Holiday Bridal Wave - Gwyn McNamee Page 0,9

you fired?”

“Well…” I hold up the list and turn it to face him, “it seems to me you’re missing several things here that are incredibly important.”

“Really?” His brow furrows again. “Hand it to me.” He reaches across the desk and takes the notebook. His tired eyes scan the words, and he taps his finger against his lips. “Nope. I think that’s it.”

He can’t possibly be this clueless. Can he?

“No, Mister Warr—uh, Archie, I don’t think it is. What about chemistry? Connection? What about love?”

He freezes, and his eyes drift up to meet mine. “That sounds like fairy-tale talk, Blaire.”

“No.” My chest tightens. “It’s not a fairy tale. It’s what most people experience with the person they’re going to spend the rest of their life with. How can you honestly think that you’re going to be happy with someone, have children with them, and live with them for the rest of your life if you don’t have those things first?”

Archie tosses the notebook across the desk, and it slides off my side and thumps to the travertine tile floor. He pushes up from his chair, shoves his hands into his pockets, and stalks over to the massive windows that overlook the busy street below.

He drops his forehead against the glass and stares out, suddenly not looking like the all-powerful Archimedes Warren anymore. This isn’t the strong, confident billionaire heir I know. He looks…lost. “That may be true for other people, Blaire. People who weren’t born into the Warren family. But I don’t have the luxury of marrying someone I love.”

Archimedes

“Luxury?”

The surprise in her question makes me cringe, and my skin heats even more despite having my forehead pressed against the cool glass. I thought moving over here, getting away from that damn list, might release some of the tension building in me, the feeling that my skin is too tight, but it hasn’t worked. And I don’t know how to explain any of this to Blaire without revealing all the Warren family’s deepest, darkest secrets—the things we’ve worked so hard to bury deep below the perfect façade.

I drag my head back from the window and glance over my shoulder at her. Sitting there in her Christmas apparel, with the flashing light bulbs around her neck, I can see how she wouldn’t understand my situation. People who weren’t brought up in a family like the Warrens can’t even begin to complete or grasp the lengths we’ll go to in order to reach the top.

If she knew what Grandfather and Father—hell, even Mother and Grandmother—have done over the years to get us where we are, she’d either run from this job screaming or be so terrified, she’d never leave for fear of ending up on some blacklist of targets.

You’re either with the Warrens or against them. And being one of them means you don’t have a choice but to knock down people who stand in your way and face the consequences. It also means accepting that some things will never be part of your life. Love is for poor fools, not rich people who want to keep climbing.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen any genuine affection between any of the married couples in the family—except Artemis and Penelope, but it took separating himself from the Warrens to get it.

No, she can’t possibly get it.

“Love is a luxury in this family, Blaire. You may not understand that, and it may seem completely foreign to you, to someone who undoubtedly believes in things like Christmas miracles.”

She bites her lip, probably because I’m right. But all it does is draw attention to how beautiful she is, how perfectly bow-shaped that lip is. And so pink. Something I definitely shouldn’t be noticing right now while we’re talking about finding me a wife. Something I shouldn’t have ever noticed since she’s my employee.

I turn back to the window and lean one shoulder against it, watching the traffic inch by below through the snow and slush. “The truth is, the Warrens marry for money and prestige…and nothing else.”

A silence lingers between us as she considers the weight of my statement before her soft question floats over to me. “You don’t think your grandparents love each other…or your parents?”

She’s met all of them over her time here when they stopped in for various reasons and at the family Christmas party. But she’s never seen them outside the settings where they are one hundred percent in character and obsessively concerned about how they look to the world…how we all look to