Page 87 of The Fiance Dilemma

There was a long pause, only the slow beats of the music playing in the background filling the silence. Then Matthew moved. He grabbed a stool and planted it next to mine before plopping down. I seemed to hold my breath for a reason I didn’t understand. As if I was waiting for something.

“When did you do all of this?” he asked. “This must have taken hours.”

I swallowed, dragging my palms down the plastic sleeve in front of me. “A couple of nights ago.”

Matthew’s breath was deep and forceful and sounded like a complaint.

“I haven’t been able sleep,” I explained, keeping my voice up, happy. Normal. “Which is not rare for me. My head sometimes doesn’t shut up. So I baked. Researched. Printed. Classified. Filed. It was very relaxing, and I was just glad I had something to keep myself busy.”

Another of those exhales left him. “Look at me, Baby Blue.”

I ignored the pressure in my throat, chest, belly,everywhere,and complied.

“Thank you,” he said, and God, Matthew had never sounded or looked so… earnest.Moved.Like the two words were coming from someplace other than his mouth. Someplace deep inside him. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he turned my stool, angling my body toward him, as if he wanted all my attention. “I wish I could find the right words to tell you how fucking grateful, and blown away, I am right now. I wish…” He shook his head. “I wish I could show you.”

Everything in me eased, taken aback by how much he meant that and how little I had done. “These are just printouts,” I whispered. “It’s the least I can do. You… You’re looking for a job. And I wasn’t doing anything for you. Not like you are for me. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.”

A muscle in his jaw jumped, and when he said, “That couldn’t be further from the truth,” I didn’t ask what he referred to. His hand reached out, fingers tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear. It wasn’t right how I could feel something so simple, so plain, so cliché if you will, so deep inside. “You’re nothing I expected, Josie,” he said softly. So softly it almost hurt. “I told you that night. But now I know you’re nothing I deserve, either.”

I frowned. “You deserve this,” I told him. And I’d been doing such a good job at trying not to talk about something that made him uncomfortable. Something he’d never brought up but that I knew. “It’s just help. It was unfair that they fired you because you refused to give them some scoop about Adalyn and Cameron. It’s unfair that they’re getting away with saying they were laying people off anyway. In fact, I’m sure there’s a way we could sue them. We can look into that. I’ll help you lawyer up. I have connections, I promise I can help with that.”

Matthew smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Do you know where I worked, Josie?”

“Some media and entertainment conglomerate,” I told him. “They own newspapers and online outlets across the country, or something like that. I can’t recall the specifics. I just know they don’t have principles and were very dumb to let you go.”

“They don’t have them, no,” Matthew agreed. “One of the outlets they own is Page Nine.”

Oh. “I… I didn’t know that. I probably should have asked.”

“I should have told you.” The corners of his mouth fell. “Page Nine is where I worked for the past year. My boss, Marissa, took me with her after a management change there. It’s not rare to move people around. It was an adjustment, but I figured out soon enough how tabloids worked. News is news, no matter what the subject. It’s more about who you know than anything else. And with social media, there’s a lot more work in the tabloid industry than what most people think.”

“So you wrote things like the stuff being said about me? And Andrew? Us?”

“I’m not proud of myself,” he said. And I believed him. “I always thought I was somewhat fair, that everything I wrote was not crossing some imaginary line I’d drawn for myself. I checked sources, made sure everything was factual. But I could only control so much.” A sigh left him.“Filthy Reali-Teais scripted, to give you an example. But that doesn’t mean you can predict what Sam and Nick will say. The whole thing is edited, but they occasionally get vicious, and people love that. It’s big part of their success.”

I processed that. All of it, really. I was surprised, it had obviously caught me off guard, but I… didn’t feel betrayed. Just confused.I should have told you.“Why didn’t you tell me this? When I asked you to help me that morning, here, in this kitchen?”

That muscle in his jaw jumped. “You said you needed me. Me.”

The weight of his answer made my next breath a little harder. “Why didn’t you say anything at any point after that?”

“I thought you’d break things off. That you wouldn’t trust me.”

Break things off.

Break what?I should have asked. What was between us was meant to be broken either way. But I wasn’t an idiot. I wasn’t blind. I could see, as much as I tried to deny it, that there was something else between Matthew and I. Something that had always made me gravitate toward him, and now had become this living, pulsing thing growing in the space we’d carefully put in place with those rules.

“Is that why they aren’t talking about you? Because they know you?”

The quality of his gaze changed. “You’re assuming that the reason is in part what made me keep this from you. I wish—” He stopped himself. “I wish I could have spared you all this ugliness, Josie.”

“I’m not as naïve as you paint me to be, Matthew. I don’t need to be sheltered—”

“You’re not.” He let out a hard breath. “And you don’t need to be sheltered, no. Because you’re smart. Way smarter than me. Fierce. Brave. Kind. You’ll assume the best in people because that’s who you are. You have a heart so fucking big, there’s room for everyone there. And I love that about you. All of those things. That’s what I wish I could protect.”

I love that about you.

That’s what I wish I could protect.

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