Free Better for Us by Vanessa Miller Page A

me.”
    “But, Noel, you’ve been so angry with me about Jaylen. I—I’m a little surprised that you would even entertain the thought of marriage right now.” Although Ryla was surprised, her heart was beating a mile a minute and she felt butterflies floating about her stomach. In the dreams she’d had of Noel popping the question, he’d always been on bended knee, but holding hands was just as good, Ryla told herself.
    Noel said, “I’m not thinking that we have to really get married. So, I guess I’m asking for you to be engaged to me for a little while.”
    And just that quickly, the dream died. She pulled her hands away from him. “What?”
    “Look, if I don’t do something drastic, I could lose this election. So I was hoping that you would be willing to pretend to be engaged to me for a while.”
    “So, we wouldn’t have to get married?” she asked to clarify the situation.
    As if he was in a business meeting, he leaned back in his seat and with that I-rule-the-world air that he had as he told her of his plan. “This is the way I was thinking we’d play this thing out... The election is in three months. So, if we had a quick engagement and then arranged a late-September wedding—”
    “But I thought you didn’t want us to get married,” Ryla interrupted.
    “Woman, will you let me finish?”
    With a wave of her hand, she indicated the floor was his.
    “As I was saying.” He gave her a pointed look, daring her to interrupt him again. “We’ll plan the wedding for late September, sometime around the twenty-fourth. We’ll do it up, invite our family and friends, and then as I am standing in front of the preacher waiting for you to recite your vows, you scream something like ‘I just can’t do this,’ and then run out of the church like somebody just snatched your purse and you’re trying to get it back.”
    “I’m not about to humiliate myself just so you can get the sympathy vote,” Ryla protested.
    Noel appeared to be puzzled as he said, “I don’t understand you, Ryla. You’ve been running in and out of my life since the day I met you, and now that I’m asking you to do what you are obviously good at, to help me, you act like it’s a cardinal sin.”
    Okay, Ryla could admit that Noel had probably received the short end of the stick when he decided to date her back in college. But couldn’t he see that asking her to become a runaway bride was just as bad as what she had done to him? “This is not right.”
    “My career is on the line, Ryla.” He pointed at the newspaper. “The press has practically married us off already. I can’t go back and say that we’re not getting married. Do you know how bad it would look if I tell my constituents that I’m not willing to marry the mother of my child?”
    “Well, we could just get married for real, you know,” Ryla suggested. But when she saw the look of horror on Noel’s face, she realized that she had been right about his feelings toward her. Before she could stop herself, she belted out, “Do you really hate me that much, Noel?”
    Noel shook his head. “I don’t hate you, Ryla. But I don’t trust you, either.”
    She understood why he didn’t trust her. If he had taken Jaylen away from her and kept her for seven years, she would have a hard time believing a word he said, too. “What I did may not have been right, but I had my reasons.”
    He harrumphed. “I figured out what your so-called reason was. And that was no reason at all.”
    “How can you sit here and even think that I would have been fine staying with a man who cheated on me?”
    “I never cheated on you.” Noel’s voice roared throughout the room. Heads swiveled. He took a sip of his iced tea and then continued in a lower voice. “Cathy tried to kiss me. That much is true, but if you hadn’t run off, you would have seen that I politely took her arms from around my neck and told her that I was in love with you.”
    Oh, my God, was Noel right? Had she run