Found in You(14)

“I was in the shower.”

“I see that.” She winked, and I knew she was saying that she was seeing more than me wrapped in a towel. She was getting the whole picture.

Well, good. I was glad. Then I wouldn’t have to feel like a jerk when I spelled it out for her. Hudson and I were together now. Whatever anyone else had ever planned for Celia and Hudson, it was moot. I was the one he’d chosen. End of discussion.

Except that discussion had only occurred in my head. Some things probably still had to be said out loud.

Celia seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Look, let me get finished with the delivery guys and you can get dressed. Then we can chat or whatever. It seems we have some catching up to do.”

She shut the door behind her, and I let out a deep breath. I wasn’t sure why Celia’s presence was giving me so much anxiety. She wasn’t a threat to me. She felt like one, though. I’d been jealous of her since I’d met her. As Hudson’s oldest friend, she knew him better than anyone. He told her things. He kept her secrets. She’d been the only one who knew about Hudson and me pretending to be a couple. It was an intimate friendship they had.

Hudson had insisted that friendship was the only thing between them. I had to trust that or the envy would tear me apart. The whole charade had started in the first place so that Celia and Hudson’s parents would stop trying to pair up the two. If there really had been something between them, then why would I have been brought into the middle?

I’d only discovered the day before that the reason the Werners and Sophia Pierce were so keen on playing matchmaker was because they thought Hudson and Celia had been together in the past. They thought Hudson was the father of the baby Celia had miscarried. But he wasn’t, and they had never been together. The truth was worse—Hudson had played Celia, had tricked her into falling for him, had sent her spiraling into depression and wild partying. So when she’d ended up pregnant, he felt responsible and claimed parentage.

In a way, Hudson had been responsible. But he wasn’t the man of his youth anymore. He wasn’t so responsible that his games had to follow him for the rest of his life. I couldn’t believe that. Otherwise I would have to believe the same about the things I’d done to others. Certainly even people like us—people who had been so broken that we destroyed others around us—deserved happiness of our own. We didn’t have to spend our entire existence making up for our mistakes. Did we?

I brushed the guilty thoughts out of my mind and quickly changed into a dress I could wear to the club later. I threw my wet hair into a bun and took a deep breath before opening the door.

The delivery men had already left, and I found Celia straightening a row of boxes into an orderly line. There were dozens of boxes, many more than I had anticipated. “Damn. He went all out, didn’t he?”

Celia looked up from her task. “He always does. But as I’m sure you’ve noticed, he has lots of shelves to fill.”

I scanned the room for the first time. A large mahogany desk sat at the far end surrounded by a curved wall of windows. Two armchairs and a long sofa created a sitting area in the middle of the room. A beautiful marble fireplace graced the center of one wall with a large flat-screen television set centered above it. The rest of the wall space was filled with shelves. Shelves and shelves—a booklover’s dream. Except that only one small section near the desk had any books on it.

“Uh, yeah. These boxes are barely going to put a dent in that shelf space.”

“He ordered more, but this is what was already in stock. The rest should come in the next few days or so. And, yes, he’ll still have a lot of empty space. Maybe you can help him fill the rest.”