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Sometimes, Gwen believed she was living in a fairy-tale. Dylan really, seriously, wanted her to move into his mansion by the beach. He requested her input on new appliances for the kitchen, new cabinetry, rugs and lighting fixtures and landscaping around the patio. He spent every evening with her and Annie, and every night with her alone.
“Are you doing this because you feel obligated?” she asked him one night as they sat in the living room, a catalog of plumbing fixtures spread open between them. He wanted to install new vanities in the bathrooms, and decisions had to be made on the basins and faucets.
“Well, the sinks are pretty old,” he said. “I want to put in those low-flow toilets, so I might as well put in new sinks, too.”
“I mean me,” Gwen clarified. “Are you including me in your plans because you feel obligated? Because you weren’t around for the first five years of Annie’s life?”
He set the catalog on the coffee table and arched an arm around her shoulders. “I hate that I wasn’t around for those first five years,” he admitted. “But no. I wouldn’t ask you to share the house with me if I didn’t want you to.”
“But it’s all so...so fast.”
“Five years isn’t fast.”
“We haven’t known each other five years.”
“Funny.” Dylan gave her a sweet, crooked smile. “I feel as if I’ve known you forever.”
“But last time—six years ago—we went our separate ways. We were strangers whose paths had crossed by chance.”
“How do any two people meet? Sometimes it’s by chance.” He stroked his hand through her hair, then sketched a line down her cheek with his fingertips. “We were both on the same wavelength then. We both wanted to go our separate ways. We did what we did and walked away.”
That was true. They’d understood each other then. They’d come together because they’d both wanted to, and walked away because they’d both wanted that, too.
And now... She could believe she’d never want to walk away. But she wasn’t sure she could believe the same of Dylan.
She loved him. She imagined he had genuine feelings for her, too. But she couldn’t get past the fact that he was Captain Steele, a movie star, and she was just plain Gwen Parker, a shop owner and a single mother. If he was staying with her only because of Annie, that would never be enough for her.
“What if you leave?” she asked. “What if you decide you want to walk away again?”
“I won’t walk away, Gwen,” he vowed. “I’ll have to travel sometimes for work. If I’m making a film, I probably won’t be able to get home for dinner every night. You go off on location for a few weeks. And there are promotional gigs. Meetings. Press junkets.”
“I understand that.”
“At least right now, though, we’re good. I won’t have to go anywhere until we start filming the new Galaxy Force episode. I’d have to check with Brian, but I’m pretty sure I’m scheduled to report to the set on January fifteenth.”
That was more than two months away. In two months, she and Dylan could solidify things a bit. Annie could feel secure about her father’s presence in her life. They could establish their rhythm, find their groove. Create a family.
Of course, he could go off to the set in January and have an affair with one of the actresses who’d be sharing the screen with him. As Gwen recalled, two actresses in the Galaxy Force were traffic-stopping beautiful.
But a man didn’t have to travel to a film set in Hollywood to have an affair. Men had affairs all the time, even if they didn’t find themselves in close proximity to breathtakingly gorgeous actresses. Men had affairs even in Brogan’s Point.
“I know it’s rushing things,” he went on, “but if you want to get married, we could do that. I’m thinking it might be good for Annie’s sake.”
Another woman might consider that proposal lacking in romance. To Gwen, it was the sweetest proposal she could imagine. That he cared so much about Annie made her love him even more.
The thought that he’d suggested marriage out of a sense of obligation troubled her, though. “I don’t want a shotgun marriage,” she said.
Dylan chuckled. “It’s too late for that. You’re way beyond pregnant.”
Gwen laughed, too. Then she grew somber. “It would be nice if love were a part of it,” she said, opting for honesty. “But I was once engaged to be married, and I was crazy in love with the guy, and he left. I don’t want to go through that again.”
“Then we won’t get engaged. Joke,” Dylan added. “We can get engaged, we can get married, whatever you want. I like you, Gwen. I think you like me. I can’t say we’re crazy in love, but the sex is pretty damned great. And we both love Annie. We can make this work.”
