Then There Was You Page 23

  Even her clothing—a T-shirt and old jeans—looked like she’d pulled them on straight off the floor.

  His heart thundered, but his mind fought to restrain him from striding into her office, closing her blinds, and sweeping her off her chair and into his arms.

  Get a grip, Tyler. You haven’t even been on a date yet.

  He paused. Gathered his scattered emotions. Drew in one deep breath, followed by another. Then he crossed the short distance to her open doorway.

  “Hi.” It was more of a croak than a word. So much for cool and collected.

  She didn’t even move, still staring at the wall like it was playing a riveting movie.

  “Paige?” His words cracked through the room, and she jolted, her head jerking in his direction.

  “Josh?” A collision of emotions crossed her face.

  “Is everything okay?”

  She tried to smile, but her trembling lips gave her away. “Fine. Just, you know, busy. When did you get back?”

  He stepped into her office, pushing the door shut with his foot. “Few hours ago.” He glanced around. Her couch was way too small for his frame but he folded himself into it anyway. It beat towering over her when she was obviously upset.

  This was not how he imagined their reunion. He’d planned for smiles and a conversation where he asked her if she wanted to have lunch, dinner, clean the building’s toilets, anything to get to spend time with her.

  Instead she was broken up about something, and he had no idea whether to push or back away.

  She sucked in a shuddering breath and twisted a stray piece of hair around her finger. “I’m sorry. It’s been a tough couple of days.” This time she summoned a genuine smile. “I’m glad you’re home. I missed you.”

  He locked eyes with her chocolate gaze. Leaning forward, he set his elbows on his knees. “Me too.” He eyed the open blinds. “Feel like taking a walk? Getting some coffee?”

  She heaved out a breath so large it was like she’d been holding the world’s air supply. “Yes, please.”

  Grabbing her gray jacket off the back of her chair, she tunneled her arms down the sleeves then slung her purse over her shoulder. Like there was any chance he would let her pay for anything.

  “Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  He opened the door, allowing her to step in front of him, her hands plunged into her pockets. He tried not to think about how perfectly her hand had fit in his on the plane, but to no avail.

  Easy, Tyler. Don’t get ahead of yourself.

  Cutting down the back stairs, they exited through a side door and into the brisk, early spring air. Brisk for Sydney, anyway.

  A few struggling bursts of sunshine managed to fight their way through the cloud cover, but a cool wind sent leaves tumbling across the campus and people hurrying from building to building. Australians weren’t good at dealing with temperatures under 20°C.

  Josh hadn’t thought this through. The café on campus would have them being scrutinized by half the staff, but his car wasn’t here. He was sure he couldn’t fold himself into her tiny machine. Even if he could, there was no chance he was letting her drive. Not because his manly pride couldn’t handle it, but because he’d seen her drive and he wasn’t giving her any reason to get behind the wheel more than necessary.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets, curling them into fists to warm them up. After two weeks of late American summer, it was going to take a few days to readjust. Paige was silent beside him. He liked that about her. Unlike some girls, she didn’t seem to need to fill every silence with words. Not that she held back when she had something to say.

  “Want to walk for a bit?” He slowed his stride to match hers.

  “Sure.”

  They settled into a comfortable silence as their feet found a path that meandered around the campus.

  His mind buzzed with all the words he wanted to say, but didn’t know how: he’d missed her, he’d thought about her before every concert, he’d kept turning around expecting she would be there. Malcolm, their US logistics manager, was more than competent but he wasn’t Paige.

  “Thanks for everything on the tour. You did a great job.” Josh winced. He finally saw the woman he hadn’t stopped thinking about in weeks and that was the best he could come up with?

  “Thanks. How was the States? Everything go okay?”

  “Fine. Busy. Those new hotels you booked for us were great.”

  “I’m glad.” Paige hadn’t so much as glanced at him during the awkward pleasantries. They lapsed back into a silence straining with things unsaid.

  What he wanted was to be was the average guy who got to ask the woman he liked out for dinner and a movie. Straightforward. Simple. Except even that would potentially expose Paige to a level of scrutiny she might not be prepared for.

  A gaggle of six girls in their early twenties approached. “Hey, Josh. Welcome back.” One he vaguely recognized but couldn’t place gave him a friendly smile. Her gaze flicked between him and Paige.

  “Thanks.” He offered a smile but didn’t slow his stride as they passed.

  Was it fair to ask her to think about giving up so much, when he spent months of the year on the road? Could she reconcile herself to the world he and his family lived in? The profile, the expectations? The days like today, when the people you loved were being defamed on the front page of the newspaper and there was nothing you could do?

  It made no sense. None whatsoever. And then, when he looked down at his side, every fiber in his being told him he would spend the rest of his life regretting it if he didn’t at least try and find out.

  He realized she’d paused at a fork in the path. Her brown eyes peered up at him, her cheeks flushed. She pinched her bottom lip between her top teeth, then released it. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you too.” He couldn’t stop the smile stampeding across the face if he wanted to.

  She returned it with one of her own. “Okay, then.”

  “Okay.” He stood there staring at her. He hadn’t been in this place in years. Had no moves, no smooth spiels for situations like this.

