squeak. She couldn’t believe she’d been so insecure about her-
self that she’d lost faith in Scot. He’d never done anything but show her the purest love. She loathed herself for doubting him,
and it was a full minute before she could find her words.
“I am so sorry for thinking…” Cheyenne’s words were lost
under her sobs. She wrapped her arms around his neck and bur-
ied her face into his chest.
Scot pulled her into a tight embrace. “I love you, Cheyenne.
Nothing will ever change that.”
Cheyenne pulled back and looked up at him. Her heart felt
like it would burst from her chest. “I love you, too.”
As Scot brought his lips down on hers, the crowd around
them erupted into whistles and cheers.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
Enrique looked extremely unhappy about taking Stephanie
back to Maravilha in her current state. Her black dress clung to her like a second skin, and wet sand coated her back from her
head to her boots. Her beautiful red cowboy boats that she’d had since college were forever ruined. This made her sad, but that it happened while she was with Phillip seemed strangely appropriate. Evidently this wasn’t the first such occurrence for Noronha guests, since Enrique opened the trunk of the Land Rover and
pulled out a tarp to cover the backseat. Finally tired of all her antics, she’d been banished to the back seat. Even Enrique had
his breaking point. Steph felt tired from her Phillip-induced
adrenaline spike on the beach and curled up in a ball on the back seat in an attempted to keep herself from dying of hypothermia.
Replaying her moments with Phillip raised her temperature,
though it didn’t stop her from shivering. She looked out at the
tropical blackness and obsessed about the weight of him as he
pinned her in the sand, his sultry breath against her neck, his
large calloused hand up her skirt…
She’d never wanted to be with anyone like she had with
Phillip on the beach. It was so insane it was almost laughable
that she wanted him to nail her while they hammered the final
nail into the coffin of their romance. The fact was, she was more attracted to Phillip while in the death throes of their relationship than she’d ever been with anyone else in the honeymoon phase.
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RAGE
She tried to focus on the physical, assuring herself that it
was understandable, rational even, that their strong physical
chemistry would lead them down that path. She was absolutely
certain she needed to stay an arm’s length away from him from
here on out. If he touched her again, she knew she couldn’t guarantee she’d have the strength to push him away, and she’d feel
even worse afterwards.
Phillip may very well have been the love of her life, but he
was her past. There was way too much water under that bridge.
Even thinking of the bridge cliché made Steph think of the aged
bridge outside the front door of their cottage, and a choked sob escaped her. Enrique shot her a concerned look in the rearview
mirror, and she buried her face in her hands. She hated herself in that moment more than she ever had. Where did she get off even
feeling like a damsel in distress? She had absolutely no right to play that role. She had caused the chain of events that led her to this particular moment in time. Here, sitting all alone in the back seat of an overpriced SUV on some remote island getting sympathetic looks from a would-be Latin lover while she caught pneu-
monia.
If it had been anyone else, Steph would have wanted to
open hand slap her and tell her to quit acting like an ingénue in some romantic comedy and cowgirl up. Fade to black on the after-school special, for the love of baby Jesus. But it was her. And no matter how she tried to mentally pull herself up by the pro-verbial bootstraps, she kept flailing. She felt like she was wandering the woods without a map. She needed to find her com-
pass. She needed Christopher.
Christopher was her present and (if he hadn’t abandoned all
hope—like the sensible man he was) possibly her future.
Phillip was in her past. It felt like a mantra.
“I loved you, Stephanie.”
Loved. Past tense.
She trudged up the stairs, her wrecked boots making putrid
163
TAMMY COONS & MICHELLE PACE
sloshing sounds, and she was so lost in he own thoughts that she tried to unlock the wrong room door. When she heard the
thumping sound of techno bleeding through the crack under the
door, she remembered that she now was across the hall in her
own room. It sounded like at least one of the bridesmaids had
skipped the luau and was having a hell of a party.
Immediately after Steph entered her room, she pulled off
her boots and peeled off her dress, dropping them directly where she stood. She jumped into a piping hot shower and practically
scrubbed her flesh raw. Part of her wished she had brought
Christopher instead of Cedric. Phillip would have remained
blissfully ignorant of their lost child, and she wouldn’t have had to talk to him and experience the sensation of losing him all over again. Her “together” façade would have remained firmly in
place, and she and Christopher would have taken their relation-
ship to that all important next level. She just kept making bad
choice after bad choice.
She toweled off and wrapped her stinging pink flesh in her
fluffy white robe. She reached for her camera case and cele-
brated the fact that she had made one good choice—buying a
waterproof one. If only she were as fastidious about protecting
her heart as she was about her camera, life might have been a bit less complicated. She pulled out her phone and tried Christopher again. Straight to voicemail. She redialed and frowned as she
heard a loud banging in hall. She peeked through the peephole
and saw Phillip beating on what used to be her hotel door. Her
eyes flew wide as she heard Christopher’s voicemail pick up
again as she leaned her forehead on the door.
“Please go away…please go away.” She whispered and then
realized that she was being recorded on Christopher’s voice mail,
“Shit!”
She
