Catoctin Mountain, Maryland
Present
While Lex was upstairs putting Gemma to bed, JT pulled out the wrapped gifts from eleven years ago and placed them under the tree. He hoped it wasn’t a mistake, reminding her of that Christmas, but if they were going to have a future, this was one of the things they needed to process.
More than anything, he wanted another shot at a future with Alexandra Vargas.
He’d never loved anyone more than Alexandra, and he’d never hurt anyone more either.
He hated himself for how rotten he’d been to the one person who gave his heart a reason to beat. That they were here together now was a Christmas gift he never dared to imagine, but still, he ached at the fear and danger that had made this moment possible.
Presents arranged, he picked up the remote and turned on the TV. He let out a soft laugh at seeing A Christmas Story was on. This year’s twenty-four-hour marathon had begun.
Ralphie’s old man was weaving a tapestry of obscenities when he heard Lex’s footsteps on the stairs. A rush of joy shot through him, just like it had that first Christmas Eve, when nothing between them was promised and he’d only just learned her name.
She entered the living room, and just like then, he caught his breath when he looked at her. Her face at forty-one was fuller, with faint lines that only added to her beauty.
The first time he saw her remained imprinted on his brain. The beautiful blonde sitting alone at a bar. Mad as hell. But it wasn’t until he spoke to her that he was hooked. Looks were one thing. Sharp wit and sharper mind another. Alexandra had snared him before she’d invited him to her hotel room for a pumpkin muffin.
He rose from the couch as she entered the room. She startled at seeing the presents beneath the tree. “What? How…?”
“They were in the attic. Stored with the decorations.”
“From that last Christmas. I forgot we never opened them.”
“Same.”
“I—I don’t even remember what I got you that year. I know I didn’t have time to bake, not with the wedding coming up. So at least we can be assured there won’t be an extremely moldy dessert.”
“No signs of rodents indulging either. But then, they were stored in a plastic box with a tight seal. To the best of my knowledge, the box wasn’t opened in the eleven years since I packed them up.”
“You packed them?”
“Yeah. It’s how I spent New Year’s Day.”
“The day after what was supposed to be our wedding.”
“Yeah. It sucked.”
She took a step toward him. “I spent New Year’s Day crying in bed. It was one of the worst days of my life.”
He gave a sharp nod even as he felt his eyes burn.
“I didn’t call it off because I didn’t love you,” she said. “I loved you deeply. You were everything I wanted.”
He heard the past tense and felt the sting of it, but he had no one to blame for that but himself. “But you didn’t love me enough.”
She shook her head. “That’s not it either. I called it off because I didn’t have you. All of you. There was a massive power imbalance between us, and you had bigger priorities than our relationship. You kept it a secret that you intended to run for Congress and were starting your campaign within weeks. You didn’t want to marry me for me. You wanted a campaign prop, just like Lisa was for your dad.”
“You were never a prop. I loved you. I never stopped.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me? Why did I have to overhear your dad talking to you about it in this very room?”
He ran his hand over his face. “We didn’t know the incumbent wasn’t going to run until early December. I was still exploring options and wasn’t a hundred percent decided. I knew you weren’t happy about moving to New York, and I didn’t want to freak you out before the wedding.”
“So you left me out of the decision entirely. As your wife, I should have been part of it. Not an afterthought. Because hell yeah, I’d have had a problem with you making such a huge unilateral decision that would affect both of us right when we were finally moving in together full time. I should have had a say. But that was the power imbalance. Your money, your decisions.”
She turned and faced the tree with the pile of presents, her spine stiff. “You’d already made it known you didn’t want children. I had accepted that. I thought you would be enough. But then I realized I didn’t really have you at all. Not if you shut me out of decisions like that. And it was only a matter of time before I would be like your stepmom. Only important when it was time to run charitable events. How long before you started bringing mistresses here just like your dad? Because if you didn’t love me enough to give me a say in one of the biggest decisions of your life right before we married, it didn’t feel like our marriage vows would be as sacred to you as they were to me.”
His throat had gone dry. He’d known some of this, of course, but he’d never understood the depth of the damage he’d caused in keeping the potential campaign a secret. He cleared his throat and tried to talk around the tears that were clogged there. His words came out as a whisper. “I’m sorry. So deeply sorry.”
A tear tracked down her cheek, and she swiped it away. “This is the first time you’ve ever apologized for that. At the time, you tried to convince me I was blowing everything out of proportion.”
“I was a dumb fuck.”
“You broke my heart. I still loved you, but I couldn’t marry you. Not then.”
Then they’d slowly slid back into a relationship when he chose not to run after all. But he’d never apologized. Never owned how he’d sabotaged their relationship. He’d finally been ready to step up and reconcile if she’d have him and had planned to propose again after Joe announced his candidacy for president.
But then his dad was arrested, and he fell apart. He couldn’t turn to Lee, who was processing his own pain over what Joe did. Lee had Erica, and they both had their own trauma over what happened in the end.
So JT turned to Alexandra. She supported him. Loved him. She was the only thing holding him together. He moved to Maryland, and they finally, after all their years together, lived in the same area full time. Lex essentially moved in with him, but still officially shared an apartment with Kendall.
But he was angry and bitter over the pain of the canceled wedding. He’d treated her horribly instead of loving her like he should.
“I’m sorry. For what I did and didn’t do. And for not owning my shit and apologizing then. For not loving you like you deserved when you were giving me everything. I hate myself for how I treated you. I was so awful, but you stayed by my side, and so in my head, I convinced myself you were only in it for the money. I’m so desperately sorry. You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. The only woman I ever will.”
She took another step toward him. “Thank you. I spent a lot of years wishing we could figure out how to go back to who we were in the beginning. We were great together until the last months before the wedding.”
