Forever With You by Laurelin Paige
Awesome.. Judith Cleary was actually a bitch, and not just because I wanted her to be one in my head in order to justify my behavior that day. I did like it when things worked out.
"So what did you do? Because you must've done something for her to be mad at you." I'd already decided that whatever it was, I was in full support of it.
Hudson smiled slyly. "I had her kicked out of the country club. For unfit citizenship."
I laughed. "You would think she would've learned her lesson. Here she is trying to take it out on another kid. What a bitch."
His face grew serious. "I'm sorry I ruined Mina's chances for going to our legacy school. I will call Judith and grovel. See what I can do."
"Please don't bother. We don't want that kind of school, our daughter playing with those kinds of people. We can find something better. Besides, there’s no way you’d apologize convincingly."
He didn’t disagree as he took the napkin from my lap, dabbed at my lips and set it down on the table.
Together we looked out over the city, lit up with lights. It was beautiful, being on top of the world. Breathtaking, thrilling, a little overwhelming, but worth it.
I tilted my head and peered over at my husband. "I know we've had many rooftop dinners in our marriage, but this was nice. I mean, the conversation sucks, but the rest of it I'll keep."
“I know something we’ve never done on a rooftop.”
“We’ve had sex on a rooftop before, H. You’re losing your memory.” That wasn’t a night I’d ever forget. It had been his mother’s birthday, but I’d been the one getting the gifts. Hudson always had been good with his mouth.
“Sex was not what I was referring to. And don’t you dare think I don’t remember that night.” His reprimand was low and serious. It made my spine feel tingly at the base.
Still. After all this time.
I grinned. “Then what are you referring to?”
Instead of answering, Hudson pulled out his phone and flipped through a few pages on his screen before setting it down between the two of us. His Spotify app was open to one of my playlists.
"You follow me on Spotify? I thought you just used that app to play lullabies for the babies." All these years, and the man could still surprise me.
"I saw you added this one a few weeks ago," he said, standing from his chair and walking over to mine. He reached over to his phone and pushed play, then held his hand out to me. The familiar strains of our anthem came out of the tiny speakers. "The babies love this particular song," he said, pulling me from my chair and into his arms.
"What are we doing?" I asked, though it was obvious.
"We're dancing. We've never danced on a rooftop." He turned me gently to the beat, and I relaxed into his arms. "This is good, right?"
"Super good. And it's our song." It was strange how I felt like I could melt and come together all the same time. How he could undo me and fix me simultaneously. I pressed my face against his, listening carefully to the words of All of Me as they played. It was a new version, not the John Legend original that Hudson had first played for me all those years ago. This one was a duet between a man and a woman.
"I like this arrangement," I told him. "Before it was always as if you were singing it to me. John Legend's voice—I always imagined it was you telling me that you were giving me all of you. But in this version, there's a woman singing too. And I like that because I feel like I'm saying it back to you. Telling you that you get all of me too."
His grip on me tightened suddenly, and he pressed his lips to my temple. "This isn't how I dreamed our life would be," he said, his voice thin and stretched. "This isn't the future I dreamed I would give you."
I leaned back so I could look him in the eye. "What do you mean? Our life is fantastic. I couldn't want for anything. You gave me three children. You’ve given me a home. Given me my nightclub. My books. My friends. My sanity. Everything I have that is good and wonderful is because of you, Hudson."
He shook his head. "I also gave you my past. I gave you security guards. I gave you a reason to go to bed at night scared."
“And I gave you OCD and obsessions and difficult pregnancies."
"Those weren't your fault," he protested.
"And neither is any of this yours now." I stopped moving, but held onto him at the shoulders.
He attempted to move me again, to start the dancing, but I didn't budge. He gave a frustrated sigh. "The things that are happening now—these threats—Alayna, you have to face that they’ve come about because of somebody I once was. That they are happening because of things I once did. I caused this. I'm the one to blame."
God, he could be so stubborn. Stubborn in his martyrdom.
Well, I could be stubborn too.
"You were the man you were because of terrible circumstances. Because no one showed you that you could be somebody else. Because your mother and father convinced you that you were unfeeling and uncaring, and you believed them." He started to try to speak, but I continued over him. "And it doesn't matter if everything you did was with your free will, because whomever you were before is what made you into the man that I fell in love with. The only reason there is any now with us is because there was once a then."
I brought my hands up to his face, rubbing my thumbs along the rough five-o'clock shadow on his jaw. "We were both broken, Hudson. And we fixed each other. When you first played me this song, the perfect future that I dreamed of with you? Was any future with you at all. And you’ve given me that and so much more. I'm sorry if you find our life together disappointing, because it's been more wonderful than I could ever imagine."
"No, precious, I didn't mean that. I haven't been disappointed for a single second. I'm only disappointed right now, through this. That I can't keep you safe and—"
I cut him off. "I am safe. I'm with you. We are together, and that's all I need to be safe, remember?"
