Saying Yes To The Dress!: The Wedding Planner's Big Day / Married for Their Miracle Baby / The Cowboy's Convenient Bride. Cara Colter
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you’re just remembering it wrong.”
Was there any way to tell him she had kept that picture without seeming hopelessly pathetic?
“No,” she said firmly. “It was that dress.”
“Representing all your hopes and dreams,” he said. “No wonder you were crying.”
She felt a surge of tenderness for him that there was no mockery in his tone, but instead, a lovely empathy.
“It was just a shock. I am hoping it is just a weird coincidence. But I’m worried. I didn’t know Allie that well when we were teenagers. I don’t know her at all now. What if it’s all some gigantic game? What if she’s playing with everyone?”
“Exactly the same thing I was upset about,” Drew confessed to her. “My brother was supposed to be here. He’s not. I’ve called him twice a day, every day, since I got here to find out why. He won’t return my calls. That isn’t like him.”
“Tell me what is like him,” Becky said gently.
And suddenly he just wanted to unburden himself. He felt as if he had carried it all alone for so long, and he was not sure he could go one more step with the weight of it all. It felt as if it was crushing him.
He was not sure he had ever felt this relaxed or this at ease with another person. Drew had a deep sense of being able to trust this woman in front of him. It felt as if every day before this one—all those laughter-filled days of getting to know one another, of splashing and playing, and throwing Frisbees—had been leading to this.
He needed to think about that: that this wholesome woman, with her girl-next-door look, was really a Mata Hari, a temptress who could pull secrets from an unwilling man. But he didn’t heed the warning that was flashing in the back of his brain like a red light telling of a train coming.
Drew just started to talk, and it felt as if a rock had been removed from a dam that had held back tons of water for years. Now it was all flowing toward that opening, trying to get out.
“When my parents died, I was seventeen. I wasn’t even a mature seventeen. I was a superficial surfer dude, riding a wave through life.”
Something happened to Becky’s face. A softness came to it that was so real it almost stole the breath out of his chest. It was so different than the puffy-lipped coos of sympathy that he had received from women in the past when he’d made the mistake of sharing even small parts of his story.
This felt as if he could go lay his head on Becky’s slender, naked shoulder, and rest there for a long, long time.
“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly, “about the death of your parents. Both of them died at the same time?”
“It was a car accident.” He could stop right there, but no, he just kept going. All those words he had never spoken felt as if they were now rushing to escape a building on fire, jostling with each other in their eagerness to be out.
“They had gone out to celebrate the anniversary of some friends. They never came home. A policeman arrived at the door and told me what had happened. Not their fault at all, a drunk driver...”
“Drew,” she breathed softly. Somehow her hand found his, and the dam within him was even more compromised.
“You have never met a person more totally unqualified for the job of raising a seven-year-old brother than the seventeen-year-old me.”
She squeezed his hand, as if she believed in the younger him, making him want to go on, to somehow dissuade this faith in him.
He cleared his throat. “It was me or foster care, so—” He rolled his shoulders.
“I think that’s the bravest thing I ever heard,” she said.
“No, it wasn’t,” he said fiercely. “Brave is when you have a choice. I didn’t have any choice.”
“You did,” she insisted, as fierce as him. “You did have a choice and you chose love.”
That word inserted into any conversation between them should have stopped it cold. But it didn’t. In fact, it felt as if more of the wall around everything he held inside crumbled, as if her words were a wrecking ball seeking the weakest point in that dam.
“I love my brother,” he said. “I just don’t know if he knows how much I do.”
“He can’t be that big a fool,” Becky said.
“I managed to finish out my year in high school and then I found a job on a construction crew. I was tired all the time. And I never seemed to be able to make enough money. Joe sure wasn’t wearing the designer clothes the rest of the kids had. I got mad if he asked. That’s why he probably doesn’t have a clue how I feel about him.”
Becky’s hand was squeezing his with unbelievable strength. It was as if her strength—who could have ever guessed this tiny woman beside him held so much strength?—was passing between them, right through the skin of her hand into his, entering his bloodstream.
“I put one foot in front of the other,” Drew told her. “I did my best to raise my brother. But I was so scared of messing up that I think I was way too strict with him. I thought if I let him know how much I cared about him he would perceive it as weakness and I would lose control. Of him. Of life.
“I’d already seen what happened when I was not in control.”
“Did you feel responsible for the death of your parents?” she asked. He could hear that she was startled by the question.
“I guess I asked myself, over and over, what I could have done. And the answer seemed to be, ‘Never let anyone you love out of your sight. Never let go.’ Most days, I felt as if I was hanging on by a thread.
“When he was a teen? I was not affectionate. I was like Genghis Khan, riding roughshod over the troops. The default answer to almost everything he wanted to do was no. When I did loosen the reins a bit, he had to check in with me. He had a curfew. I sucked, and he let me know it.”
“Sucked?” she said, indignant.
“Yeah, we both agreed on that. Not that I let him know I agreed with him in the you-suck department.”
“Then you were both wrong. What you did was noble,” she said quietly. “The fact that you think you did it imperfectly does not make it less noble.”
“Noble!” he snapped, wanting to show only annoyance and not vulnerability. “There’s nothing noble about acting on necessity.”
But she was having none of it. “It’s even noble that you saw it as a necessity, not a choice.”
“Whatever,” he said. He suddenly disliked himself. He felt as if he was a small dog yapping and yapping and yapping at the postman. He sat up. She sat up, too. He folded his arms over his chest, a shield.
“Given that early struggle, you seem to have done well for yourself.”
“A man I worked for gave me a break,” Drew admitted, even though he had ordered himself to stop talking. “He was a developer. He told me I could have a lot in one of his subdivisions and put up a house on spec. I didn’t have to pay for the lot until the house sold. It was the beginning of an amazing journey, but looking back, I think my drive to succeed also made me emotionally unavailable to my brother.”
“You feel totally responsible for him, still.”
Drew sighed, dragged a hand through his sun-dried hair. “I’m sure it’s because of how I raised him that we are in this predicament we’re in now, him marrying a girl I know nothing about, who may be using him. And you. And all of us.”
“I don’t see that as your fault.”
“If I worked my ass off, I could feed him,” he heard himself volunteering. “I could keep the roof over his head. I could get his books for school. I even managed to get him through