The Bridegroom's Secret

“Is she part of the contracts that will put McLachlan’s on a worldwide map? Has she worked with you on the motoring deal?”

Palpitations, cold sweat, clenching stomach—he hadn’t known extreme fear mimicked the symptoms of a heart attack until now. “Sweetheart…” He turned back to face her, knowing he might as well tell her the rest, and trust in her love to get them through. “She’s an old and trusted friend, and she put thousands of dollars into the prototype that I didn’t have at the time. You know how far McLachlan’s had crashed. I could barely afford to pay my workers for three months. She deserved the partnership, so I got a contract made up. She owns forty percent.”

“And your workers own how much?” she whispered. “Ms. Whittaker also told me your workers knew about your invention, and the deals, and have shares. It appears I’m the only one without any share in it at all.” She wrapped her arms around her waist and seemed to shrink inside herself.

Dear God. Matt’s stomach churned. Could this get any worse?

“Who else knows about you and Elise?” she said softly, her voice filled with a world of pain. “Who else knows about the contracts? How much time were you spending with her when you weren’t with me?”

From a faded flower, she’d become like a kicked puppy—a woman thinking she was scorned. Oh, God help him, what to say? How to make this right? “Julie, I’ve done nothing to earn this level of distrust from you. Okay, so I’ve spent some time with Elise over the past few months,” he admitted, thinking of the days and nights in Elise’s company, “but it was purely business.” His chin kicked up. “I don’t want her, Jules, and she doesn’t want me—not anymore.”

“Any more?” she pounced on his words. “I thought you said it was only ever friendship.”

He resisted the impulse to close his eyes. “Look, I don’t know why, but I couldn’t feel anything deeper for her—and if she had feelings for me for a little while, friendship is all we feel now. When I told her about you, she was happy for me, for us. We decided we would always have been better as friends. I haven’t touched her from that day—except a hug or two of jubilation when the water converter worked.”

She whitened further, and he could have shoved a gym bag full of dirty socks in his stupid mouth for saying that. Hadn’t he learned the lesson yet? Never give away too much, son. Women only want to know enough to make them happy.

He reached for her. “I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for us—for our future.”

She moved away, shaking her head. “Future?” she whispered. “A future of what, Matt? More secrets? More months and years in which you do these amazing things, and your mother, your ex and your workers share your life and I know nothing about it?”

Anger began to surge through him. “Tonight was our engagement party. I did all this for you. What else do I have to do to prove you’re the only one for me? You must know that by now.”

She moved out of his touch and spoke so softly he could barely hear her. “It seems there’s a lot I don’t know.”

Matt turned her around and looked into her eyes. “Maybe I made a mistake in waiting until tonight to tell you everything at once—but we’re getting married, Jules. You either trust me by now or you don’t.”

She just looked at him with deep, unblinking eyes, but he could see she wasn’t truly with him. She’d slipped into the past, remembering another man, an unfaithful man who’d said the same thing.

He didn’t have a chance in hell, unless he took control right now.

Taking her hands in his, he looked into her eyes and said, with what he hoped was quiet strength, “Sit down and listen to me, Jules, and I’ll tell you everything. I was going to tell you tonight, anyway. I’d planned it all.”

“You mean there’s more?” she whispered, sounding horrified. “Not…not now, Matt. No more now…”

One look at her white face and dilated eyes told him what he’d done to her. He knew there was no way he could tell her his final secret tonight, he couldn’t let her down again. It would break her.

There was only one thing he could think to say. “I love you, Jules.”

She didn’t answer in words; she even refused to look at him now. Finally, after what seemed hours, she spoke. “I don’t know you…”

He couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, couldn’t even breathe. He was about to lose the love of his life because of a damned reporter!

When she spoke, it had nothing to do with what he’d just said. Or maybe it did. “Thank you for making me feel like a queen tonight.” She looked up then, and he saw her eyes glimmering with tears. She kissed his cheek, and it froze him through with its gentle good manners and definite farewell. “Spend time with your mother while she’s here. Tell her about your inventions, and the deals you’re making. Or you can talk to Elise. She seems a lovely person, and wouldn’t just accept ‘it’s only work, I wouldn’t want to bore you with the technical details.’”

