The Last Eligible Billionaire(91)

“Hayes?”

She nods. “Hayes.”

A massive gaping hole opens in my heart for the teenage boy looking for love.

For the boy who believed in love.

“He’ll tell you now that he saw that three of the Emmas and Cricket and Leah flirted more with Jonas than they did with him, and that he kept dating them to give them something no one else could. That Ella and Odette were only in it for the gifts, and that the rest of them got off on dating the weird Rutherford with the big trust fund and Razzle Dazzle Village season tickets. But he didn’t at the time. He took a long time to grow into his looks, he didn’t have the societal advantage of Jonas’s natural charm—and I say that as his mother who thinks he’s utterly perfect exactly the way he is—but he’d cut his teeth watching Razzle Dazzle films, and that child believed in the power of love. He believed so hard in the power of love.”

“You remember all of their names.”

“You will too one day, Begonia. If not for your own children, for Hyacinth’s.”

I pull my knees to my chest. “A little kid named Aiden shoved my niece Dani on the playground two months ago,” I mutter.

She smiles at me. “You’ll remember.”

“Why are you here? Not to be rude, but—Hayes dumped me, and then he told the whole world we were fake, and—”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Then who—”

She tilts a brow at me, then shifts her focus to the ocean, where Marshmallow is still dancing about, trying to catch waves in his mouth.

“No,” I whisper.

“Begonia, that dog brought me your signed contract the first night that I was in Maine. I put it back in your luggage for you.”

“You knew,” I whisper.

“I suspected from the minute I laid eyes on you. I knew a few hours after that. What I didn’t know was what you were hoping to get out of the proximity to my son and my family.”

I shake my head, but that doesn’t stop my eyes from burning again. “Something new. Anything but my old life. I didn’t want to fall in love. I just got out of a relationship that was—well, it was lacking. I wanted an adventure. I wanted to live without being told I couldn’t do the simplest things that sounded fun. I wanted to find myself. Not lose myself again.”

“Are you lost?”

I shake my head. “No. I’m not lost. I’m sad.”

“Hayes was never the same after Trixie and Brock,” Giovanna says quietly. “I thought he’d come back out of his shell. That I’d see my boy again, the one who believed in the goodness of the world, who had hope, who had so much love to give, but he closed himself off so hard. It was three years before he dated anyone again, and the minute he so much as suspected someone wanted him for anything other than himself, she was out the door. He’d bring the occasional date to an event, but I always assumed it was more to give meddling family members or the press something to talk about than it was because he truly enjoyed his date’s company. He was keenly aware that if he was spotted in public with a woman, he’d be labeled a playboy if he was spotted with a different woman anytime in a six-month window after that. He used it to his advantage.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you gave me back my little boy. You made him believe in love again. I have never—ever—seen him laugh with another woman the way I’ve seen him laugh with you. Or stick up for another woman the way he sticks up for you. And I don’t want what happened to him to happen to you merely because he’s terrified to love you back.”

“Stop.”

“Thomas’s death shook him. It shook all of us. But then Mathias and Jonas both got married too, leaving Hayes as the world’s most prominent single man in possession of such a large fortune, if you’ll forgive the reference—I was worried he’d do something drastic. I followed him to Maine with Amelia because I didn’t want him to do something he’d regret.”

“Or something you’d regret.”

“Antonio showed up at his house with an eligible bachelorette in tow two years ago, and Hayes retreated to Maine and started dating the mayor there without a fake relationship contract.” She purses her lips. “Kristine is a lovely woman, but Hayes wouldn’t have been happy with her, and he wouldn’t have been fair to her either.”

“Fair how?”

“She deserves to be loved. We all do.”

I twist and bury my head in my knees. She said it herself.

Hayes is terrified to love anyone.

And I can’t fix that for him.

God knows I tried to do whatever it took to make Chad love me for me for years. I can’t spend another eternity trying to make Hayes not afraid to love me too.

Am I truly that hard to love? “You’ve made your point. You can go.”

“Oh, Begonia, he could so easily love you.” She squeezes my shoulder, and I want to tense, but I can’t, because she feels safe and kind and she’s giving me hope in a way I never would’ve expected of Giovanna Rutherford. “And he wants to. He does. But big feelings—he hasn’t let himself feel them in so long, he just needs time.”

“Please don’t give me false hope,” I whisper.

“You love him.”