Definitely not romantic. Yet maybe this was the only kind of marriage that would suit them. They were compatible, and they both wanted what was best for their daughter. And as he said, the sex was pretty damned great. As a basis for marriage, that wasn’t bad.
She could only hope that a marriage would create the foundation they needed, the solid ground on which they could build their family. Annie deserved that. She needed it.
Gwen had survived a heartbreak, and she could survive it again. But if this marriage didn’t work out and Dylan went away, it would break Annie’s heart. And Gwen simply couldn’t bear to let that happen.
*
“Are you crazy?” Brian squawked through the phone. “Marriage?”
“She’s the mother of my daughter,” Dylan said. “Why shouldn’t I marry her?”
“Let me count the ways,” Brian said. “First of all, it’s not like she’s some poor, helpless chick. She’s been raising the kid on her own for, what, five years? She doesn’t need you to step in and make an honest woman out of her.”
“True,” Dylan conceded. But he’d never considered that he was marrying Gwen to make an honest woman out of her. She already was an honest woman—one of the most honest women he’d ever known. This was the twenty-first century. Unmarried women who had children didn’t need the legitimacy of a marriage to make them respectable.
“Second, the tabloids will have a field day. You don’t exactly have the reputation of a boy scout, but you come pretty damned close. You’ve never had a scandal attached to you—which makes the vultures doubly eager to smear you. It’s a lot more fun to throw dirt on someone who’s clean than on someone who’s already dirty.”
“I don’t see how marrying Gwen would create a scandal.”
“Because she’s the mother of your child,” Brian explained, enunciating each word as if he were addressing an idiot. “Your five-year-old child.”
“Not a big thing,” Dylan insisted. As long as Gwen and Annie didn’t get dragged through the dirt along with him, he wouldn’t care what the tabloids said. If necessary, he’d preempt them by arranging a few interviews himself. “I found the love of my life,” he’d tell the journalists and talk-show hosts. “I found her, and I lost her, and six years later, I found her again. I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
“Besides,” Brian continued, and then listed the names of half a dozen pretty actresses. “All available. All stunning. All interested.”
“In me? Doubtful.”
“I’m telling you, Dylan—you’ve got a lot of romantic opportunities here in Tinsel Town. You get married, and you’d be throwing all those opportunities away. Unless you plan to cheat on your wife, which brings us back to the subject of the tabloids.”
“I’m not going to cheat on my wife,” he said, thinking about how strange the word wife felt on his tongue. Wife. Could he really go through with this?
He recalled his thoughts about preempting the tabloids by scheduling his own interviews. I found the love of my life. Somehow, that thought didn’t seem anywhere near as weird as wife.
Gwen couldn’t possibly be the love of his life, could she?
Why not? She was kind. She was smart. She worked hard, kept her word, devoted herself to her daughter. She was pretty. She was sexy. She asked so little of him—which made him want to give her so much.
“We’re not rushing into anything,” he promised Brian. “We’re just laying the groundwork. But I feel good about it. I think this is the right step to take.”
“We’ll talk more about this.” Brian’s statement sounded like a warning. “Let me run it past my partners. If you go through with it, we’ll need to find a way to massage your image so it doesn’t hurt you.”
“It won’t hurt me,” Dylan said. “I’m a boy scout—your word. Boy scouts get married. Boy Scout values are about honor and responsibility and all.”
“Yeah, right,” Brian muttered. “Meanwhile, sign a pre-nup. These grand romantic gestures can wind up being seriously expensive.”
“I’ll think about it,” Dylan said, then ended the call, knowing he wouldn’t think about it at all. If Gwen had craved his money, she would have gone after him when he was pregnant. She could have hired an attorney. She could have gone to the tabloids herself, or threatened to.
Not once had she acted like a gold-digger.
Joking aside, he was hardly a boy scout. But Gwen... Yeah. She was the very definition of honorable.
Wife. He mouthed the word, whispered it, held it on his tongue. It still felt weird. For some reason, the love of my life didn’t.
