Blue Shoes #3: New Adult Erotic Romance Read online

  Dylan and I answer in unison, “We want to know.”

  I smile at Dylan. It’s not much, but I’m relieved to finally agree with him about something.

  “Thank you so much.” Dylan stands and pulls out his wallet.

  Iris nods for me to come and pick out my painting, so I leave the guys to finalize the payment.

  “This one,” Iris says, handing me an oil painting of roses. This painting is different from the others—it looks like a bride’s bouquet. “For the newlyweds,” she says.

  I lean in and whisper, “I don’t even know if we’ll get married. Things are always up in the air with Dylan.”

  Iris sighs, then grabs me in a big hug. I give in and hug her back as she gives me a good squeeze. In my ear she whispers, “All men are stubborn sometimes. But Dylan’s a good one. You can hear it in his music, and I can see it in his eyes when he looks at you.”

  “He won’t even look at me today.”

  “Well, not when you’re looking back at him, honey.”

  I pull away, and she brings me over to the mantle to show me their wedding photo. The two of them look about the same age Dylan and I are right now.

  “Almost forty years,” she says. “Honey, there are always going to be rough patches. Being stubborn and proud only makes those patches worse.”

  I give her a skeptical look. “Am I supposed to be a doormat? Do I just forget everything and let it all go? To what end?”

  “It’s not being a doormat to be… gracious sometimes.”

  I can feel my eyebrows raising so high, they’re about to fly right off my face. Gracious? Who is she kidding?

  I nod and thank her for the advice anyway.

  Dylan finishes with Clay, thanks them both, and we go out to the car. He looks at the painting after I set it in the back seat, but doesn’t say a word.

  We wave goodbye to the couple, who look adorable standing together in front of their cute yellow house, surrounded by roses.

  If all this Ryanna and phone stuff hadn’t happened, Dylan and I would be getting married in a few days. So far, we’ve had one huge breakup per year. If we stay together as long as Iris and Clay, does that mean we have forty breakups ahead of us?

  I can’t even imagine. I thought I saw a future for the two of us, but now everything is a blur.

  This painting of roses that’s in our back seat might be the only bridal bouquet I ever get.

  Chapter Four

  Once we’re back on the road, it’s quiet time again. Dylan doesn’t turn the stereo back on. He drives and stares straight ahead for what feels like forever.

  I pull out my phone and stare at it in my hand. There are messages from Riley, asking me what happened this afternoon. I still have the spyware on the phone, so I’m glad she didn’t mention Ryanna by name. I don’t know how much they know about what I’ve figured out so far.

  I’m dying to tell Riley everything, but I can’t talk freely with Dylan sitting next to me.

  Maybe I could send her something cryptic. I wish I could trust the privacy of my own phone, but Clay left the hacked stuff intact so he could trace the source. That means I can’t tell Riley the truth, or I’ll let on that we know about the spyware, and it might shut down before we track the guilty party.

  While I’m holding the phone, another text comes in. This one’s from Amanda. It simply says: WTF.

  I have to laugh. Amanda has the best timing.

  Dylan’s still staring straight ahead. He could use a friend like Amanda. He’s so serious all the time. I suppose I’m his Amanda—I’m the one who lightens his mood. He’s been without me for twelve days, and by the scruffy beard and the circles under his eyes, he looks like he’s been in a prison cell the whole time.

  I want to say something to him, but I don’t know what. I’m still angry that he had alerts set up on his phone to watch for gossip about me in Italy. If he wanted to know what I was doing, he should have found his way to a working phone.

  He keeps staring ahead, unaware of the dirty look I’m giving him. Typical. He’s probably composing song lyrics about how he’s the only one who suffers when things go wrong.

  I look down at my phone and compose a quick message to the girls: Let’s order Italian food tonight. My treat! Riley, I went back to the office after we talked. I’m such a total doofus. I’ve got this jet lag and I crashed out in a puddle of drool on my desk. I’ll be home soon for dinner.

