Double Contract Love novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: White Roses

It was seven in the morning and the whole street was awake.

Across the road a woman in a quilted robe was watering her ferns, and she had stopped with the hose pointed at the sidewalk.

Two joggers slowed to a walk at the corner.

The mail carrier stood at the end of the walk with a bundle of envelopes, pretending to read one.

I stepped out onto the porch in Dal's shirt and pulled the door shut behind me.

"Preston," I said. "It's seven."

"I know. I've been out here since five. I didn't want to wake you."

"You woke me at seven instead."

He winced and held out the roses.

"Lily, please. Let me say it."

Nobody had called me Lily in two years but him.

"You have the length of this walk," I said.

"I made a mistake."

"Which one?"

He looked at me.

"Tabitha," he said, lower. "And Gwen. She had it all planned, and I got swept up in it. I thought I wanted a different life. I thought it was the easier road. I was wrong."

"You stood on a stage and said I was the wrong sister."

"I was nervous. It came out wrong."

"You rehearsed it."

His face flickered.

"Come back to me," he said, almost in a whisper. "I'll end it with her today. We'll get married on the twenty-second like we planned, you and me. Your father wanted that."

My father was dead.

He had no business using him.

"You want to get married on November twenty-second," I said, "at St. Aldric's."

"Yes."

"With my husband in the front row."

"Lily, you can't be serious about this man. He's a tree cutter. You barely know him. People do crazy things when they're hurt."

"I do," I said. "I married him."

"Fix it. I'll fix it. And whatever you find in those papers, it isn't what it looks like. I swear to you."

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