He gave a curt nod.
“We’re going to figure this out," I reassured him. It wasn't often that I was in this position, where I was the one bolstering my husband. He was usually the foundation, the anchor, the levity.
Surprisingly, it comforted me to be able to be that for him now.
He kissed me suddenly, locking his lips to mine and holding them in place for several long seconds. When he broke away, he said, "I'm still going to give you that future I dreamed of. We’ll get rid of this baggage from the past, and then we will be safe for good."
He was so solemn, it was as though he was making a promise. As though he were adding to our wedding vows, and I took them in, placed the words inside me along with the other things he'd said, sworn to me on the day we pledged our lives to each other.
"I believe you," I told him. “I’ll be here when it happens. I’m here until then too.”
The song finished, but we held each other longer. Clutched each other tight.
Then, when we finally broke away, I threw my shoulders back and said the words that I knew we were both thinking. "We both know what we have to do to make progress on this. And I'm ready. Are you?"
"If you're with me, I am," he said earnestly.
"Okay then." I took a deep breath, and tried to ignore the anxiety creeping along my skin. "It's time to call Celia."
14
Hudson
There were a myriad of reasons I hadn't wanted to go to Celia Werner Fasbender.
I didn't trust her.
Any information she shared would come at a great cost.
Seeing her would likely cause my wife stress. Seeing her would likely cause me stress, for that matter.
I didn't necessarily want her to know there was someone threatening me and my family, didn't want her to know the predicament that I was in, for fear she'd take advantage of it.
Because, as I'd mentioned before, I did not trust her.
But, if I were being honest, Jordan and I were essentially stalled on the investigation. It took Alayna's insight for me to finally face that matter, to finally accept that t
Wasn't that where all journeys ended up eventually?
It had to be handled delicately. I thought about it in great detail, how it would go, what she would say. Even after feasting on Alayna, loving her and pleasuring her to the point of exhaustion, the dilemma of adding Celia to our hunt kept me up all night.
As soon as it was late enough in the morning for human interaction to be appropriate, I crawled out of bed and texted my old friend. I had considered calling, but I was sure I knew how that would go. With enough time to talk to her and enough information from me, she would have no reason to meet us in person, and I felt strongly that this was a matter that needed to be addressed face-to-face.
Celia was a woman who was always playing some game. Every word that came out of her mouth, every side glance, every gesture was the move of a pawn. The slide of a rook. Even the text I sent had to be carefully crafted.
I need to see you.
She was already awake, or my text had woken her. She responded quickly. She was smart enough not to ask why or try to gather more from me here. It had to be that, because I certainly didn't believe she was still loyal, not even somewhere deep inside her, underneath all the hard, cold, thick layers that I had helped her build. Her only questions were where and when.
With that settled, I left a note for Alayna, then went down to the office gym for a run. When I returned, she was awake. Coffee was brewing and she'd found the eggs in the refrigerator and was making omelettes.
"Tomorrow. 6 PM. Celia will meet us at Randall's for drinks."
Alayna—my precious, my world, my light, my life—she turned and smiled at me as though I had given her the key to a brighter future instead of announcing we were walking into the gloom of the past.
Hopefully, her optimism was warranted.
As Alayna had requested, we spent the next day and a half going over the video files of the interviews conducted with possible suspects. While I paced the room and tried not to succumb to drinking all the scotch in the loft, Alayna sat stoically, taking feverish notes about the men and women describing the heinous crimes of my past. This was the vulnerability that I hated most—feeling out of control, like a spiraling fall into black nothing. She'd known vaguely about my games, but never in this precise detail. She’d certainly never experienced the horror of listening to it from the victim's side.
Somewhere in the midst of the terrible confessions, I had an epiphany—it hadn't just been Alayna I’d been protecting by keeping all of this from her. The letters, the danger from my past—I'd also been protecting myself.
"That wasn't the man I married," she'd say occasionally as the worst stories were told, seeming to know that I needed comfort, and it helped, but still—by the time we were ready to meet with Celia on Sunday evening, I was tense and on edge.
Other than the occasional reassurance, Alayna had been oddly quiet for the most part, whether processing all she'd seen or letting me have my space, I wasn't sure. But on the ride to Randall's bar, she became herself again, anxious and fretting and full of questions.
"Why did we choose Randall's? We don't usually go there." She twisted her fingers together nervously, the very definition of wringing her hands.
"It was a random point between our location and hers," I answered, not mentioning that Celia and I had gone back and forth on this matter. She had wanted to meet on her turf, I had, obviously, wanted to meet on mine. The office, her hotel, The Sky Launch—all locations were suggested and dismissed, finally settling on using an app that found meet up spots at an equal distance between two points on a map. Randall's it was.
