I didn’t have eyes for anybody except my fiancée. I knew Bree was a beautiful woman, but I really didn’t see her as anything more than a coworker. I wasn’t attracted to her, not like I was to Julianne. She didn’t set my blood on fire. She didn’t distract me from everything or make me feel anxiety and excitement in the same breath the way Julianne did. I didn’t feel her presence when she was near, and my body didn’t respond to something as simple as her scent. And I most certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with Bree.

I just needed Julianne to understand that.

She was worried about something that was completely insignificant.

The ride home was less tense than the drive to Jamie’s. Julianne’s mood was considerably lighter after a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and an evening with her sister, and I wondered if she felt a little relief that we were pushing the wedding date back.

I was secure enough to know that any relief she might have felt had nothing to do with me or her feelings about me and everything to do with planning a wedding in five months. She needed time, and I understood that.

I just couldn’t wait for her to be my wife. Not because I wanted to tie her down. Not because of some outside force, and certainly not because of Travis.

It was because she was everything I had ever looked for in a woman.

And since I loved her as much as I did, I knew I needed to solve the biggest issue in our relationship: Travis Miller. I just wasn’t sure how to go about doing that.

“Did you have fun?” Julianne asked tentatively as we drove toward home.

I glanced over at her, her face beautiful even lit by the dashboard dials. I squeezed her thigh under my hand. “I had a great time. Your sister is fantastic. It clearly runs in the Becker family.”

Julianne smiled. “Thanks, Nick. That’s a sweet thing to say.”

“And Brandon is a good guy.”

“You two seemed to get pretty heated about baseball.”

“The guy’s a fucking Dodgers fan. What do you expect?”

She giggled. She knew how much I hated the Dodgers.

We were both quiet for a moment, and then I spoke again. “So have you thought about wedding party at all?”

She nodded. “Of course. I’ve thought about it since I went to my aunt’s wedding when I was five.”

“And?”

“And I want my sister to be my matron of honor. I already asked her.”

“I want my brother to be my best man.” It was something I’d known since I’d first started toying with the idea of getting married, which, honestly, I never thought I’d do. I thought I’d be a perpetual bachelor. And then I started working at McMillan, and the moment my eyes found Julianne’s in that conference room on my first day, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my single life was over even though it took a year for me to do anything about it.

“I figured. Do you have any other family you would like to include?”

“Josh is the only person I consider my family.”

“Are you going to ask Eric, too?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“How many bridesmaids do you want?”

She glanced over at me and shrugged. “I guess I figured I’d ask Lucy and Holly. And I always thought—” she stopped midsentence.

“Thought what?”

“I always thought Travis would stand up in my wedding.” Her voice was a whisper, but I could sense the pain laced in her words.

She may have talked a big game about not being in love with the guy, but I didn’t totally buy it.

I didn’t want to share her heart with anyone, least of all the guy who thought it would be a good idea to come into my office to tell me that he had fucked the woman I planned on marrying when we had been briefly apart. But I had no other option. The only other option was ending things with her, and I was certain that ending it wasn’t something I would ever be able to do.

The
three times we had been apart added up to a total of seven days of my life that I had lived without her in them since we had first revealed our true feelings for one another, but they were seven days of hellish torture that I never wanted to experience again.

I was a fucking walking contradiction. W
hile I hated the idea of sharing her heart with someone else, on the other hand, I didn’t have a choice. I had to commit to taking her as she was and loving her with everything inside of me, because the alternative was impossible.

I’d learned through a lot of hard work and some tough experiences how to be disciplined in my life, and this was just another time where I’d have to exercise that discipline. 

“If that’s what you want, Julianne, then that’s what you’ll have.”

I felt her eyes studying my face, but I didn’t look over at her. For one, I was driving, but I didn’t want her to see the hurt that would certainly be in my own eyes at the thought that she wanted someone she’d slept with to stand up in our wedding.

“No,” she whispered. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

I thought about that. From what I’d pieced together from our various conversations, Travis had met someone. Apparently he’d moved on from Julianne, but I didn’t buy it. You don’t just get over a girl like Julianne. You don’t just move on from the person you loved your entire life, but I had to give the guy credit for trying.

“Baby, you know where I stand on this issue. I’m not going to get into another argument about him. I want our wedding day to be everything you ever dreamed it would be, and if that means including Travis in it, then that’s what we’ll do.”

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I know you do.” I pulled her hand up to my lips and kissed her fingertips. “And I love you.”