“You knocked me off my feet.” He glanced at the TV, still showing the movie they’d watched together that night. “Christmas Eve sixteen years ago was one of the best nights of my life. It was the night I learned your name.”
She took the last step that separated them. “And I finally got to see you naked.”
“You always wanted me for my body, not my money.”
“Can you blame me? You have an excellent body.”
“I’ve aged a bit.”
“So have I. Plus I have stretch marks, and breastfeeding has made parts that were once firm quite soft.”
“I like soft.”
“That’s not what she said.”
He laughed.
She slid her arms around his waist and pulled him close for a hug he desperately needed. “Hold me?” she asked.
“Always.” His arms surrounded her, and he held her tight against his chest. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered again. “I’ve done a lot of work in the last few years, but I know I have more work to do.”
The embrace continued, and JT felt whole for the first time in forever. If he could regain her friendship, it would be more than he deserved.
Lex tucked her forehead against his chest and let out a slow breath. “I needed this. The apology. The hug.” She looked up and met his gaze. “And I’m sorry that I didn’t look for a solution eleven years ago that included marrying you on New Year’s Eve. I couldn’t figure out another way to show you how deeply being left out of major choices hurt me. So I had to use the only power I had and make a choice without you.”
He stroked her cheek. “Truth is, if we’d married, I would have gotten worse. All I had to go on was an awful example of marriage and politics. And Lisa was my dad’s third wife. He was a lousy husband.” He cocked his head. “I’ve learned a ton from Lee and Erica. And Curt and Mara. They were some of the first relationships based on equality I’ve ever had front-row seats to witness.”
She leaned back in the circle of his arms. “Outside of Lee and Curt, you never had many friends.”
“A product of never fraternizing with employees. I’ve only ever worked at one company, and it was the one place where I couldn’t be anyone’s friend. It complicated everything when I needed to make tough choices and got even worse after what Spaulding did.”
On the TV, Ralphie was decoding a message from Little Orphan Annie.
“Is that why you’re selling? Because you’re tired of being on the outside?”
He tilted his head toward the couch. “Can we sit?”
She nodded.
He sat and was surprised when she chose to sit right next to him. Not touching, but within easy reach when there was plenty of couch to go around.
He lifted the bottle of red wine, silently offering her another glass. She nodded, and he poured for both of them. He raised his glass and twirled it, staring into the swirl of red. “That might be part of it. But mostly I’m tired of living other people’s plans for my life. Or trying to redeem people’s opinion of me.”
Her eyes widened. “But you love running T&D.”
“I haven’t loved it in years. Not since we learned what Drake and Dad were doing. I felt like I had to make things better. Prove that the company was good. That I was good. Not my father’s son and not Drake’s puppet.”
“No one ever thought you were Drake’s puppet.”
“Sure they did. I was twenty-five when I took over. No one believed I was really running the company. I spent twelve years having to circumvent that asshole, working twice as hard because I had to work around him, not with him. Anyway. I’m done. I’m proud of the work I did. I’m selling for twice as much as it was worth when I started. It’ll be someone else’s headache.”
“What are you going to do after the sale?”
“I’ve got six months of transition—they wanted two years, but I refuse to be on the hook that long. After that…who knows? Maybe I’ll travel.” He glanced around the living room. “Or move here and be a hermit. I’ve always wanted to be a hermit.”
“Who’s buying the company?”
“A competitor. Moss & Delano Architects and Engineers.”
Lex was about to take a sip of wine, but she jolted. Red liquid sloshed from the glass and splattered over her and the sofa. “Shit! Sorry!”
“I don’t care about the couch, what’s wrong?”
She grabbed a napkin from the coffee table and patted at the red drops on the cushion. “Russ Spaulding works for them.”
“Not possible. I checked.”
She shrugged. “That’s what Kendall said the last time we talked.”
“His direct employment is a deal-breaker.” Spaulding had never paid a legal price for his attempt to assault Lex, but JT always made certain the man wasn’t working for anyone he did business with.
“They hid it, then. He must be a contractor.”
“Motherfucker.” This workaround had been used more than once over the years, but there wasn’t much JT could do after the subcontracts were signed.
“Another thing to have Raptor look into. I don’t like that his name is crossing paths with Kendall’s again. All this must be connected. It feels like, I don’t know, Drake’s ghost or something.” She leaned toward him, her elbow on the couch cushion, her fist pressed just below her ear, supporting her head. “Drake hit on me, you know. One of the company parties—not a Christmas one—he said something pretty disgusting about if I ever got sick of you as my sugar daddy, he’d show me what a real man had to offer.”
“What the fuck?”
“I kneed him in the balls and told him if he ever came near me again, I’d see to it that both you and Senator Talon knew he’d hit on me, and I’d make sure a call was put out through HR for women employees to come forward if he’d ever been inappropriate with them.”
“Shit. Why didn’t you tell me this then?”
“At the time, you were having enough problems with him, and a game of he said/she said with me wouldn’t have made anything easier. Then later, when he was arrested…well, you were having a hard enough time. Confessing I hadn’t told you something that you might have used to oust him sooner felt like a bad idea.”
He heard what she didn’t say. He might have blamed her instead of being horrified for her.
“I’m sorry you went through that and felt you couldn’t share it with me.”
“We were both bad at communication then.”
“Fair.”
She sighed. “I wonder if Officer Williams had a connection to Drake?”
“A solid question for Raptor’s investigators.”
She faced the TV. “But one that will wait until after Christmas. Tonight, let’s see if Ralphie gets his BB gun.” She surprised him by leaning into him, resting her head on his shoulder as she sipped her wine and watched the movie.
JT breathed deeply, unsure if this was the best Christmas Eve of his life, or second best.