  As I tuck my phone away in my new Italian purse, Dylan glances over. He looks curious, but doesn’t ask me what’s going on. Typical.

  I cross my arms and settle down into the seat. Warm sunshine is coming in through the window, but I’m not too hot, thanks to the air conditioning.

  The fake glasses slide down my nose, reminding me I’m still wearing them. I take the glasses off and put them in my purse, then rub the bridge of my nose.

  I sink down deeper into the seat, taking the comfort of its embrace. I close my eyes, as relaxed as a barn cat with a belly full of mice, curled up in a patch of sunshine.

  Chapter Five

  Someone’s gently shaking my shoulder.

  For a moment, I’m back in Italy. I’m in my hotel room, napping during the day because I’m too heartbroken to go outside. The housekeeper ignored the sign on the door, and has come in to change the sheets. She wants me to wake up, but I don’t want to wake up. I want to keep dreaming.

  The shaking on my shoulder gets more insistent.

  “Dylan,” I cry out in my sleep.

  “I’m right here,” he says.

  I open my eyes. It’s not sunny anymore. Everything is dark. I’m so confused. Are we in Italy? Did he come back?

  “Hey, it’s okay,” he says soothingly. “I’m right here, Jess.”

  The tears I’ve been holding back for so long start to flow.

  “You left me,” I sob. “You left me all alone in Italy. I couldn’t even leave the hotel room. How could you do that?”

  He reaches down to unbuckle my seat belt. I don’t want him to touch me, though. I hate him. I slap at his hands and yell at him incoherently.

  “You had a nightmare,” he says. “You fell asleep in the car, but I’m here now.”

  He keeps trying to pull me toward him, to comfort me. The car interior is dark and cramped. I don’t know where we are.

  I scream at him to leave me alone. I get my seat belt unbuckled, push open the door, and jump out.

  We’re inside a garage, but I don’t recognize it. It’s completely empty, like a house nobody lives in.

  There’s a door, and I run toward it. I need to get out of this garage and away from Dylan. My breath is coming in raspy sobs, and part of my mind still thinks I’m in Italy, holed up in that room. I don’t want him to see me like this.

  The door is locked. I’m trapped. I start banging on the door and kicking it.

  Dylan is out of the car and comes toward me, his arms outstretched. “Shh, I’m here now, Jess. I’m here for you.”

  “No, you aren’t. You only think about yourself.”

  “You’re right,” he says.

  The rest of my words catch in my throat. He’s agreeing with me?

  He reaches me at the door and takes me in his arms. He squeezes me so tight. I stop breathing and hold still. I can feel his chest moving against mine. He loosens his grip and rubs his palms up and down my back.

  “You’re right,” he whispers into the top of my head. “I’ve been selfish, and I need to do better by you.”

  On his next breath in, I let my lungs open and inhale in rhythm with him. The breath is ragged, but feels good. His shoulder feels good against my cheek, and so do his arms around me.

  “Jess?”

  “Don’t ever let me go.”

  “I’m trying.” He keeps rubbing my back, and kissing the top of my head.

  “You did let me go,” I murmur. “You can’t do that, or one of these days I’ll be gone.”

  “I’m trying,” he repeats.

  I ci
rcle his waist with my arms and melt into him. “Try harder.”

  “Jess, I’m sorry.”

  I close my eyes and press my face into his shoulder. He’s saying these words now, but does he mean them? Will he still remember this feeling when his temper flares up again?

  Now I’m crying even harder, because I don’t think he will hold onto this moment. This is how it will be with us, always, because of how he is.

  “I’m sorry too,” I say, but I don’t mean it.

  “Don’t be sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s all my fault.”

  These aren’t the words I was expecting to hear. I pull back and look up at his face. He lets go of me and turns away quickly.

  Gruffly, he says, “Entirely my fault.” When he turns back, he’s got a soft expression on his face.

  We stare into each other’s eyes in the dim garage.

