Page 66 of Seeing You

“What about you, Billie?” Ashlynn asked. “What’s your dream destination?”

Marcus already knew what she was going to say—Hawaii.

“Hawaii,” she said before taking a sip of her wine. “I’ve always wanted to see the Pearl Harbor memorial. I want to try surfing in Waikiki and lie on the soft sand beaches. Next, I’d go to Volcanoes National Park, and then to Maui’s tropical rainforest, where it slopes down to classic white and volcanic-black beaches where turtles come to nest. How freaking cute would that be? And I always wanted to take a helicopter tour of…well…all of it!” She took another sip of wine before laughing softly. “Clearly I’ve thought about it, right?”

It was all the things she had wanted to do when they eloped, but he had put the kibosh on most of it because he didn’t want to be gone that long.

God, what a prick I was…

“That all sounds amazing,” Chloe told her. “But you’d probably need a few weeks to do that too, right?”

She nodded. “To do it right and not rush, you’d need…like…two weeks.”

That made him feel even worse because it really wasn’t an exorbitant amount of time. Why hadn’t he just agreed to it to make her happy? He was already going to basically rob her of a family wedding, so why couldn’t he have let her have her dream honeymoon?

Okay, I was acolossalprick.

Yeah.

“What about you, Marcus?” Ashlynn asked, and there was definitely a hint of a challenge in her tone. “Any dream destinations?”

Wherever Billie is…

That thought hit him like a ton of bricks. Sweat beaded on his brow and he took a quick swipe at it, before doing his best to sound calm and cool.

“Hmm…I’d have to say…”

Don’t sound like a pretentious snob…

“France.”

Snob.

“Their bakeries are supposed to be the best in the world, and I think it could be nice to explore and go on a tasting tour.” He looked at Billie and saw the impressed smile on her face. “That could be fun, right?”

“Definitely.” When she leaned in to kiss him, it took every ounce of strength to keep it chaste. The last thing he needed was to look like he was mauling her right in front of her family.

When they had arrived at Jade and Levi’s earlier, it was like walking into a hostile crowd. Everyone sort of gave him a tight smile and a few side-eyes, but it was no more than he expected. The last time he’d seen them, life had been very different all the way around. As the afternoon wore on, they all relaxed a bit, but he knew they were only being polite for Billie’s sake. Marcus knew no matter how charming and polite he was, he was always going to be the guy who broke their sister’s heart.

What no one seemed to realize was…she broke his too.

If he could go back and change anything, he’d change himself—his ego, his arrogance, his need to control everything. He was angry that she left, but once he rationally looked at the situation, he knew he was fully to blame,

And that’s when the enormity of what he’d lost really hit him.

After that, he became obsessed with work because he didn’t have anything else—didn’twantanything else. He was consumed with climbing the ranks and building a small financial empire for himself. It was easier than opening himself up to getting hurt again. Between losing his mother and then losingBillie—two totally different losses, but both equally devastating—he had decided that being alone was the key to his survival.

Holy shit…is that why I’ve been avoiding my father for ten years?

Yeah, that thought came out of nowhere too. As much as he wanted to blame his anger on the fact that his mother died and his father was still here, maybe there was more to it than that.

Probably not in the beginning, but definitely later on.

Great time to figure that crap out.

“You okay?” she whispered in his ear. “You kind of got really quiet and stiff as a statue.”

“Just…something came to mind about my dad and I got lost in thought. Sorry.” He kissed her cheek.

---