Pierce laughed. “I’ll give you, Mari, that is not what I expected you to say.”
Ugh, I was messing it up. Pierce thought I was here as a joke, but it’s serious business. We needed to cut through the small talk and get straight to the point.
I leaned forward putting both my palms on my knees. “Pierce, do you love me?”
He reared back as if I’d slapped him, and his eyes widened in shock or fear. The emotions were so close he probably couldn’t tell which. “Mari,” he started slowly. “You are a strong woman—”
“Yes or no,” I cut him off because I didn’t want to wait. There wasn’t time to listen to his explanations.
Pierce cringed but eventually shook his head. “No, I’m sorry.”
They were words most women wouldn’t want to hear, but I smiled at his honesty. “Good, I don’t love you either. No offense.”
The two of us falling in love wasn’t part of our story.
“I think we may have had a misunderstanding,” Pierce started again, trying to explain himself. “Our relationship was never meant to be real. Love wasn’t in the agreement. Only six months and then we’d both get what we want.”
Six months. The words burned against my ears. It seemed so easy in the beginning, but now I realize I’d been destined to fail. I never would have made it six months as Pierce’s fake fiancée regardless of how much money he offered. Yet, his comment struck a chord, and I diverged for a moment from my original purpose.
“What is it you want, Pierce?”
“To buy the bed-and-breakfast,” he answered easily.
But his story, which I accepted so effortlessly when we first met slowly fell apart the more time I spent around him. “You don’t need me for that.” He’d been buying real estate in this town for years and he never needed to employ a fake fiancée. No, something else had changed.
Pierce shrugged. “Sure, I do. It makes it easier.”
“But you’ve never cared before. So why now?” If he wouldn’t give me the information willingly, I’d pull it out of him by force.
“That’s private,” he gritted out against flattened lips.
Now I had him. “What changed, Pierce?” It wasn’t just the bed-and-breakfast. A bigger story was at play. Pierce could buy the oldest building and do whatever he wanted with it, so why was he so concerned about his public image now?
“I’m tired of fighting,” Pierce said. His words were solemn and sounding dejected, except we weren’t fighting.
And then it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Pierce wasn’t talking about fighting withme. Exactly as I expected, more was going on underneath that fake reason of his public image.
“You are a nice man, Pierce. You give back to this town and you’ve committed yourself to helping those you can in a world which refuses to move forward. At what point do you get what you want?”
Pierce leaned forward. “And what do you think I want?”
I hadn’t laid my cards on the table, so I leaned back pretending as if I didn’t know, even though my suspicions grew every second. “Does it matter? When we find what we want in life, it is our duty, our right, to go after it with everything we have. If you’re not willing to fight for the future you so adamantly deserve, what’s the point at all? You should reach out and wrap whatever it is that calls to you up tightly so it can’t get away.”
Hopefully I wasn’t approving kidnapping or something.
“And you?” Pierce asked as if my words hadn’t touched him, but a new fire simmered underneath his eyes that hadn’t been there when I walked in the room.
“I’m going to go after what I want, too.”
Pierce leaned back in his chair throwing his pen on his desk. “My cousin?”
Shit. “How did you know?”
Pierce smiled as if he wasn’t upset about the declaration I still hadn’t officially made. “I have my ways, too. You aren’t the only one who’s been digging.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. On the way up here, I prepared a great speech that would outline how Pierce would be okay on his own, how I wanted to run away with his cousin, and how it would be okay for us, but those words washed away and all I could do was repent.
I refused to feel badly over falling in love with Oliver, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t upset with how I would leave things for Pierce. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine my life would turn out this way.