  “Where are we?” I ask. “Did you buy another house?”

  “Don’t change the subject. I was apologizing to you.”

  I turn my head and look down at the concrete floor. “Oh, right. Apology accepted.”

  He chuckles. “Fair enough. I shouldn’t expect you to forgive me right away. I know we have a lot of work to do.”

  “Work?” I turn back and look into his dark eyes. Work to do? That doesn’t sound like the Dylan Wolf I know. His method of dealing with things is to disappear to a cabin in the woods, or buy a faster car.

  “I’ve been seeing someone,” he says.

  My heart drops, and my legs start to buckle. I gasp and reach for the door handle to steady myself.

  “Jess?”

  I’m too choked with emotion to answer.

  He continues, “He was a referral from my regular doctor. He’s actually a decent guy, considering he pokes around in people’s heads for a living.”

  His words wash over me. Dylan’s seeing someone, but it’s not a terrible thing.

  “You’re… seeing a therapist?”

  He stands up straighter and huffs his shoulders out. “Yeah. Don’t tell anyone.” He looks away.

  “Dylan, there’s no need to be asha—”

  He cuts me off with a gruff, “Whatever.”

  I look around the empty garage. I don’t even care about where we are anymore. I’m so overwhelmed by this news. I think it’s good news. Dylan is the last person in the world I thought would see a therapist, but I guess I don’t know everything.

  “That sounds fun,” I say.

  He looks at me warily, through the sides of his eyes. “Fun?”

  I give him a big, genuine smile. “Yes. Fun. Do you lay on a couch and talk about your dreams and stuff? I think it would be totally fun to do that.” I let out a small laugh. “Honestly, I’ve always wanted to try it, just to see what they’d say. It must be fun to spend an hour talking about your stuff.”

  “It’s fifty minutes,” he says. “Unless the guy’s ripping me off. He says an hour is fifty minutes.”

  I can’t stop grinning. “An hour is not fifty minutes.”

  “But thirteen is a baker’s dozen.”

  “What? Are you a baker now?”

  He pulls a set of jingling keys from his pocket and gives me a flirty look. “Do you want me to be a baker?”

  “I just want you to be happy.”

  He pushes the key into the lock of the door behind me. “Is that all you want? For me to be happy? Because I can’t be happy without you.”

  I reach up and run my fingers down his cheek and through his beard. “Is this a beard of sadness?”

  Dylan closes his eyes. “Do you want me to shave?”

  “I want you to kiss me.”

  He opens his eyes and gazes at me with adoration. “I thought you were mad at me.”

  “I can still want you to kiss me when I’m mad at you.”

  “Hmm.”

  I lick my lips and wait for him to kiss me, but he doesn’t.

  He unlocks the door and nods for me to follow him through the doorway.

  Chapter Six

  Beyond the door, I see a hallway with coat hooks on the wall.

  “Dylan, where are we?”

  “Come on,” he says.

  I follow, my curiosity rising. We pass through a door into a large kitchen, then a hallway, then an atrium. Now I know where we are. This is the Malibu mansion we rented for our wedding. This glass-walled atrium is where we planned to say our vows.

  “Why are we here?”

  He reaches for the patio door. I grab his elbow and stop him from opening the door.

  “Let’s go outside,” he says. “I’ll show you the gardens.”

  I shake my head and stare at him in confusion. “Why?”

  He turns to me and gives me a warm look. His voice soft and rich, he says, “Because you looked so relaxed today, when Clay’s wife showed you the gardens. I was watching you, walking from flower to flower, stopping to admire everything that was beautiful. You looked so serene.”

  I glance out at the Malibu mansion’s gardens. They’re rigid and orderly, growing in tidy rows, unlike the country-style garden at Iris and Clay’s house.

  The sun is very low on the horizon, bathing the room in hues of amber. I turn back to Dylan. His face is golden in this light, like he’s a statue made of bronze.

