Falling for Fitz (6 page)

Stratton sipped his beer in respectful
silence as Fitz’s words sank in.

“
So, what happened
tonight?” he finally asked.

“
I walked into the Hotel
DuPont and there she was: Daisy Edwards in the flesh after nine
years. And she was standing there with her—her
goddamn
fiancé. And he was
such
an
asshole
to her I ended
up punching him in the face. Possibly broke his nose.” He shrugged.
“I don’t know. Daisy was furious. Called me a Neanderthal. I didn’t
stay to find out if he was okay.”

Stratton handed Fitz another beer,
which Fitz took by rote and threw back. It was starting to do its
work. He was mellowing out a little.

Stratton didn’t say anything
immediately and when Fitz looked up, his younger brother was
desperately trying not to laugh and losing the battle. “You beat up
your ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend.”

“
Technically her
fiancé.”

Stratton snickered quietly, his
shoulders quaking as he stared down at the floor. “Jesus,
Fitz.”

Fitz shook his head back and forth,
leaning forward on his knees as he felt his own laughter start. He
laughed until the waiting tears filled his eyes and his belly
ached. “Oh, man. I haven’t seen her in nine years, and the first
thing I do is beat up her boyfriend. Geez.”

Stratton sat back in his chair,
finishing off his beer and putting the empty bottle on the shiny
hardwood floor. “So, what next?”

“
Hell if I know,” said
Fitz, then quieter. “She’s moving back here.”

“
Is that good or bad?”
asked Stratton.

“
Honestly, I don’t know.”
He rubbed his forehead, thinking of what she was about to say to
her fiancé just before Fitz hit him. She was about to say that they
were just “old friends.” Except he’d
never
felt that way about Daisy, and
even after all this time, “friends” rang hollow. He didn’t want to
be her friend. He wanted to be her everything, and he definitely
wanted her in his bed. “Bad.”

“
You still care about
her.”

“
Yeah,” said Fitz softly
without a second thought. “I never got over her.”

Stratton nodded sagely. “You and
Barrett and these Edwards girls.”

“
Just thank God there
weren’t three more, Strat, or you, Alex, and Wes would be down for
the count too.”

“
There’s a pretty big
problem, though,” said Stratton. “She’s getting married,
Fitz.”

“
I heard,” said Fitz
bitterly.

The doorbell rang alerting them to
pizza, and Stratton hopped up to answer it while Fitz slumped back
down into the couch, opening another beer. He remembered the way
Dr. M. had manhandled and intimidated her, and his eyes
narrowed.

She’s not getting married
to him
, thought Fitz, telling himself he’d
do whatever he had to to help her see that Dr. M. was no good for
her.
She didn’t want to marry me? Fine.
But she’s
not
marrying him. Over my dead body.

Daisy woke up in the two-bedroom suite
she’d reserved at the Hotel DuPont, got out of bed, and peeked into
the sitting room to see if Josh was up yet. Didn’t look like it. No
wonder. It was eight a.m. here, but only five o’clock for her and
Josh. While she was an early riser, baking at the crack of dawn,
Josh probably wouldn’t be up for hours.

She changed into workout clothes and
slipped out of the suite quietly to use the fitness center. At home
she had a stationary bike and although she didn’t love working out,
no one who baked cookies for a living could skimp on the exercise.
If she did, she’d be as fat as a house in a month.

She pressed the elevator button,
praying that she didn’t run into her cousin, who was staying here
with Barrett, or any of the other English’s or Edward’s, though she
was fairly sure the rest of them had headed back to Philly after
the Gala last night. For her part, she’d spent the remainder of the
night in her suite with an irate Josh, convincing him not to file
assault charges against Fitz and persuading him to stay the night
and not to take the redeye back to Portland.

Her head was still spinning over last
night.

She swiped her card against the card
reader and was relieved to find the fitness center mostly empty.
Two middle-aged women walked next to each other on the treadmill,
chatting, and a younger man kept a good pace on the third of four
treadmills. He winked at her when she entered, but she pretended
not to notice and headed for the bikes.

She started slowly, grateful for the
time to figure out what the hell had happened last night.
Illumination came pretty easily.

Despite the surprising strength of
Daisy’s feelings for Fitz and her panty-sopping attraction to him,
everything had happened within the bounds of expectations last
night… until the end.

She reviewed everything
carefully.

She’d expected their reunion to be
awkward, and it was in some ways. Though, to be honest, she hadn’t
expected it to be so charged. She’d sort of assumed Fitz had
forgotten her over the years, and while she’d have to fight against
the power of her attraction to him, he’d be more or less
indifferent to her.

She could tell he’d been thrown off by
seeing her, and their first attempts at conversation were stilted
and uncomfortable, but they’d eventually segued from polite
pleasantries into an old rhythm of easy banter. And for a few
minutes, she’d thought maybe they could leave the past behind and
move forward as friendly acquaintances who shared a brief and
ancient history.

What had truly surprised her was two
things:

First, Daisy was almost positive that
their attraction to each other was both instantaneous and entirely
mutual.

She remembered the way he had looked
at her, his eyes raking down her body, undressing her when they
were first reunited. That same heat in his gaze, hot and
unsatisfied, had flared up several more times throughout the
evening. The way his breath caught when their hands had touched.
His lips brushing against her cheek. The way he’d flipped his hand
over to lace his fingers through hers. She couldn’t deny it. After
all this time, he was still attracted to her.

Daisy had underestimated him. She’d
underestimated herself. But more than anything, she’d
underestimated their chemistry together.

