Page 49 of That Reilly Boy
Her voice cracks toward the end, and tears well up in my eyes in response. Mel is the only person I’ve ever said the hard things out loud to.
Is this what Prince Charles felt like, having to wait until his mother passed away before he could do anything with his life?
Every time I spend a little bit of money on something that just makes me happy, something in the house breaks, so I don’t spend money on fun stuff anymore.
What if she outlives me, Mel? What will happen to her? I’ll have devoted my entire life to taking care of the house and it will still fall down around her. It’ll all be for nothing.
“I’m going to go along with this,” Mel says quietly, as if she’s talking to herself instead of to me. “And if anybody asks me if I knew you were talking to him online, I’m going to say yes even though it’s a lie. I’ll say that of course I knew all along and didn’t say a word because I’m Cara’s best friend and I love her like she’s my sister.”
“I love you, too,” I say because if nothing else, that is an undeniable truth.
“Let us buy you this dress,” she says softly. “You’re going to look so beautiful on Saturday. And I’m also going to look beautiful, but I’ll downplay it a bit so nobody looks at me.”
I laugh, and then throw my arms around her neck. “Thank you.”
“Do not fall in love with your husband.” It’s such a ridiculous thing to say, we both laugh some more. “Now, let’s buy this dress and go find some very salty french fries.”
Chapter Thirty
Hayden
I really can’t stand this town. I’m on my second lap of the main street, looking for a parking space, and why are there so many cars clogging up the town square right now? Did everybody decide to get a spray tan and manicure on the same day?
It’s a town also sadly lacking in lodging. It occurred to me over the weekend that the gossipy citizens of Sumac Falls aren’t seeing Cara and I together enough to convince them we’re in love. While they might buy our inability to spend nights together thanks to the family feud and our mothers loathing each other, if the town had a motel, we could at least give the appearance we can’t stand to be apart.
As far as I know, there’s still only one bed and breakfast in town, and that’s not an option. It was the second grandest home, after the Gamble house, and it’s not in much better shape now—probably because it never has guests. Mrs. Barlow just registered it as a B&B after her husband died so she could use it as a tax write-off, or so the story goes.
The lack of places to stay is probably for the best. As much as two lovers hiding away in an inn because they’re desperate to be alone looks good for the tale we’re spinning, being alone with Cara in a room with a bed might actually kill me.
I finally find a parking space and make the short walk to Pampered Pets Grooming. Because Cara told me she might still be working with a dog, I left Penelope at my mother’s house. She mostly ignores other dogs, but I don’t want to upset any of Cara’s four-legged clients.
I peer through the glass door and see that she’s in the process of lifting a fairly large brown dog—some kind of mixed breed, I guess—down from the table. I wait until she’s secured it in a fenced-in area decorated to look like a barn stall before I push the door open.
The dog barks the alarm until Cara snaps her fingers. “Kevin, be quiet.”
“Kevin?”
“Yes, his name is Kevin. I don’t ask.” She brushes some hair from her shirt and walks over to her small counter. After shifting an appointment book out of the way, she hands me a sheaf of papers. “You should give them a quick look and make sure I initialed and signed everywhere I was supposed to.”
I take the prenup and NDA documents and start flipping through them. “And you were okay with everything? Nothing you want to talk through?”
She shrugs one shoulder before turning to clean the grooming table. “I understood everything, and we’d already talked about the basics—we leave with the assets we came with, I keep my mouth shut about the plan, and I can’t have Penny in the divorce.”
I smile and take out my phone. After setting the papers on the counter, I open my scanner app and start scanning each page, one at a time. Cara was able to print them, but when she asked how best to scan them to return them to Taylor, I told her it would be easier for me to stop by. My scans go straight to a cloud folder Taylor has access to.
It also gave me an excuse to see her. “Any chance you want to grab something to eat at the diner? It wouldn’t hurt to be seen together around town.”
She laughs. “Trying to get a decent meal into me before our big family dinner tomorrow?”
“I had to promise an entire weekend of babysitting Daisy and AJ so Aaron and Hope can go away somewhere before they’d agree to host the dinner. But asking either of our mothers to host the other would have been a disaster. Aaron’s last name might be Reilly, but they’re the closest to neutral ground we have.”
“Tell me again why we can’t just go to a restaurant?
I’ve asked myself that same question several times, so I give Cara the answer I’ve given myself. “Because there’s a fifty-fifty chance the dinner ends with my mother and your mother throwing glassware at each other, and that gets expensive fast in a restaurant.”
She laughs. “I’m not sure your sister-in-law would consider her home the best food fight backup plan. And I’d say it’s more like a ten percent chance it goes that far. I mean, wrecking a meal over an old family grudge is far-fetched.”
I glance sideways at her. “Whatever is between our mothers is personal—beyond their last names, I mean. I don’t know what, but I think something happened in high school that caused problems of their own.”
