My Sunset Love Affair with the Billionaire CEO novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Pier

Lorna cries without a sound on the pier and the man who found her just sits; Renata announces her ex-husband is coming.

The pier ran out into the dark, with a bulb on every fourth post.

I walked to the very end, where the last bulb was burned out.

I sat on the boards with my feet over the water.

Then I cried.

I did it quietly, with my hand over my mouth.

There was a camera on a tripod somewhere, and I would not give it that.

Thirty-four years was a long time to be wrong about one man.

I had ironed his shirts the morning he stopped paying my mortgage.

The boards creaked behind me.

I didn't turn around.

Someone sat down on the planks a few feet away with a grunt.

It was the grunt of a big man whose knees are older than he is.

"Don't say I'm sorry," I said.

"Wasn't going to."

"Don't tell me it'll get better."

"I don't know that it does," said Ray. "I'm not going to lie to you on a dock."

A long time went by with only the water moving.

He didn't pat my shoulder.

He didn't hand me a handkerchief like a man in a movie.

He just sat and let me finish.

It was so much kinder than anything else he could have done that I started crying all over again.

"Sorry," I said, wiping my nose on my cardigan sleeve.

"You said not to say it."

"I'm allowed. It's my pier."

"Is it?"

"For tonight it is."

He huffed out a short laugh.

"Tell me about him," Ray said. "If you want. The one with the stove."

So I told him.

I told him about thirty-four years of bookkeeping at the kitchen table.

I told him about the dealership I had co-signed for in 1998.

I told him about the June morning Dale took his golf clubs and a suitcase and said he needed room.

I told him about page nine, and the yellow tabs, and the soup.

I didn't tell him the number.

I couldn't make my mouth say two hundred and twelve thousand dollars out loud twice in one day.

"He took your retirement," Ray said quietly.

"How did you know that?"

"You said it by the fire. You said you'd like your home back. You didn't say you'd like him back."

I stared at him.

"I did not say that."

"You said it the way I'd say it," he said, "if I'd lost something that a man's signature took."

He looked out at the black water, and his jaw worked.

"My wife died six years ago," he said. "Anne. Cancer, and fast."

"I'd have signed anything if somebody told me it would buy a week."

"I'm sorry."

"You're allowed," he said. "It's my pier."

I laughed through my nose, which was disgusting, and he grinned.

"What was she like?" I asked.

"Loud. She laughed at the wrong parts of movies."

"She kept a list on the refrigerator of the nicest things people said about me, so I'd know they weren't lying."

"Was there a list of the not nice things?"

"That was the second refrigerator."

I laughed again, a real one.

He turned to look at me then.

Up close, with the lamp behind him, his face was weathered and kind and tired, and his eyes were a very dark brown.

"Why a dating show?" I said. "A man like you."

"A man like me?"

"Handsome, handy, no obvious flaws except a bad habit of being right."

"I'm sixty-two years old and I eat dinner standing at a counter," Ray said. "My late wife told me to do something about that."

"And you came on television."

"It was the only place I could get her to stop haunting the kitchen."

I put my hand down flat on the boards between us without thinking about it.

He put his over it.

His palm covered my entire hand, warm and rough.

My heart did something stupid and eager that it hadn't done since before Britta was born.

Neither of us moved.

"I'm fifty-eight," I said. "I have a sewing machine and nine hundred dollars."

"I fix trucks," he said. "I'd call that a good start."

My face went hot to the roots of my hair.

Behind us, in the reeds on the shore, a light clicked on.

It was a small red light, the kind a camera has.

I jerked my hand away.

Footsteps came down the pier.

Renata appeared at the edge of the lamplight with her headset on.

"Gorgeous," she said. "Do you know how good that looks? I couldn't have written it."

"You were filming us," I said.

"I'm always filming. That's the show."

She tapped her clipboard.

"Tomorrow's group date is the Senior Games, and you two are on the same team. The audience will love it."

Ray said nothing, but he stood up and put himself half a step between Renata and me.

Renata smiled at that, too.

"One more thing, Lorna," she said. "Your ex-husband accepted our invitation."

My stomach dropped.

"What invitation?"

"Every contestant's past gets one on-camera moment. He lands in the second week." Renata checked her phone and walked away. "Don't worry. He sounded delighted."

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