A tear slips down her cheek, and she swipes it away as if it’s what’s committed the most egregious error of this evening.
It has.
That tear is single-handedly splitting my heart in two. And I have a choice.
I can tell her I love her back, risk that Begonia’s love is fickle, that she’ll fall in love with someone else as easily as she falls in love with the sunrise each morning, with a funny design on her toast fresh out of the toaster, or with someone’s hairstyle at a formal event, and try to do all in my power to keep her, all while never knowing for sure that I’m truly what she wants.
If I’m merely convenient.
The first man to give her a glimpse of better, but not necessarily the man who would be best for her.
Or I can stay safe.
Let her go.
Weather the scandal alone.
And know that I wouldn’t have been able to keep her. That this bright, vibrant angel of life couldn’t have ever been mine.
Not fully.
She’s the sunshine, hurtling about the universe bringing light to all she touches, and I’m the tree.
Solid and dependable. Rooted. With a few broken branches.
But the fact remains—while the tree needs the sunshine, the sunshine will never depend on the tree.
“Do you love me, Hayes?” she whispers. “Could you love me?”
For fuck’s sake. How could I not? “Begonia, I know very few people in this world who could know you and not love you.”
“But do you love me?”
Three words.
Three of the most damn impossible words in the English language.
That’s what it would take to keep her.
For tonight.
But what happens tomorrow?
I asked her to pretend to be my girlfriend so that she’d be a shield between me and anyone with an opinion about my love life after I became the world’s most eligible billionaire. How ironic, when she’s the one who should have men lined up around the block for a chance at her hand.
She’s loyal to a fault.
She wouldn’t cheat.
But she’ll find someone new—possibly someone I know—and she’ll be miserable, and then she’ll leave me too.
I thought I hurt when Trixie left me.
That grief would be nothing compared to watching Begonia go after convincing myself I could make her happy.
“Hayes?” she whispers.
I rise. “I’ll instruct the pilot to change course.”
33
Begonia
Hyacinth won’t quit knocking on my door.
I know it’s her. She has a distinctive knock. It sounds like our mother asking if I took my vitamins.
And just like the last seventeen times she’s knocked on my door, I ignore it.
Marshmallow harumphs.
He and I got back to Richmond two nights ago, courtesy of Jonas Rutherford’s private jet, since Hyacinth was using Hayes’s at the time, and I’m running out of food in my little apartment, and I don’t care.
My only plans are to wither away into nothingness, because that will hurt less. Also, if I wither away into nothingness, I don’t have to pack my apartment and move back in with my mother, which is probably on the agenda since word got out that I was caught giving a man a blow job in public.
Not really what high school parents want in their kids’ art teacher.
My head and a platter are soon to be very intimately related.
I close my eyes and return to snooze-land.
Or try to. Snoozing is hard when you hear your dog unlocking your apartment door.
“Who’s a good boy?” Hyacinth says. “Marshmallow is such a good boy. Where’s the potty, Marshmallow? Where’s the potty before I pee on your mommy’s carpet?”
I grunt.
“Oh, B,” my sister sighs. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
She’s lying.
She’s not right back.
But eventually she joins me, which I know not because my eyes are open, but because she’s as quiet as a herd of rhinos trying to walk across a field of Legos.
“So it was all fake.”
I pry one eye open. “What?”
She waves a tabloid in my face. “You signed a contract to fake being his girlfriend. Why?”
Heat funnels from my chest, up my neck, into my brain, and makes me lightheaded. I’m lying down and I’m lightheaded.
“What?”
“That’s your signature. I know your signature. How did they get your signature if it was fake? And you were supposed to get engaged? What did you do? And talk fast, because I guarantee you, this is hitting the morning shows locally any minute, and Mom will be here like she can teleport the minute it does.”