  “What are you thinking?” The wind blew some loose strands of her hair across her face and she captured them, tucking them behind her ear.

  About kissing you. Picking you up and spinning you around and making you laugh. For the rest of my life. What came out was, “I need to talk to you about something.”

  The expectation on her face deflated like an old balloon. “I need to talk to you about something too.”

  He gulped at the turn in the conversation, his mouth suddenly drier than the Sturt Stony Desert in February. “Let’s sit down.”

  He gestured toward a bench set about twenty meters away, surrounded by bushes on three sides. It wasn’t right out in the open and would ensure they could have this conversation in private without anyone creeping up on them.

  Their feet plodded through the grass. They sat, a more-than-appropriate distance between them. Next to him, Paige’s gaze was steady and expectant. He was tempted to let her go first. Just in case she wanted to say she’d thought about it and wasn’t interested in him, his life, after all. But that would be taking the easy way out. She’d told him about Ethan. He needed to tell her he wasn’t even close to the guy she thought he was.

  “I can go first.” Paige offered the words in a small voice. As if she knew this conversation could change everything.

  “No. It’s okay. I should.” He wanted to hold the moment, before he shattered all her remaining illusions. He didn’t know what she thought might be coming, but he could guarantee it wouldn’t be this.

  Josh leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You made a comment in Christchurch about me having no regrets.”

  Behind him, she stayed silent. He bit his lip. He looked back at her over his shoulder, capturing her gold-flecked gaze. “I need to tell you something.”

  “Okay.” She settled back, waiting for him to speak.

  “A long time ago
, I dated a girl called Narelle. More than dated.” Eight years later, even just hearing her name aloud sent stabs though him. None of them good. All the great stuff they’d shared had been washed away in the tsunami of devastation that destroyed them.

  He steeled himself. “We’d been together a couple of years. Were going to get married. Or so I thought. But I kept putting off proposing. The band was just taking off and I was spending a lot of time on the road. I wanted things to be a bit more settled, more certain.”

  He’d been twenty-four. Had the world at his feet. Thought he was invincible. Chosen.

  “We—” He paused. “No, strike that. I let us make some bad choices. Narelle got pregnant.” He tried to keep his tone neutral. The buck stopped with him.

  Paige’s eyes widened and a whoosh of air escaped her lips, but she didn’t respond.

  He sat back, clasping his hands so tightly his knuckles turned white. They’d done the same the day he’d sat in their lounge and told his parents. He’d seen the devastation and disappointment written across their faces.

  “It tore my parents up. I let them, Narelle, myself, everyone down so badly. I was going to step down from the band, marry her. Try to make it right. As right as I could. The rumors had already started. My parents had speaking engagements cancelled. And a book deal. Then . . .” He sucked in a breath. “Narelle went into labor at twenty-three weeks. It was one of those unexplained things. The baby lived for only a few minutes. A little girl. Hannah.” His throat clogged. He swallowed, trying to clear it.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I got to the hospital too late to be there, but I got to hold her for a few minutes. She was tiny. Perfect. All she needed was time—” He couldn’t go on. His words choked him.

  He swallowed hard. “We tried to carry on. Tried to fix our relationship. But it was broken. The truth was that every time I looked at her, I couldn’t get beyond the fact I’d taken something from her that wasn’t mine to take.

  “Then I found out my life insurance provided coverage for the death of a child. Not much, but enough to pay for the plot Narelle’s family bought, cover the expenses. To make a claim, I needed her birth and death certificates.

  “Narelle got all angsty about the birth certificate. Cagey. First she said she kept forgetting to get me a copy, then she couldn’t find it, then she said she didn’t want to make the claim. Eventually she told me why. I wasn’t listed as Hannah’s father.” He took a deep breath, then swallowed. “Where my name should have been, it said Father Unknown.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath beside him but he barreled on, couldn’t let himself stop to see what Paige’s reaction was to his great big ugly shame.

  “It turned out that while I’d been busy, consumed with the album and the band and the tour and being the great up-and-coming Josh Tyler, she’d been feeling neglected. Fallen back in with some old high school friends. The kind who thought the defining characteristic of a good weekend was being unable to remember most of it.”

  “When I was away, she’d go out with them. Drink too much. Then one night she went home with some nameless guy.”

  Josh sucked in some air. “It wasn’t until after I got back from that tour that we . . . slept together.” His stomach still curdled at the memory. Him coming off a great tour, high on playing night after night in front of crowds of thousands, convinced he was God’s gift to the world. Her, wrapping herself around him, telling him how much she’d missed him, that they were going to get married anyway, so what did it matter?

  Unlike her, he didn’t even have the excuse of large amounts of alcohol that dulled his senses and numbed his reasoning. But he’d been drunk all right—punch drunk on his own pride and ego.

  “We had the mother of all fights when I found out. She said there was no way she could tell me, that I would have discarded her without a second thought if she had. And the truth is, I would have. I was the great Josh Tyler. Worship leader extraordinaire. I was arrogant and blinded by my own ego. Josh Tyler with used goods? Never going to happen. The only chance she had was to make me the same.”

