Page 67 of Words On Candy Hearts

“Did he have anything else to say?”

“About what?”

“About me,” she said, her voice cracking just a tiny bit.

“Just the regular,” I said. “What’s she do, what’s she like. That sort of thing. Why do you ask? Is there something you haven’t told me?”

I asked it casually, like it was a joke.Ha ha, what are you, a bank robber or something?But the fact was, her nervousness made me genuinely wonder if she had something to hide. Maybe she was worried that my dad’s lawyers had discovered some deep dark secret from her past. “If you have a rap sheet ten pages long,” I half-kidded, “it might be a good idea to tell me now.”

“I don’t have a rap sheet,” she said, giving me a nervous smile. “I guess I’m just worried that your dad will disapprove of me still being a student at twenty-eight. Or something like that.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t have a criminal record. And she needn’t worry about my dad. She was blond, she had boobs, and she was breathing. The three Bs of love. All Dad’s boxes were checked.

“I told him you were a PhD candidate,” I said, without adding,He thinks your degree will look great with your boobs. “He was impressed.”

She let out a deep, relieved breath.

“Are you sure everything’s okay?” I asked.

“Everything’s fine,” she said. She reached over the console and grabbed my hand, her palm just a little bit sweaty. “I guess I just want him to like me.”

I lifted her hand to my lips and gave it a kiss. It was terribly touching to see her so vulnerable. At the same time, her assumption that I had the kind of relationship with my father that she had with her mother was painful. It was clear to me that she and her mother trusted each other and valued one another’s opinions. Conversely, if Dad liked and approved of Clara, it would make me assume something was horribly wrong with her.

“Don’t worry about what my father or anyone else thinks,” I said. “All that matters is what I think. And I think you’re perfect.” Feeling encouraged, I pushed a little further. “So am I allowed to ask what you and your mom were talking about before that was such a big secret?”

“She was just asking me what the deal was with us,” she said. “What our plans were and if I liked you. That kind of thing.”

“And what did you say?”

She pulled my hand to her cheek. “I told her I thought you were wonderful,” she said. She kissed the palm of my hand. And then kissed it again. “And that I really wanted this to work out.”

But even as she was saying the words, she looked sad. I would go so far as to say she looked like she was going to cry. There was more on her mind than my dad not liking her. There was something she wasn’t telling me.

CHAPTER 37

Clara

An hour later, Ian sat beside me in the passenger seat, sound asleep. As I approached the dirt road that led to the cabin, I hit the right blinker. Not that there were any other cars around to see it. Even at the height of the summer camping season, it was rare to see another vehicle in this stretch of the Adirondacks. And it was still only May. The chances of running into another car, much less another human being, were almost nonexistent. It was the perfect place to keep Ian safely hidden for a few days.

And there was nothing in the world more important to me than to keep him safe. He’d protected me from Carter and the cameras, all the while knowing that he had been branded a purveyor of two-dollar whores for life. He’d gotten me out of jail and had all record of the incident wiped out of existence. He’d squeezed my hand and comforted me when I expressed my fear that his father wouldn’t like me, and assured me that he wanted me and that that was all that mattered.

I wanted to return the favor. For the next few days, I wanted him to feel safe and secure and protected, to know that no matter what came our way or whatever twisted lies hit the papers, he had me there to support and comfort him, to tell him that he needn’t worry what anyone else in the world chose to believe. I knew the person he was in his heart, and I was crazy about him. That was all that mattered.

I slowed down to ten miles an hour so that the six bags of supplies we’d picked up at Walmart wouldn’t rattle too noisily and wake him from his well-earned nap. I reached over and gently ran my fingers through his hair. I imagined him as a boy of eight or nine, all giggly and excited as he fed the neighbor’s dog a hotdog through a chain-link fence, blissfully unaware that in just a few short years, his happy young life would be completely upended. Next, he was eighteen, a handsome young college student excited to come home for winter break and indulge in happy memories of Christmases past, only to break down crying when he realized his book of memories was lost and gone forever. And then I thought of him just eight months ago, waking up one morning and finding his fiancé gone.

I wanted it all to be behind him. And for my part, I wanted to be the woman who knew what she had in Ian Dunning: a man worth loving.

The problem was, it was all a fantasy.

I wished I believed in genies. If I had even one free wish, I’d ask my genie to turn back time, to take me back to the parking lot of the police station so I could un-speak the request I so deeply regretted making to Mom.

Tell me what you know about the Dunnings.

She straight out warned me that I didn’t want to hear the answer. She said that if I really liked Ian and wanted to pursue him as a romantic partner, I should get to know him for myself and form my own opinions rather than listen to tabloid rumor and gossip that would bias me against him. And, she stressed, I would most certainly be biased against him once I heard some of the things she had.

She may as well have been dangling a carrot in front of a very hungry horse. Ihadto know. So I’d badgered her until she broke down and told me everything she knew about Ian and Daniel Dunning.

On the business front, Daniel Dunning was a self-made billionaire. He had his greedy, extremely powerful fingers in more pies than anyone could count. On the private front, he was a media whore who loved having his picture taken next to whatever uber-babe was hanging from his arm that week. He was rumored to have at least six mega-homes and traveled everywhere in his own private jet. It went without saying that there was a yacht, on which he held lavish parties in the waters off of Monaco and Malta. Daniel had had five wives and about a hundred infidelity partners. But he had only one son, one future heir.

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