Free Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish by Cara Colter Page B

father convinced her he was a thief? That he was behind the break-ins that had happened that summer?
    Or had she just come to her senses and realized it wasn’t going to work? That a guy like him was never going to be able to give a girl like her the things she had become accustomed to?
    It seemed to him that there was a lot of space between them that was too treacherous to cross. They’d caused each other pain, he was sure, but he was sure he had caused her more than she had caused him.
    Maybe he had been the one who wrecked fairy tales for her.
    But he’d already been a world away from fairy tales by the time he met her.
    Safer to focus on the here and the now.
    “There used to be a wall here,” he said. And a couch here . He decided that focusing on the here and now meant not mentioning the couch. Not even thinking about it would have been good, too, but it was too late for that.
    “My mom actually opened the walls ups after my dad died.”
    Which meant they were not, technically, even in the same room they had once made out in. The ghosts of their younger selves, breathless with need, were not here.
    Mac somehow doubted her mother had achieved the almost tangible quality of sanctuary that the room had. Her mother, as he recalled her, had been much like Claudia. This room would have had the benefit of an interior designer, the magazine-shoot-perfect layout. It would have been designed with an eye for entertaining. And impressing.
    But Lucy had created a space that was casual and inviting. It was a place where a person could read a book or stay in their housecoat all day. But there was something about it that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
    Mac went through to the dining-room table to set down the envelope of money. There were papers stacked neatly on it. It was not the space of someone who entertained or had large dinner parties. He put his finger on it: her space had a feeling of surprising solitude clinging to it.
    Lucy? Who had been at the heart of a crowd, directing all the action, without even knowing she was? Imposing her standards on others as unconsciously as breathing?
    Lucy? Who had been the most popular girl in her graduating class, not standing up for herself with the likes of Claudia Mitchell-Franks?
    Lucy? Who had always been “in,” now suddenly having to beg for use of the yacht club in the town named for her grandfather?
    Lucy? Who had been as conservative as her parents before her, now tentatively painting her house purple and enraging the community by running a commercial venture from her dock?
    “What happened to you?” he asked softly.
    And he saw more than secrets in her eyes—enormous, green, dazzling. But if he didn’t allow himself to be dazzled, he was sure he saw something he really didn’t want to see. He saw fear.

CHAPTER FIVE
    F OR ONE MOMENT Lucy was almost overcome by a desire to tell him. Everything. That after he had left that summer, her whole world as she had known it had changed irrevocably and forever.
    But she was not giving in to impulses—she already regretted the charade behind Claudia’s back—and especially not where Mac was concerned.
    “Nothing happened to me. I grew up. That’s all.”
    She didn’t want him to look too closely at the table. The charitable foundation registration was sitting there. So was the rezoning application that would allow her to turn this house into a group home for unwed mothers.
    She was not getting into that. Not with him. Not now and not ever.
    Still clutching her housecoat closed, she went over and inserted herself between him and her secrets.
    “Is there something on that table you don’t want me to see?”
    She was close enough that she could smell him, the scent of the pure lake water not quite eradicated by a faint soapy scent.
    “No.”
    “Unlike Claudia,” he said, “you are developing a little worry furrow right here.”
    He touched between her brows.
    And she wanted, weakly, to lean into his thumb and share