  Even this new beard he’s been growing looks beautiful in the sunset light. I didn’t like the beard, until now. He looks like a warrior who’s been marching through the mountains for days. He still has those soulful eyes of a poet, though.

  My poet warrior.

  He steps closer to me and brings his hands up to cup the sides of my face. “You looked serene,” he repeats.

  I gaze up into his dark brown eyes and feel myself falling. “Gardens make me happy, I guess.”

  “I want you to look that way again.” He moves one hand up the side of my face gently, then uses his fingertip to draw a line straight down between my eyebrows. He draws the line again.

  It tickles, so I let out a giggle. “What are you doing?”

  “This is where I give you a frown line. Right here.”

  I push his hand away and snort. “I don’t have frown lines.”

  “But you will if you stay with me. You get a crease here between your eyebrows, when you’re upset.”

  I take a step back. He’s gone from saying sweet things about me looking serene, to talking about frown lines. And we’re standing in the place we were supposed to say our vows. I’ve got a terrible feeling everything is broken, more broken than I feared.

  “It’s me,” he says. “I’m the one who drives you.”

  “What are you talking about? Drives me? Are you breaking up with me? Just say it, Dylan. Tell me you’d rather have your freedom to kiss girls like Ryanna. Don’t act like this is for my own good.” I look around at the empty atrium, at the bare, tiled floor. All of our friends were supposed to fill this space this weekend, and now they won’t.

  Everything’s empty.

  “We’re talking about you,” he says insistently. “You weren’t working enough overtime hours here, so you had to fly to Italy. I’m not enough for you, so you fill your life with work. With meaningless junk and paperwork.”

  His tone is gentle, but his words are sharp.

  The atrium swirls around me.

  “You’re the one who practically shoved me on the plane,” I say, my voice rising in volume. “I went so I could get away from the paparazzi and all the hellishness here in L.A. I needed to get out of this awful city.”

  “Just the city?”

  My jaw drops open. This isn’t like him. He’s always been supportive of my career. He’d never call it meaningless junk.

  “What the hell, Dylan? I didn’t go there to get away from you. Why would you say that? Why would you think that?”

  “We need to both be honest. With each other and with ourselves.”

  He’s standing in front of me, holding still, and his body looks like a wall to me. A big, wide, wall. I reach out and shov
e him by his shoulders. He barely sways.

  “I am honest!” I yell.

  “You have to tell me when you’re upset. I’m not one of your Morris clients that needs to be managed.”

  I shove him again by the shoulders. It’s not fair that he’s so much bigger than me, like a big wall.

  “Stop getting to me,” I growl. “Stop trying to get in my head. You don’t know what I think.”

  “No, I don’t know what you think.”

  Outside the atrium windows, the sun is setting. The last sliver disappears over the horizon. The light in the room changes, from gold and pink to cool and gray.

  Dylan’s brown eyes become cool and smoky, distant. I feel like he’s slipping away from me. Even though he held me in the garage, just moments ago, that was an illusion. He always takes one step toward me, then two steps away.

  He’s always moving away.

  It’s hard to get words out of my throat.

  “I want to be with you,” I whisper. “I love you.”

  His eyes are gleaming. “I love you, too. That’s why I want you to be happy. We can’t keep going like this.”

  “Like what? We just found out my phone got hacked. And they paid for someone to make up stories about you. That doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  “I don’t know, Jess. If there weren’t cracks there already, they wouldn’t get in.”

  I let out a howl of frustration and fly at Dylan. I hit him on the shoulders with both palms, sending him back a few steps. He steadies himself, his face calm.

  I don’t want him to be calm anymore.

  I shove him again. Harder.

  “Good,” he says. “Let it out. You resent my career, and that’s why you throw yourself into your work.”

  I make a fist with one hand, and glare at the center of his chest. He’s being so stupid right now. I just want to hit him.

  He sees my fist and says, “Go ahead. Hit me.”

  I growl, “I’m not going to hit you.”