He Wants Her Back: The Billionaire's Leading Lady novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Front Steps

I looked at the red circle.

Then at Damon.

"Nine days," I said.

"I'd have done it today," he said. "She made me wait."

Bea pointed her coffee at him.

"Because she needs a dress, you maniac. And I need a dress. And I'm not letting the wedding of the year happen in your T-shirt."

"It's his shirt," I said.

"Worse."

Damon picked up his phone.

"Who are you calling?" Bea said.

"The gate," he said. "Tell them to stop turning photographers away."

Bea stared at him.

"All of them?"

"All of them." He looked at me. "She said not one photo hidden. I heard her."

Nine days later, at four in the afternoon, the gate at the bottom of Damon's drive stood wide open.

The photographers came up the drive on foot, the same ones who'd stood against those iron bars in March.

Nobody stopped them.

Damon's head of security handed each of them a bottle of water and showed them where to stand.

He looked like it was the worst day of his life.

The front steps were wide and pale, and Bea had covered them in white roses and lemon branches.

"Not one rose from Bel Air," she'd promised me. "I checked the receipts."

Forty chairs sat on the gravel at the bottom.

The cast of Low Tide. My director. Two girls from drama school.

Bea's three new clients, who'd called her the Monday after the gala.

The nurse from the hospital, in a blue dress, who I'd sent an invitation to on a whim and who had actually come.

No Strades except one.

I stood inside the front door in my dress.

It was ivory silk, plain, with long sleeves and a low back, and nothing I'd ever worn before.

My bracelet was on my wrist.

My hand was on my stomach, where nothing showed yet.

Bea stood in front of me in emerald green and fixed my hair for the ninth time.

"You okay?"

"I'm about to walk out of Damon Strade's front door in front of thirty photographers."

"That's not an answer."

"I'm so happy I could throw up."

"That's the baby." She kissed my forehead, right on the beauty mark. "Go."

She opened the door.

The light came in, and the ocean, and the noise.

Damon was standing on the top step.

He was in a dark gray suit with no tie, and he turned around when the door opened, and his face did something it had never done once in front of a camera.

It just fell open.

I heard the shutters start.

I walked out of the front door and down to him.

The officiant was a retired judge with a voice like gravel, who Damon had once outbid for a painting.

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