  Narelle had lost as much as him. More. She’d saved herself for twenty-four years, only to lose it all in a hazy blur with a guy she couldn’t even name, then resorted to luring him to bed to cover up what she was afraid may have resulted.

  For every recrimination he’d heaped on Narelle’s head in his anger and pain, he’d never doubted that she loved him, that what they’d shared had been real, even if the ending was steeped in mixed motives and deception. In desperation, she’d done the unthinkable, but it didn’t wipe out the two years they’d had before that.

  He kept his gaze down, focusing on the lush grass at his feet unable to handle seeing the disappointment, or worse, in Paige’s eyes. “To this day I have no idea if Hannah was my biological daughter or his. I choose to believe that she was, is, mine. That she at least got to be the product of something real, not some drunken mistake with someone unknown.”

  That was one of the only things he was proud of from that time. Even after he’d found out, he’d still wanted Hannah to be his daughter, begged Narelle to change the birth certificate. He’d argued that she deserved better than to have her father listed as Unknown. Beyond his family, until now, he’d never breathed that Hannah might not be his to anyone.

  “So please know, I know what it feels to live with regret so bad that it shadows you every second of every day. To wake up every morning wishing you could have a do-over and make things different.

  “I promised myself I would never ever let my family down again. Let the people I love down. My parents’ work, the band, it’s so much more now. The platform, the impact, all of it. And Christians, I’ve discovered, are often not the most gracious or forgiving when a high profile someone doesn’t meet their expectations. I will never risk everything my parents have worked for ever again.”

  He lifted his head and turned toward Paige, offering a half-smile. “And just for a record, despite the rumors. I pretty much haven’t dated anyone since. Not seriously. Never even wanted to.”

  Josh paused, holding her gaze, and tugged a piece of stray hair back behind her ear. “Until I met you.”

  Until I met you. The words echoed in his own ears, whipped up by the wind.

  Paige’s eyes widened and her lips parted.

  His chest contracted, either from terror or anticipation.

  He hadn’t intended to put those words out there. Not yet. But he had. And he wasn’t going to take them back, because it was true. This American with her sassy wit and hidden depths had his mind going places it hadn’t gone for a long time, and his heart wishing for things it had no business desiring.

  Paige pulled her jacket tighter around her. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” She blew out a breath. “I had heard about Hannah.”

  His jaw dropped. What? How?

  “None of the details. It wasn’t until after you’d left Christchurch and all I knew was that you had a daughter who had died. I wanted you to tell me in your own time. But now I’ve—” She cut herself off with a shake of her head. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Okay.” She’d changed her mind. She’d realized what dating him would mean and it was a thanks-but-no-thanks. He couldn’t blame her.

  Paige twisted her hands, her fingers tumbling over each other. “The tax investigation. The yacht.”

  “There’s no yacht.” It was the most ridiculous claim yet.

  “I know.” She looked at him, lines etched into her forehead. “It was just a joke.”

  “I don’t understand.” He sat back. The slats of the bench pressing into his back.

  “It’s all my fault. This whole thing. Kat and I were out for coffee. I made a joke about the church buying a yacht. There was a tax guy behind me. He thought I was serious. That’s how this whole thing started.”

  It was like someone had just cut off his air supply. The weeks, if not months, of auditing his parents and the church would go t
hrough. The media prowling around out front like dingoes circling a carcass. The fact that even when they were cleared, their name would still be tarnished. Again. It was all because of her?

  She was saying something about wanting to tell the media, offering to resign, but he couldn’t process any of it. All he could hear was the voice in his head telling him that it could never work. No matter how much he had fallen for her, how much he’d missed her. If she didn’t understand by now that you couldn’t go around making stupid jokes about his parents in public, she never would.

  “So my parents know.”

  Paige ran her hand through her hair, her fingers snagging on the now lopsided bun. “I told your mom straight away. She keeps trying to convince me it’s not a big deal.”

  Of course she was. His mother was one of the kindest people on the planet. She wouldn’t dream of giving so much as a hint to Paige about the stress this would be causing behind the scenes. The fear that even with all the financial controls in place and rigorous auditing that went on that something could have been missed somehow, somewhere.

  “I see.” His family had already paid too much for his mistakes before. He couldn’t take a chance that it could happen again. No matter how much he wanted to. The one woman he’d seriously dated since Narelle had ended up selling them out to the tabloids. Paige could do just as much damage by being careless.

  He was a Tyler, for better, for worse. The big picture was paramount, not his individual happiness. If that meant he had to spend his life single, or marry someone who didn’t capture his heart but would never let the family down, that was what he had to do.

  Paige was just sitting at the end of the bench, worrying her lips, twisting her hands. He should’ve listened to his head weeks ago and not let her get close.

  “Paige, I . . .” His voice trailed off. He re-gathered himself and tried again, ignoring everything in him screaming that there had to be another way. “Paige, we can’t do this. I think you’re incredible but it’s not going to work. This stupid thing with the yacht is more proof. I can’t change who I am or the life I lead.” He could barely get the words out. “I’m sorry if you feel like I’ve led you on. That wasn’t my intention. But I think we should just be honest with each other now, before anyone gets hurt.”