REMEMBER US: A Billionaire Romance (Part Two) Read Free

watching her face closely for her reaction. She seemed okay, so I continued. “When we grew close, we had a discussion about our previous lovers, and you asked me not to tell you about my past. I honored that a little too well, I think.”
    “I asked you not to tell me?”
    I nodded. “You said you wanted to pretend that the day I met you was the beginning of everything. You said it wasn’t important to you to know whom I’d dated, whom I loved, whom I didn’t.”
    She rubbed her casted leg again. “So you didn’t.”
    “I didn’t. And then you moved out here; we got engaged; and we planned a wedding. It was going to be a beautiful affair here in Los Angeles. We rented out a beautiful garden downtown, had a priest, all the guests coming. Everything was set.”
    “And I called it off because of a snafu at the county office.”
    She made it sound so trivial. It hadn’t felt trivial at the time.
    “You wouldn’t let me explain. All you could hear was that I was married, and that convinced you that I’d been lying to you all along. I tried to convince you that I wouldn’t do that, that I wouldn’t have taken you down there if I had known you would find out that way, but you wouldn’t listen.”
    “I moved out?”
    “You rented a little house downtown, not far from where you were working on the mural for Margaret.”
    “Why didn’t I go back to Texas?”
    “I don’t know, really. I was hoping it was because it wasn’t really over between us. I wanted to believe that it was because you were upset, but you weren’t ready to end things between us completely.”
    “But you don’t know for sure.”
    “I don’t.”
    She adjusted her position in the chair, a low moan slipping from between her lips as she did. I wanted to insist she go back to her bedroom, take her pill, and relax a little. But I knew she didn’t want to be fussed over. Not now.
    “I want to see it,” she said after a few minutes.
    “What?”
    “The house I was renting. Maybe it’ll help me remember.”
    An image flashed through my mind, the high steps in front of the house covered in roses I’d bought and had delivered. Every day. For a week.
    “The steps are too steep. We’d never be able to get the wheelchair up there.” I sat forward and touched her knee lightly. “There’s plenty of time. The doctor said you shouldn’t push things, that it would come back naturally if it comes back at all.”
    She nodded. “I know. I just…I feel like something is missing, you know? I just want to get on with my life.”
    “Patience was never your strong point.”
    She smiled then, her eyes meeting mine for the first time since her father barged into the house.
    “Thank you,” she said, touching my hand. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”
    I shrugged. “I love you, Harley. And I’ve always believed that what happened three months ago was just a blip. We’re meant to be together.”
    Her smile widened briefly, but then pain shot through her expression. I’d had enough. I stood and swept her out of the wheelchair, carrying her to the small bedroom at the back of the house she’d been living in since coming home from the hospital. Her pills were on the bedside table. I fed one to her, then got the heating pad that seemed to be the only thing that could relieve the worst of the pain before the pill began working.
    She let me stretch out on the bed beside her; she even allowed me to cradle her head against my chest. As we lay there, I could almost believe that everything was going to be okay, that Harley was coming back to me. I held on to that hope with everything I had.

Chapter 3
     
    Harley
    They removed my cast today. I wasn’t completely free of restraint because they replaced it with a removable boot to continue to support the section of the tibia that was broken the worst and continued to resist healing. My physical therapist said that I would be free of the boot in a few weeks if I kept working as hard