She quickened her pace on the bike,
droplets of sweat dripping down her face.

The second, far more confusing
surprise was how emotional Fitz had been with her—the anger in his
eyes when he’d mentioned their brief engagement, his eager chuckle
as she teased him about his boring deals, and the way his face had
softened when she’d reached for his hand. She’d expected polite
indifference from him; what she’d seen—before Josh’s inopportune
interruption—was genuine emotion, vibrant feelings that weren’t
latent holdovers from nine years ago, but alive and urgent. And
after Josh’s interruption? Hitting him like a jealous, protective
boyfriend? She couldn’t have been more shocked. What in the world
did it mean?

None of this was part of
her plan, and yet she might be seeing the answer to a question that
had always haunted her. They’d had such an effortlessly good time
together that summer—without the complication of pregnancy, would
they would have parted ways and maybe found each other again down
the line? Between their compatibility and attraction, would they
have had a chance?
Maybe,
she thought.
We might
have
.

The broken condom had
complicated things. Fitz had only asked her to marry him because he
feared she was pregnant. He’d
never
told her that he loved her, not the night they’d
made love, not the next morning when he proposed, not in his
mostly-sterile letters to her from London that were concerned about
her health, and not even when she was lying in a hospital bed with
a broken leg and several broken ribs after miscarrying his child.
And while she knew he had cared for her on
some
level, without the word “love,”
despite ample opportunity, she’d come to believe that the summer
they spent together was just a fling. Or it would have been, had
responsibility and guilt not entered the equation the second the
condom broke.

I’d do anything for
you.

The words resonated in her head,
making her wince. She knew that Fitz would do anything to settle
the debt between them. She’d known it when he offered her his high
school ring as an engagement ring the morning after their tryst.
She’d known it again when he arrived at the hospital straight from
London. She’d known it before he said goodbye when he told her,
“I’ll still marry you” despite her miscarriage. Knowing his motive
was honor, not love, Daisy had thrown his ring at his head, telling
him she didn’t need his pity or his stupid ring, and he should go
back to London and never, ever bother her for as long as she lived.
In a strange way, she even knew that he hadn’t contacted her for
all these years because she’d told him to leave her alone so
definitively. It was his way of honoring her wishes.

But now they’d been reunited and
amidst scorching attraction and uncharacteristically indiscriminate
emotion, his guilt was the least confusing thing about last night
and the one thing Daisy felt she could address.

I’d do anything for
you.

Even now, nine years later, he still
perceived there was a debt to settle.

She needed for him to
understand that he was wrong. If there ever
had
been a debt between them, which
was arguable in the first place since she had wanted him just as
badly that night by the pool as he had wanted her, it had been
forgiven long ago. The sheer force of her love for him hadn’t
allowed her to hold a grudge. All she wanted for Fitz was a happy
and full life loving someone as much as Daisy had once loved him.
She wanted him to have the chance to find that sort of happiness,
unencumbered by the weight of the past. Her heart insisted that she
gift him his freedom from any misguided sense of obligation, and
that’s exactly what she intended to do. Getting over Fitz
emotionally was her problem, not his, but by setting him free, she
hoped it would set her free, too.

Circling back to their attraction and
his unexpected emotions, she broke into a sweat that had nothing to
do with her workout.

If she intended to hold
onto her sanity, being with Fitz physically simply wasn’t an
option. Though she’d never been Miss Right for Fitz English, if the
heat in his eyes told her anything, it assured her that Miss Right
Now was up for grabs. But, despite her loneliness, Daisy wasn’t
interested in being
anyone’s
Miss Right Now. Not even Fitz
English’s.

Her body protested this decision as
she remembered the feeling of his lips against her cheek, the heat
of his hand laced through hers.

She told her body to shut the hell
up.

First of all, she was still
technically “engaged” in the eyes of her friends and family, and
Daisy wasn’t a cheater, so until she and Dr. M. officially “broke
up” she simply wasn’t available to be Fitz English’s
plaything.

And second of all, she had more
maturity and self-respect than would allow her to engage in a
purely-physical fling with someone who didn’t genuinely care for
her. Daisy was lonely, but in an encouraging burst of spirit, she
realized that she wasn’t desperate. She wanted wedding rings and a
home and children. She wanted deep, mutual, unconditional love. She
wanted someone to be so crazy about her that nothing and no one
would get in the way of him having her.

She sighed, wishing that life had
turned out differently for them. But she also saw things clearly.
There was only a past for her and Fitz to reconcile, not a future
to look forward to. The sooner Fitz let go of his obligation to
her, the sooner Daisy could let go of her love for him, and the
sooner they could both get on with their lives. And after nine
years of his guilt and her unrequited love, the only wish they both
deserved to come true, was the freedom to finally move
on.

***

Fitz’s mouth felt as dry as cotton
balls and his head thumped with the drums of a hundred high school
marching bands. He opened his eyes slowly, the effort painful,
trying to orient himself. Blinking twice, he tried to lean up, but
his cheek clung to the surface beneath him. He jerked his neck a
little and dislodged himself from dried saliva and black leather,
but the effort made his head start pounding all over again. He
leaned on his elbows, looking around at Stratton’s living room as
the details of last night started careening back to him.

The Hotel DuPont… Daisy Edwards…
asshole fiancé… bloody nose… Strat… beer… pizza… beer, beer,
beer.

He sat up, wincing from the throbbing
in his head. He looked over at the kitchen groggily where he
smelled coffee, which was pretty much the only smell on the face of
the earth that wouldn’t make him want to heave.