Chapter 15

Sonia didn't know. She didn't owe him an answer.

She just turned to Sheldon. "Let's go in."

He nodded, shot a quick glance at his younger cousin Chloe — who had been vibrating with the desire to get involved. He lifted his chin: go.

Chloe flashed an OK. She waited until Sheldon had Sonia upstairs before descending the steps and giving Ember a withering look. "Honey — this isn't Juilliard. If you want to audition, don't do it on our lawn. And if your boyfriend broke my sister-in-law's heart and then dragged you here to keep breaking it — that's him being the problem. So maybe handle your man instead of screaming at the woman who's happily moved on."

Zachary was still reeling from "not your family." He replied, reflexively, "I'm not her boyfriend."

Chloe had disliked him on sight. She cracked her knuckles and smiled icily. "Right, I forgot. Not her boyfriend. Then why does she drop everything to go babysit you? Why does she bully my sister-in-law into handing her gifts? You're real generous, huh? How come you never wrote me a check for a cool mil? Actually, never mind — thank God you're garbage, or my brother might've pined for another decade."

From the upstairs balcony Sonia heard that. She turned. "Pined?"

Sheldon's eyes skittered away. "You heard wrong."

She grabbed his collar, demanding. She'd suspected something from their first meeting — he'd known too much, cared about the wrong things. Chloe had let slip, casually, that Sheldon had refused to even meet previous matches, had essentially gotten Sterling to give up arranging things, and then the moment he heard Margaret Harrington was offering Sonia he had practically volunteered. It was the only reason Margaret's side of the family had even been able to reach the Sterlings.

No matter how she pressed, he wasn't giving it up.

Sonia went for the kill. "Keeping secrets before we're even married? Okay, then maybe we shouldn't —"

He bolted upright in a panic, clapped a hand over her mouth, wouldn't let her finish.

She glared at him.

He caved first. "Okay, fine. But you promise — no more 'we shouldn't' after you hear it."

She nodded. It wasn't a deal-breaker no matter what it was. She'd just been pushing his buttons.

Relieved, he started. "Do you remember that summer camp you went to, your junior year of high school?"

She nodded. She'd hated it. What she'd actually wanted was to sleep in all summer. But Zachary had wanted to go, and his parents were terrified he'd get himself into trouble there, so they'd asked Sonia to come along and keep an eye on him.

"That was when I first saw you," Sheldon said. "I thought you were incredible. I wanted to introduce myself. Someone told me that the guy standing next to you was your childhood sweetheart, and you didn't even notice other men existed."

Which had been technically true. Zachary had been aggressively territorial back then. No boy got near her.

"But you wouldn't have cared about that," she said, slow.

"I didn't," Sheldon admitted. "So Zachary picked a fight with me. He lost. Got pretty banged up. And then I watched you cradle him and cry over him. I didn't want you to cry."

He had, apparently, kept quiet tabs on her ever since. When he'd heard Zachary was making her miserable over some girl, his reaction had been fury and, somewhere underneath it, relief. He finally had a path in that didn't cost her any pain.

So he'd said yes to his family's merger proposal, and waited for her to walk toward him.

Sonia held out her arms. "For being honest — come here. Hug."

He pulled her against him and clung. They stood together on the balcony, watching the show below.

Downstairs, Chloe was still going. She saw Zachary's eyes drift toward the second-floor windows and snapped her fingers in his face. "Hello? Still here? Want me to have security escort you out?"

Zachary came back to himself, humiliated, and yanked Ember up to leave.

Chloe was right.

All of this was his own doing.

He was the one who'd felt bad for Ember. The one who'd kept abandoning Sonia to sit with her. The one who'd grown tired of Sonia's hurt and decided Ember was "easier." The one who, even after Sonia said she was done, had kept using Ember to try to bait her back.

He was the one who had shoved her, step by step, into another man's arms.

All of it. On him.

He made it out the front gate before his legs gave out and he hit the pavement.