Love In Slow Motion (Love Beyond Measure #2) - E.M. Lindsey

Chapter 1

It all happened in quiet succession. His shin collided with the table he was pretty sure Jacqueline had moved without telling him. Sebastian began to whine, a stream of curses fell from his lips, and then a familiar baritone chuckle sounded from the front door. Relief swept through Fredric with an intensity he hadn’t expected, and he turned his face up, feeling his cheeks strain with his grin.

“Still laughing at old men?”

“Only when they embarrass themselves.” The voice got closer, polished shoes shuffling across the threadbare carpet, and then a warm hand closed around his bicep, and he was able to straighten up. “Let me guess,” Ilan said, and his voice was cold and hard, “she moved all your shit around?”

“Please don’t,” Fredric sighed out. The week had already frayed his nerves beyond repair, and he didn’t really have it in him to have this conversation about Jacqueline again. He’d already gone a round with her that morning, and he would have tripped over a hundred more tables if it meant having the cottage to himself for a little while longer.

“Julian said she’s been particularly vicious this week,” Ilan murmured as he let Fredric’s arm go. “And not just with him.” He sat on the sofa with a soft grunt, and Fredric heard him pat the cushion next to him. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No,” Fredric said and then walked the now-clear path back to the sitting room and took up space beside his son’s best friend. “We all knew this week was going to be terrible. I was just hoping she’d find another focus than Julian.”

Ilan snorted a bitter laugh. “Considering she guilted him into coming to his ex’s wedding…”

And Fredric felt a measure of responsibility because he hadn’t been able to do enough to stop Julian from showing up. He’d been tied in knots over the events that week, and his heart ached knowing that no matter what he said or did, Julian would put himself through hell, if only to shut his mother up. It was what he had always done—in the name of keeping the peace, and Fredric had lived with that suffocating guilt for as long as he could remember. And he could only blame himself for being such a weak man that his son would show up to the week-long circus Julian’s ex-husband was calling a wedding celebration.

He’d shouted himself hoarse the night Jacqueline had told him, and even now, his throat ached a little with the memory.

“I don’t see what the problem is, Fredric.” Her voice had been cold and sharp—something he’d once loved about her, but had now come to despise with a sort of searing hatred. “Julian made his choice.”

He had laughed then, bitter and furious, because it was categorically untrue. He may have been blind, but he didn’t need sight to know that Bryce was an opportunist, and the moment he met a richer cousin, he’d jumped at the chance to leave Julian in the dust.

Of course, Jacqueline had seen to it that Julian hadn’t made a single choice to benefit himself for most of his life. His one, single rebellion against her was turning down law school and getting his master’s degree in literature. He remembered the seething fury in Jacqueline’s voice the night Julian announced he’d taken a job at a high school, teaching English. It had given Fredric an almost perverse pleasure knowing his son had done it as a very soft, very quiet fuck you to her.

Fredric admired his bravery and his poise. Some days he wished he was half the man his son had grown up to become, because all that was left inside his aging bag of bones was cowardice and regret. But he did have a breaking point, and the wedding had taken him by the hand and then flung him off the edge.

And there was no going back now.

“You okay?”

Ilan’s voice brought him back to the present, and Fredric turned to him, hoping his smile was convincing enough. Ilan had always been able to see through the façade of their home though, and it was one of the reasons Fredric had gone out of his way to make sure the boys’ friendship didn’t fail, regardless of Jacqueline’s dislike for Ilan and his background. He knew that if Julian ever needed saving, Ilan would be the arms he’d fall into.

To this day, he was still surprised that the two of them had never fallen in love. No one cared for Julian the