She met his eyes across the table and set her taco down. “I know we agreed not to get to know each other, but that hasn’t really been working, has it?”
Lucas smiled. “Not really. I guess we do know a few things.”
“But there’s a big gap missing.” Kendra smiled, but it looked hollow. “And I don’t know if I should tell you, because I’m worried it’ll change things.”
Lucas’s stomach gave a flip-flop, and he braced himself for whatever she planned to share. “What is it?”
“Well, you know that I was supposed to be here on my honeymoon.” Kendra fiddled with her cloth napkin, pinching and smoothing it between her fingers. Instinctively, Lucas reached over and put his hand on hers. She stopped and looked up at him.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know, but I feel like…” She trailed off, but Lucas thought that she was feeling the same thing he was — that there was something between them. Something too difficult to put into words.
“It’s okay.” Lucas smiled at her. “I already know you were supposed to be married. I just don’t know why you aren’t.”
“Well, it was my parents’ idea for me to get married in the first place.” Kendra looked up at him. “You might have heard of my family, actually. The Morans? We’re industrialists who’ve had a big presence in almost everything in California for the last hundred years or so. My great-uncle was even a governor. Because we’re so influential, in my family, it isn’t uncommon for people to have semi-arranged marriages.”
Lucas’s eyebrows rose. “You agreed to an arranged marriage?”
She nodded. “A semi-arranged marriage. It felt like the right thing to do.”
“But you believe in grand, romantic love stories and all that,” Lucas pointed out. “How were you satisfied with someone your parents chose?” Slowly, he was starting to understand her lack of belief in love, despite her romantic nature.
“I believed that I should put my family first. So, I did. My parents found a fiancé for me, Aaron Louis, the son of another family of industrialists.”
“Aaron Louis?” Lucas wrinkled his nose. “I remember hearing his name at check-in. But having two first names is just so pretentious.”
Kendra chuckled. “We were a great match on paper, but I never really felt a spark between us, and I guess he didn’t either. When we were at the wedding, when I was poised to walk down the aisle, he sent me a message that he didn’t want to get married.” Kendra’s cheeks were pink, and she looked away from Lucas. “I got left at the altar.”
Lucas’s head spun. He’d known that Kendra was supposed to get married, but he hadn’t known she was left at the altar. Who would leave a woman like her at the altar? It was inconceivable to him.
“That’s awful. I’m so sorry.” No wonder she’d said she was having a really bad day at the check-in counter.
“That’s the thing.” Kendra sighed. “I was embarrassed and upset, obviously, but I wasn’t heartbroken that he didn’t want to marry me — because I didn’t really want to marry him, either. He never made my heart race or my head spin. I rarely thought about him when we weren’t together.”
“Were you going to leave him?”
“Probably not,” Kendra admitted. She sighed. “I felt I had to do what was right for my family. I love my parents, and they asked me to do this. They had an arranged marriage, too. They really thought it was the best thing for me. That’s why, when Aaronstood me up, I jumped in the car, went straight to LAX, and left the country. I couldn’t bear to see how upset they were.”
“They wouldn’t have been upset withyou,though. Right?”
“I don’t know.” Kendra shrugged as she let out a slightly nervous laugh. “This mattered a lot to them, and I ran off. I could have stayed to fix things, but I didn’t.”
“That’s why you haven’t been checking your phone much,” Lucas filled in.
Kendra nodded. “I’m not ready to hear from them yet.”
“I still can’t believe anyone would leave you at the altar. You’re amazing.” His words were a little too true and a little too deep. Kendra’s eyes met his across the table, and Lucas felt as though some invisible force was tugging him toward her. He didn’t give in, though. Kendra had been honest with him, and the least he could do was return the favor.
“I haven’t told you why I’m here, either,” he said. “The truth is that I don’t just work at a tech company. I’m the CEO of one — Omegron. I hardly trusted anyone to help run the company except one of my closest friends, Jim Adams. He was my CFO. And it came out last week that he’d been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from Omegron over the last five years or so. It’s a huge scandal, and my team recommended that I leave the country until things blew over so that I wouldn’t make anything worse.”
Kendra’s eyes were wide. “I can’t believe your friend betrayed you like that.”
Lucas nodded. “And I’m worried that the company I’ve spent a lifetime building is going to fall apart because of it. I had no idea what he was doing, but the press doesn’t seem to believe that.”
“And that’s why you’ve been checking your phone so much,” Kendra filled in. Lucas nodded.
“Exactly. I’ve been hoping for news about Omegron since my team says they can’t give me much information yet. It’s horrible. I’ve barely taken a day off in the last decade, and now I’m on a forced two-week vacation.”