He might have been angered further still by her mirroring of his words if he hadn’t heard the truth inside them…that he’d done more than merely hurt her by his months of silence. The slight hiccupping rasp at the end of each sentence was a sure sign Jules was close to tears, if she wasn’t crying already.

Though emotional by nature, Julie never cried for effect. She didn’t know how to manipulate him. She was crystal clear, impulsive and giving, funny and adorable—

And walking out the door.

He ran after her. “Julie, I won’t let you leave now, not like this. We have to talk.”

She kept walking. “I can’t take any more tonight.”

He grabbed her by the wrist to stop her walking out, but she pushed at him with her free hand. “I need time, Matt. You gave me the night of my life—the best and the worst. I’m feeling pretty betrayed right about now. I need to get my head around it.”

Shock held him immobile, rendered him speechless. As death knells to love went, betrayed ranked among the worst words.

And then she was gone.

He was wrenching her car door open before he knew he’d followed her. “Don’t do this to us, Julie! Damn it, Elise is only a friend—she was only ever a friend. I never loved her. She knows that. Ask her! I love you, only you!”

She stared up at him and hiccupped again. “How can you love me, if you don’t trust me with your life?”

God help me. “It wasn’t like that. Please don’t go, Jules. Stay. Talk to me,” he said, dropping his voice for the last sentence, suddenly conscious of his mother in the house behind them.

But the tears streaming down Julie’s face told him that talking was the last thing she wanted to do now. At least with him.

Gently, with finality, she closed the car door to her little compact and drove away. No wrenching gears, no racing out. She just left.

She left, and Matt stood there staring after her, reading his future in the past fifteen minutes and without a single clue what to do about it.

CHAPTER TWO

Eight Weeks Later

NEVER in his life had Matt thought he’d be reduced to fighting this dirty. But here he stood outside The Wedding Belles, Julie’s place of work, ready to—

Stop thinking about it. Just do it.

Standing next to his car, Matt tightened his jaw and flipped open his phone. “Hey, Callie, I’m outside. Is everything ready?”

“All systems up and running,” The Wedding Belles’ florist, Callie, replied, with a low laugh. Then, after a short silence, she whispered, “I’m used to doing… unusual things, and this has to be the most romantic way I’ve ever helped out a friend. But are you sure about this? This really is a federal offence.”

“Not if she’s willing, and since she’s my fiancée, I think we can assume she will be,” he replied lightly enough to reassure Callie. But inside, the gripping of his stomach, clenching over and over, signaled his desperation. Would Julie be willing once she knew what this was really about?

He’d pushed her to the edge over the past few months, been a fool to keep so many secrets from her—but he knew this one last secret could destroy them. He’d been trying to tell her for weeks, but after the night of their engagement party, even the thought of telling her made him freeze inside. His tongue glued to his mouth, he retreated behind his old friend and ally, silence.

A real man bears his burdens and mistakes alone. And he puts them right alone. His grandfather’s words.

After everything he’d put her through, to tell her now could be the end of them. But damn it, he wouldn’t let her walk out on him. Whatever it took, he’d keep her with him.

Callie’s voice started him out of his morbid thoughts. “Personally, I love what you’re doing. I wish Jared had thought about doing this to me,” she laughed, “but a couple of the girls are scared about becoming accessories to some kind of felony. And Jared’s worried, too.”

He didn’t blame Callie’s husband…in fact, he couldn’t blame any of them. “I won’t force her into anything she doesn’t want to do,” he said. But it was the biggest lie he’d ever told. He’d keep her in the car, in his house, in his life. Whatever it took to win her, he’d do it, short of a real abduction. He wasn’t that crazy.

He was just a man about to lose the woman he adored with a dozen words, and desperate enough to take the biggest risk of his life.