A Walk Down the Aisle

She looked like his Sophie again.

But he wasn’t sure she was...he wasn’t sure she had ever truly been the woman he’d thought she was.

She nodded at the table in the sunny breakfast nook and took a seat. He sat across from her.

Colton had planned to start slowly. To ask her to tell him what happened, but instead he found himself jumping right into the thick of it. “How could you be willing to marry me and never tell me about whatever happened in your past? You said your parents were dead.”

“They were—are—dead to me. They stole the life I planned. They stole my hopes and dreams. They stole my daughter,” she added softly. “I couldn’t stop it. I work at forgiving them every day—not that they’d ever think to ask for my forgiveness. I work at it anyway, and most of the time I think I’ve succeeded in forgiving them, but I can’t forget any of it. I finished school and then I left. I changed my name and I’ve never, never looked back.”

She wasn’t even really Sophie Johnston? “Who are you really?”

“Sophia Moreau-Ellis.”

He tried to imagine her as Sophia Moreau-Ellis, but he couldn’t. She still looked like Sophie.

His Sophie. But she wasn’t his—not really. Not ever.

“And you haven’t seen your parents since?” He couldn’t imagine that. He was close to his family. His parents had been calling, wanting to be there for him. Normally, he’d want that, too, but this time, he simply wanted to be left alone to process what had happened.

“My parents aren’t anything like yours. Image. Position. Money. Those are the things that matter. I think the fact that I’m gone is a relief to them. They can moan to their friends about how ungrateful their daughter was. But, to be honest, I can’t imagine my name comes up often.”

Her parents were rich. He knew that suddenly. “You have money?”

“A trust my grandmother set up.”

Which explained how she could afford her house. She worked hard at her job, but since he was a member of the newly formed wine association, he knew what they paid her for her PR services. Even with the other occasional freelance jobs she did, now that he thought about it, he knew she had to have another source of income.

Sophie having a trust fund made the idea of her marrying him even more of a mystery. He’d always wondered why she’d chosen him. Sophie could have had any man in Valley Ridge.

Any man, period.

And yet, she’d picked him.

“My grandmother’s father started with one small gas station. West’s. It grew into a large chain in Ohio and Kentucky. The name has meaning there. That makes my mom first-generation rich. My dad’s family, the Ellis family, made their money in fertilizer two generations ago. He’s worked hard to get the stench of that poop off him all his life.” She said the words as if by rote, as if she’d said them or thought them many times.

It all made sense now. “So, your family’s rich. You’re rich. A poor little rich girl? You came here and worked as a PR person. You found a simple farmer and thought, Gee, that’ll show my parents?”

“I came here and worked at a job I’d been preparing for since birth. Public perception is everything in my family. My parents could be fighting, screaming at each other, then hold hands and be all smiles for a party. I learned how to present a public face at birth. I simply took all those tools they gave me and turned it into a job. I take the wineries and give them a public face.”

For a moment, he thought she was going to cry, and that would be his undoing, but she didn’t. She simply said, “And when I came here, I planned on finding a place I could build a home. I came looking for a community. I didn’t plan on finding love. Frankly, I didn’t plan to ever marry. Especially...”

“Especially what?” he asked. “You didn’t plan on marrying, especially not a farmer? Not a man who comes home covered in dirt? A man who rhapsodizes over a new tractor, not the newest opera? A man who wears a cowboy hat and lives in a house his family has owned for generations?”

“I never planned on marrying...especially not a man as perfect as you.”

* * *

SOPHIE WAITED, PREPARING herself for more of Colton’s questions or accusations. “I want to tell you—” she started.

But he shook his head. “Sophie, it’s obvious that you aren’t the woman I thought you were. I’m not saying this to be cruel, or to hurt you. And I don’t want you to think it’s because you had a child. It’s simply—well, not simply. Nothing about this is simple. It’s that you obviously have a lot of things you didn’t tell me about. Things you couldn’t trust me with. I don’t think I ever really knew you.”

“You did,” she said. She wanted him to understand. She needed him to understand. “You knew the real me. Know the real me. The me that my parents wouldn’t recognize. The me I always wanted to be. That’s what I found here in Valley Ridge, not only a home, but a place where I could be the real me.”

When he didn’t respond, she added, “That’s what I found when I was with you—the real me.”

For a moment, she thought she’d made him understand, but she saw in his face that he didn’t. She steeled herself for him to say something hurtful, but in the end, he shook his head and stood. She followed suit and, for a moment, they stood face-to-face, not touching. Then he wrapped his arms around her. He leaned down and gently kissed her cheek.

Colton didn’t say the words, but she knew that kiss was his goodbye.

“I’m sorry.” He stepped back from the embrace.

Sophie realized that was it. The last time they’d ever touch. Part of her ached to step back into his arms, but the bigger part of her understood there was no going back. She took another step, putting more distance between them.

“I wish it could be different,” he said, “but I can’t...”

She knew what he was saying. He couldn’t be with a woman he didn’t trust. “I understand.”

“Can we be friends?” he asked. “Not now, but eventually?”

“I’d like to say yes, but no.” This was her fault, too. She’d left them nowhere to go. She should have trusted her instincts and not gotten involved with anyone. Ever. She should have learned fourteen years ago when she’d lost her daughter that there was no such thing as a happy ending.

Well, lesson learned now. What hurt the most was knowing that she’d hurt Colton in the process. She couldn’t go back and undo that, but she could make a clean break of it for his sake. “No, we can’t be friends. I’m sorry, Colton. We can be friendly. Given Finn and Mattie’s relationship, and the fact I think there’s something between Lily and Sebastian...” She paused a moment. “We’ll see each other. Valley Ridge is small enough that there’s no help for it. We’ll be friendly. We’ll smile and make small talk, but we can’t be friends. Not when I know what we should be, what we could have been, if I’d been...”

She let the sentence hang, not sure how to end it. What we could have been if I’d been honest was her first thought, but in reality, the real end to the sentence was what we could have been, if I’d been someone other than Sophia Moreau-Ellis.

Colton didn’t respond. He simply nodded and turned and walked down the hall. She followed as far as the kitchen doorway. She watched as he opened the front door and walked through it. He shut it behind him softly but firmly. The sound of the door latch clicking into place wasn’t loud, but to Sophie, it was defining, and something she’d remember for the rest of her life.

It would haunt her, along with the sound of her own screams as she’d begged them to allow her to at least hold her baby one time. Please, she’d begged over and over, crying hysterically.

She hadn’t begged Colton. And she wasn’t crying. She felt as if she wanted to. That maybe if she did, some of the almost unbearable pressure, which seemed to press on her from all sides, would ease. But she didn’t.

Couldn’t.

Colton was a simple man. An honest man. He was a man who believed in hard work, laughter and, most of all, love.

Sophie knew the truth of the situation. Colton would have accepted her past. He could have forgiven her anything...as long as she’d offered him the chance.

She’d never be able to make him understand that even now, talking about her childhood, about her pregnancy, was almost impossible.

God, she wanted to cry.

She wanted to blame her parents for ruining yet another relationship for her. She wanted to add one more black mark against them as parents.

But she knew she couldn’t blame this on them.

She’d done this on her own.

She’d had the perfect man and she’d let him go.