Page 8 of The Player + The Pact = I Do

“Are you sure?” Worth asks. “Doesn’t she live in California?”

“Who the fuck is Caroline?” Fisher asks.

I sigh, resigned that we’re going to get into it. It feels like I’m about to reach into a barrel of rotting fish guts and sift through it looking for something I know I’m never going to find. I don’t want to do it. There doesn’t seem to be any point.

“She was the one Leo got engaged to,” Worth says, and in wafts the scent of two-week-old cod. “Way back.”

“Do I know about her?” Fisher asks.

My gut twists. Even after nearly fifteen years, what happened with Caroline still churns me up inside. Remembering myself as someone so gullible, so trusting, so completely blinded by love… the memories are physically painful.

I’d been in New York less than a year when I met Caroline Hammond, Upper East Side princess and heiress to the Hammond fortune. We’d come to America from the UK twelve months before, because my dad bought a German bakery over the phone from an eighty-two-year-old man who decided it was time to retire.

I was sixteen. Before school and at the weekends, I’d help my dad with deliveries. One stop we made each day was to the Hammond household on 79thStreet—one of my dad’s key accounts. I first laid eyes on Caroline as she hung out of an upper-floor window, watching us unload a tray of bread. I remember thinking she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.

“I was in love with her,” I say. “Or so I thought. I was sixteen. A kid. I just… don’t particularly want to see her again,” I confess.

The next time I saw her was a week later. She was in the kitchen, watching me. Saying nothing. She wore black leggings and an oversized Blondie t-shirt pulled off her shoulder. I’d been mesmerized by her bareskin and her lack of smile, the way she leaned her hip against the doorjamb. I’d found everything about her completely fascinating.

The third time I saw her, I’d been looking for her. And there she was, still entirely compelling, her light blue eyes fixed on me as soon as we entered the kitchen. It was Friday, the day my dad got paid, and as he was collecting his check, Caroline came up to me, boldly looked me up and down, and said, “I’ll be at Marquee tonight.”

“And you definitely know that she’s going to be at the ceremony?” Worth asks.

“Yes, her husband is taking over the running of her father’s agency. The entire reason they’re sponsoring the awards is to introduce him to the industry. He’s going to be schmoozing everyone in town. And Caroline’s going to be right alongside him. They’re going to want to present this as a continuity thing—a Hammond is still at the top of the tree, albeit someone who married into the dynasty.”

“Did you know she was married?” Worth asks.

I nod. “It’s been a few years.” It’s not like I have a Google alert set, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t keep tabs on her. Not because I’m still in love with her. I’m not. But because I don’t want to be surprised by her ever again. I wanted to be made aware if she ever moved back to town. But she never came back to New York after leaving for Berkeley. And thank god. I think I would have left Manhattan if she had.

“Okay,” Fisher says. “So this chick you had a thing for is going to be at some event with her husband. Do you still care? Really? After all these years? Fuck her. You’ve moved on.” He yelps, and I’m pretty sure someone, or maybe everyone, has either pinched him or thrown something at him.

“It’s a good question,” I say. “You’re right, Fisher, it was a long time ago.” He’s got a point. Why do I care so much?I’m no longer the boy who would do anything Caroline Hammond asked him to.

Who am I kidding? She didn’t even have to ask. I gave her everything willingly. But a lot has happened since then. I’m not the person I was when I proposed to Caroline just before she was about to start NYU. I’ve become the man her father would want her to marry now, not the one he got his minions to try to bribe to disappear out of her life. I’m not some bread delivery boy who doesn’t deserve an Upper East Side princess.

“Some things leave a mark,” Bennett says. “No matter how long since the initial hurt.”

And that sums it up. What Caroline did is scorched into me like a tattoo.

My father warned me that I was making a mistake when I told him Caroline and I were getting married, and I couldn’t help him in the bakery anymore because I was moving across the country to be with her. My mother cried as I left with my backpack and two hundred dollars, thinking I was about to start my life with Caroline in California. We loved each other, and not even the width of an entire country would keep us apart.

When I turned down his ten-thousand-dollar bribe to stay away from Caroline, Frank Hammond sent his daughter to Berkeley to tear us apart. But I knew we were stronger than all those external forces. We were in love. We were going to spend the rest of our lives together.

The first time I saw Caroline in California was also the last. I turned up at her dorm and she looked at me, amused. The image of her condescending smile, offered like I was some doll she’d outgrown, has never left me.

But the memories refocused and sharpened this summer when I discovered the woman I was dating wasusing me. Not to annoy her father, like Caroline had, but to try to bring down my friend. The deception sliced sharp into my skin just like it had all those years ago, and it opened the coffin of feelings I hoped were dead and buried.

“I want to go to this ceremony and look like I don’t give a shit, like I can’t even remember Caroline’s name let alone recall how she used me as a way to get back at her overly controlling father.”

“Hell yeah,” Fisher calls out. “Fuck them. You’re a good-looking dude who’s at least as rich as any of us. You rule Manhattan real estate. Any woman would be lucky to have you.”

“Right,” I say, grinning at my overenthusiastic friend group.

“So call Tom Ford, get a new tux,” Fisher says.

“I have a Tom Ford tux that’s almost brand-new,” I say. “The tux isn’t the issue.”Then what is?I don’t need Caroline to find me attractive. I don’t expect her to turn around and tell me how she realized rejecting me was the biggest mistake of her life. We were eighteen. She was never in love with me. I understand that.

“I don’t want her to think she’s had any impact on my life whatsoever,” I announce.

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