The Billionaire's Trust (His Submissive, Part Eleven) (2 page)

Alicia could barely sit still. “Tell
us more about your vision for the ceremony for my son and
daughter-in-law. I know you have something amazing in
mind.”

Hearing my in-law call me ‘daughter’
for the first time and mean it should have been a moment, but it
just made me feel...queasy. She was really laying it on and it made
my stomach twist and knot because I still wasn’t sure if this was
all real or just a part of a larger plan. I tried to push it aside,
at least long enough to hear what Macy had planned for
us.

“Nothing gaudy and over the top,”
Macy continued. “You’re marrying a billionaire so people are
expecting horse drawn carriages and a guest list that stretches as
long as the train of your elaborate wedding gown. So I was thinking
something small and intimate would be the way to go.”

And just like that, I’d found our
wedding planner.

The excitement that colored Alicia’s
face a few minutes ago devolved into confusion. “Small
and...intimate?”

Macy nodded. “I think that would
really capture the essence--”

“We’ll be in touch, Macy.” Alicia
sliced in, shutting her down.

I opened my mouth to tell her to
wait, but Macy didn’t linger. Alicia offered to pay for her drink,
but she whipped out a twenty and dropped it on the table before she
strut toward the exit. Another point in her favor. She knew she was
good and didn’t have to beg for our business, despite the groom’s
net worth.

“Don’t worry,” Alicia said, the
borderline scary chipper voice clearing out me and Jacob’s surprise
and replacing it with uneasiness. “We’ll find someone that can give
you two the wedding you deserve.

I hoped Jacob would speak up and
state the obvious--that what she really meant was the dream wedding
SHE wanted for us, but he said nothing, reading his menu in
silence. I followed suit, but committed Macy Scott’s name to
memory.

****

Megan walked in, her eyes gulping up
every inch of the apartment. “I don’t think you can call anything
occurring in this place a ‘sleepover’. I think that word should be
reserved for modest, itty bitty kinda places where mere mortals
live. This--” She gestured around us before twisting her long,
fiery strands nervously. “This is breathtaking.”

“You act like you haven’t seen it
already!” I laughed, holding out my hand for her overnight bag.
“It’s just four walls, Meg.”

Her green eyes glimmered as she
shook her head in disagreement. “I wondered when this would
happen.”

Pangs of worry pricked my arms and
the back of my neck when I took in her worried expression. “When
what would happen?”

“When you’d be so jaded by all of
this that you’re all, ‘It’s no biggie!’.” She leaned in, dropping
her volume to a whisper. “Let me let you in on a little secret.
This isn’t just four walls. This is like,
MTV Cribs
before
it sucked. This is call up every interior design magazine
ever
so you can get your brag on.” She gasped and covered
her mouth in horror. “This is just step one. The next is upgrading
your friend circles to socialites and celebrities.”

I yanked the strap from her hand,
shaking my head. “Don’t worry, I’d keep you around for
laughs.”

“Like your court jester.” She swept
the air with her arm twice in a gesture that reminded me of our
Tudors
marathon last summer. Naturally, she punctuated it by
bending at the waist, bowing low. “Your Majesty.”

I ignored her, moving to the living
room where I deposited her bag beside the sofa. “Keep it up and I’m
gonna start regretting inviting you over here to keep me company
while Jacob’s in London.”

“I’m a lot more fun than whatever
trashy reality TV show you would have thrown on.

She knew me too well.

When Jacob left at the last minute
to handle business in England, I’d already mentally recounted what
I had recorded on the DVR. When I realized it wouldn’t have been
more than background noise while my eyes were glued on Macy’s
website, regretting not standing up to Alicia, I decided I needed
to call in reinforcements. At least with Megan I could vent instead
of staring at the little ‘Message Me’ button until my eyes
bled.

She joined me in the living room,
gesturing at the white sofa. “Can I sit or will I ruin it?” When I
glared at her she laughed, “I’m just saying, I don’t want to mess
up your feng shui or whatever.”

“Megan...” I warned with a
groan.

She dropped down without another
word and her face went serious. “Alright. So what’s going
on?”

I’d already told her about Alicia’s
change of heart (or change of strategy), but I hand’t talked to her
since the woman started wearing out my cell number.

I dropped into the oversized
armchair, repositioning my head band and rolling up the sleeves of
my denim shirt. “Jacob’s mom is driving me insane.”

“I think that’s what mother-in-laws
are supposed to do,” she offered unhelpfully. She must have picked
up on my annoyance because she tried a different route. “Remember
when you were trying to play nice? I thought this was what you
wanted. Alicia to be friendly and be in you and Jacob’s
life.”

She was right. In the beginning, I
wanted to bridge the distance between Alicia and Jacob. Despite my
reservations, I thought that having her in his life was what Jacob
needed.

And then I got to know her...and I
realized the healthiest thing for Jacob and everyone involved was
distance. The optimist in me wanted to believe that she genuinely
wanted to start over and be the mom Jacob deserved from the start,
but I couldn’t quiet the reality of what she’d done. The blank
check. The hurtful comments about me. About Jacob. All but telling
Jacob damn his feelings and needs--he’d have to pry the ring from
her cold, dead fingers.

“I thought I did,” I said honestly.
“Thinking back, I was so naive. I saw that letter and she seemed so
nice. I figured it was all Rachel, but I had no idea she was--” I
stopped, not finishing.

“Bat shit insane?” Megan offered.
“You know, maybe that’s why she and Rachel got all buddy-buddy.
They both have a screw or ten loose.”

I slumped backward with a sigh. I
never thought I’d say I’d rather talk about Rachel Laraby than the
topic at hand. Her name would come up dead last, hands down. But
Jacob’s mom gave her some competition.

I sat back up hesitantly, meeting
Meg’s patient gaze.