"She knows why we want to see her?" she continued to fidget.
"No." I was terse.
"Then why did she agree to meet us? That doesn't seem like her. To walk into a situation without knowing what she was dealing with? That seems highly suspicious. Doesn't it?" She was working herself up.
I stilled her hand, wrapping it in mine and caressing it with my own, an attempt to calm her. "I suspect that she thinks that I'm going to discuss business with her,” I said. “She wants me to let her and her husband purchase equal shares in Werner Media so that our three-point alliance no longer favors us."
"Of course she does," Alayna huffed indignantly. "Did she really ask you that directly? Or are you just guessing?"
"She asked directly. She said that if I don't let her buy shares, they will find them somewhere else. That was a few weeks ago." It seemed so much longer in the past. I had barely thought about it with everything else going on.
Alayna pulled her hand away from mine brusquely. "You spoke to her recently?" Her eyes burned into me, not quite accusing, but warily.
I should have realized she’d have that reaction.
I reclaimed her hand in mine, placing my fingers through hers so that it wasn't as easy for her to pull away. "I spoke to her, but just once. We have a business relationship. There will be times that we have to speak." I didn't mention that I had been the one to call Celia, that I'd been concerned about the engagement party details for Chandler and Genevieve. It wasn't a good time for Alayna to believe that I was so worried about her mental health that I would resort to calling her foe.
Perhaps that was manipulative on my part.
Add it to the list of things I was guilty for.
"You're right," she said. "I overreacted." She was silent a moment, and then asked the most brutal question of all, the one I'd really hoped to avoid. "Are you sure Celia isn't the one sending the letters?"
We'd promised to be honest. "No."
"She's late," Alayna said, when we’d been sitting at Randall's for nearly seventeen minutes.
Of course she was. Celia would want to make an entrance.
"Maybe she hit traffic coming from downtown." I took a swallow of my scotch. "Or she had a hard time getting away. You remember how it is when your baby’s that young."
Alayna glowered at me. "Are you defending her?"
I sighed heavily. "No. Just, she's not even here yet. I thought we could save the judgment and the daggers until she's earned it." Because if she was still the Celia that I knew, she was going to earn it.
"How very fair and noble of you.” She brought her glass of Sancerre to her lips. And with her sour expression and red wine lips, for a split second I imagined her the Lady to my Macbeth, the one who could truly undo her husband's enemies.
Then the image was gone, and I had to laugh at myself. Alayna as Lady M. Preposterous. It had always been Celia who was calculating and vengeful and steely. Bitter and focused to the core.
And I was not someone who wanted his enemies undone. I had made them. I was resolved to make amends, and leave vengeance for another man. Another man's wife.
I flipped my eyes to the door as the aluminum frame caught in the light, indicating it had opened. Then—cool, crisp, dressed in red, her blonde hair pulled up—there she was.
"Speak of the devil," I muttered to myself.
Alayna turned her head toward the entrance, but the door wasn't in her sightline. Which meant she wasn’t in Celia’s sightline either.
Celia, on the other hand, saw me right away.
She smiled, not too brightly—with the smile of an old acquaintance, which was what I supposed we were now, on our best days.
After checking in with the hostess, she started toward our table, and, though her stride never changed, I could tell the moment that she saw Alayna. Her posture changed. Her chin lifted. Her shoulders rounded backward. Whatever promise she had of being helpful when she walked in, there was less of a chance now, and her body showed it.
I didn't regret bringing Alayna, though. I wouldn't. I wouldn't have even come if not for her.
It was also obvious the moment that Alayna saw Celia.
My wife was the most beautiful woman in the un
But she could never see herself the way that I could. Secretly I suspected she wished she were more refrained and controlled.
Which is why when they met Celia’s, I saw her eyes flash with envy.
Unwarranted envy, in my opinion. Celia was an attractive woman, but she was cold. There was no fire. There was no passion. She might as well have been made of marble and placed on a shelf of one of the fancy homes she decorated for all the life she brought to a room.
Except, maybe she’d changed.
I was still holding out hope that she had.
"Hudson, Laynie," she said in greeting when she arrived at our table.
If I were a gentleman, I would've stood. I didn't.
She sat down at the far end of the booth. Alayna sidled closer to me, likely by instinct.
"I didn't know we were bringing our significant others," Celia said to me, as though we were the only two at the table. "Should I call Edward? He doesn't have any plans."
"That won’t be necessary," I said quickly. I was determined to get straight to the point. Determined to let her know right away that this was not going to be a conversation about our businesses. "This conversation doesn't involve him. It does, however, involve Alayna."
Celia's eyes narrowed into tiny little slits as she moved her focus to the woman next to me. "I'm intrigued.” She studied my wife much more closely than I liked. “How are you, Laynie? It's been so long since we've seen each other face-to-face. You look… tired."