Stand-in Groom by Suzanne Brockmann Page B

deciding how much to tell him. She hitched her blanket up higher underneath her chin. “Troy didn’t know, but Bent and I did more than date,” she finally said. “It was really just dumb luck that he didn’t manage to get me pregnant too.”
    “How old were you?”
    She paused before answering, her eyes assessing him, trying to gauge his reaction. “Sixteen.”
    In his neighborhood, girls lost their virginity at age sixteen all the time. But in hers? He did his best to hide his shock. “And he was how many years older?”
    “He was twenty-three.”
    “Christ, what the hell was he thinking?” So much for hiding his shock.
    Chelsea smiled. “I don’t think Bent particularly paid attention to the parts of his anatomy that did the thinking. And as for me, I was impetuous and independent, and trying much too hard to be all grown-up.” She laughed, rolling her eyes. “I was so naive. When he told me that Nicole was pregnant—that was her name, Nicole—I honestly didn’t understand. I thought he was somehow being coerced into marrying some dumb girl who’d gotten herself into trouble. It took me two days before I made theconnection that he’d been sleeping with Nicole on the nights he wasn’t with me. It was a crash course in reality.”
    “You were just a kid—it must’ve been hell to have to deal with that.”
    “I didn’t deal with it very gracefully,” she admitted. “It took me years to get over the bastard. You know, the really stupid thing was, if he had been faithful, if he had really honestly loved me, I would have married him right out of college. I would’ve become everything that I hated most about my mother and my sister, and all those other good little wives who live and breathe only for their husbands. I would have been driven slowly insane. Nicole saved me years of expensive therapy, attempting to discover the underlying causes of my deep unhappiness.”
    “How do you know you would have been unhappy?”
    “Oh,
please.”
    “No, I’m serious.” Johnny reclined his own seat, so that they were nearly nose to nose. “I met your sister, Sierra. She seems really happy. And her husband, Ed Pope—he seems like an okay guy. True, he’s not
your
type,
you
wouldn’t be happywith him, but maybe your sister is. Not everybody wants to be president of their own company, you know.” He gazed at her, well aware that she hadn’t answered his question. She hadn’t told him whether or not she was still in love with her former—and probably her first—lover.
    “But
I
want to be president of my own incredibly successful business,” she told him. “How could I do that with a husband like Edgar Pope or Benton Scott, who at any moment could come home and tell me he’s being transferred to the Philadelphia office?”
    “Obviously the trick is to marry someone like me. A townie. Even if Lumière’s burned down, I’d find another job in Boston. It’s my home—I’m not going anywhere, except on vacation.”
    “Except—suppose that we were really married, suppose we really were trying to make it work,” she said. “And what if I had the opportunity to sell my business for a million dollars to a buyer in Texas—with the contingency that I move to Dallas and continue on in my salaried position as president for the next five years?”
    “Five
years
?”
    “You wouldn’t want to do it.”
    Johnny shook his head. “There’s no way I can know what I would or wouldn’t do. I mean, everything would be different. If we loved each other …” He shrugged. “If I loved you and you were in Dallas … Hell, I guess I’d go to Dallas. If I knew I could go back to Boston in five years—”
    “What if you didn’t know that?” she asked. “What if you didn’t know where you’d end up, whether you’d stay in Dallas
another
five years, or then go somewhere totally different? And what if the only job you could get was at a Texas barbecue restaurant, waiting tables? And what if you knew that