“She’s been calling, texting,
emailing, hell, I bet she’d even send smoke signals if she could. I
mean, you know how hardcore my mom can get if she doesn’t hear from
me every few days.”

“Oh yes,” Megan answered with an
understandable shudder.

During my second year in college we
had a falling out and I stopped answering my phone. Most parents
would take that as a pretty good indicator that space was needed.
Not my mother--she came out to campus, demanding to know my
schedule and gain access to my dorm. According to the staff member
who had the misfortune of dealing with her, she’d even demanded I
be brought from class to the administrative building like a child
being called to the principals office. They sent her away because
my school recognized a fact that seemed to fly over Mom’s
head--that I was an adult--and I’m sure they didn’t want to get
involved in a private matter. If that whole thing wasn’t
embarrassing enough, one of the student’s working in the office put
my mom’s craziness on her Facebook wall.

Eventually, Mom and I made up, but
I’d never forgotten the embarrassment and shame that she’d actually
come to my school and made a scene.

“So take my mom’s brand
of...persistence,” I said after an unpleasant trip down Memory
Lane. “And multiply that by ten.”

Megan’s green eyes rounded. “Holy
crap.”

“Yep,” I said with a bitter laugh.
“Jacob said she was absent most of his life and instead of
moderation, she jumped to the other side of the spectrum. It got so
bad that I actually considered changing my phone
number.”

“Yikes,” she said sympathetically.
“So she’s been apologizing like crazy, huh?”

“Nope.” Which was ironic, because
she had a LOT to be sorry for. But other than the apology she’d
given in the coffee shop, she hadn’t uttered another ‘I’m sorry’.
“She seems more intent on making sure Jacob and I have the wedding
of her dreams.”

“Um...” She held onto the ‘mmm’,
voice filled with all the suspicion that rang in my head from the
very first call. “Maybe she should work on rebuilding the bridge
before she blazes over it?”

“You’d think, huh? I don’t know how
many times I told her Jacob and I hadn’t even discussed what our
dream wedding would look like and how she completely ignored that
‘tiny hiccup’.”

Our eyes met and the unspoken
question was plain as day, hitting me like a blow to the chest: Why
hadn’t we talked about our wedding?

“We’ve both been so busy. I mean,
we’re not purposefully not talking about it. And he’s going to be
out of town until he gets a handle on the merger and--” I took a
breath, realizing I was babbling. My hands were clammy and I was
nervous as hell, trying to explain why my fiancé and I neglected to
have a very important conversation.

“Everything good with you and
Jacob?” Megan asked cautiously.

“Good? Everything’s great!” I
answered quickly. I immediately realized I was a little too eager
and leaned back, steadying my nerves. “Our intimacy level is
through the roof. We even--” I decided against telling her what
we’d done on the very cushion she was sitting on, but the way she
made a face and jumped to her feet meant she could put two and two
together.

“Eww, really?!” She shot me a look
before she started pacing back and forth. “Anyway...you’re good in
the bedroom, but how about emotionally?”

“Emotionally?” I recalled his
confession about his suicidal moment. HIs mother’s
frequent
suicidal moments. Together, we’d stripped down the layers until I
knew everything about who he was and he knew...”Oh my
god.”

Megan stopped pacing.
“What?”

“He opened up to me, but I--I’ve
never opened up to him. Sexually, sure. But never about my past. Or
about the wedding.”

“Why?”

I shrugged, not sure of the answer.
“I guess my life is pretty unimpressive.”

“That’s a cop-out and you know it,”
she tsked. “I get that Jacob is going through a lot and had some
really horrible things happen when he was a child, but it doesn’t
make your story any less important.”

“Yeah, but--”

“Are you his therapist or his
fiancé?”

“His fiancé,” I answered
curtly.

She went back to the chair, hovering
a few inches before saying the hell with it and sitting down. “Love
is more than one person pouring out their soul and the other
carrying the weight of it. It’s give and take--or else you wake up
one day and realize you’re with someone that doesn’t really know
you, but you know everything about him.”

I bit my lip to stop the retort that
rose in my throat.
What do you know about it?
Megan knew too
much. Her ex, Brad, had the whole tortured thing down to an art.
Megan told me his father liked to get completely plastered and beat
the living crap out of his wife and when he got bored, Brad and his
sister were next in line. Not to diminish his story; it was a
terrible thing that happened to him. No child should ever endure a
parent, anyone, harming them, but Megan took on the pain. Whenever
Brad berated her or cheated or did something douche-ish it was
always back to his childhood. She supported him, but she had no
voice in the relationship. Whenever she demanded more of him and
tried to explain how she had pain of her own, he’d one up her by
reminding her of something horrible his father did to him. She
completely lost her voice, lost herself in him.

Was I losing myself in
Jacob?

“We’ll figure it out together when
he comes back. We’ll sit down and I’ll tell him that I want
something small. That I want to work with Macy.”

She didn’t seem too convinced. “Why
do you think you haven’t talked about it? Why didn’t you speak up
when Macy left?”

“Well, we’ve been busy,” I
reiterated, unable to stop the defensive streak from lashing out
when I spoke. “And as far as the wedding, as long as Jacob’s there,
I’m good.”

“Well, duh,” she said with an eye
roll. “But that’s not really what I mean. Even if you didn’t want
to start something in the restaurant, why didn’t you bring it up to
Jacob after?”

“I don’t know,” I said stubbornly.
Lying. I knew exactly why I didn’t say anything. It was the exact
same reason I closed my laptop or clicked the tab closed whenever
Jacob turned his attention to me.

“If you want me to drop it, I’ll
drop it,” she said quietly, sitting back and looking away. She was
trying to give me space and I loved her for it, but didn’t want or
need it. The shades were already pulled open, there was no pulling
them back closed.