The Senator's Hispanic Bride (11 page)

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Isabella’s grandparents lived almost at Key West, which is the furthest of the Keys. He was both blessed and cursed by the long drive, for it gave him time to think about what he would say to her but the slow passing of the minutes did nothing to help his nerves.

After what seemed like forever, he finally reached the house. He parked in front of it and smiled at the pretty little Victorian beach home. It was a cheerful little place with enormous detail put into it. He could easily see why she would want to go there to get away from the chaos that he had gotten her involved in. He drew in his breath and walked to the screen door and knocked. The front door was open, so the screen was the only barrier to the inside of the house. He couldn’t see anyone for a moment, but then he saw an older woman walking toward the door.

She opened it and looked up at him and he saw Isabella in her face. He knew it must be her grandmother. A strange expression crossed her face, one of recognition and acknowledgment. He was surprised, because they had never met. “Hello, please excuse my intrusion. I’m looking for Isabella. Is she here by chance?” he asked, his heart in his throat.

“Michael?” she asked with a smile.

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

She opened the screen door and waved him in. He walked into the spacious room and turned to look at her.

“I’m Sofia, I’m her grandmother.” Sofia held her hand out to Michael and he took it, shaking it gently.

“Why is it that you are looking for her?” she asked kindly, offering him a seat in her sitting room. He took it and set his hands nervously on his knees.

“I need to talk with her to work things out. I need to explain what happened and try to fix it,” he said quietly.

She nodded at him with a small smile. “Why do you want to do that?” she asked, watching him with her old, wise eyes.

He took a huge breath and let it out in a sigh. “Because, I love her more than anything in the world and I can’t lose her.” He waited nervously as she nodded again.

“Come with me.” She stood up and he followed her to the back of her house where a sliding glass door opened up to a beautiful patio. Beyond the patio was a path. She pointed to it. “Follow the path to the beach. You’ll find her there,” she said, patting his back lightly. “Good luck, Michael.” She winked at him and he thanked her and took the last steps to what would decide the fate of his life.

Isabella was standing waist deep in the warm turquoise sea water, letting it wash up on her and pull her sorrows away with the tide when she heard her name spoken behind her. Her entire body froze on the spot and her eyes flew wide open in recognition of the voice that called her name. She sucked in her breath and felt her heart race. She turned slowly and stared in disbelief at Michael standing at the water’s edge looking at her.

“Isabella, please, come talk to me. There’s so much that I have to explain to you. Please give me just a few minutes to tell you what happened!” he pleaded to her with all of his heart.

She felt a rage grow in her that she had never known and she launched herself at him, splashing him and drenching his clothes in the process.

“How dare you! How dare you follow me to Florida and come to my grandparent’s house! You monster!” She yelled at him and raked her hand over the water, spraying him yet again with a wall of it as she came out of it and reached him on the shoreline.

He backed away from her a few feet and held his hands up in surrender. “I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be-” he started, but she interrupted him.

“You’re damn straight I have every right to be! I heard you, you son-of-a-bitch! I heard you say that you had been in on the plan from the very beginning! I was standing in the hallway in your office and I heard all of it!” she hollered at him, bleeding her pain out to him vocally.

“Did you see Glenn leave?” he asked quickly, hoping to stop her tirade.

She blinked in confusion. “Did I what? No, I didn’t see Glenn leave!” she snapped at him.

He shook his head. “Then you didn’t hear the whole thing and you need to!” he pleaded with her again. “Please, just give me a moment to tell you the rest of it!”

“I don’t care what the rest of it is!” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him angrily. “You shouldn’t even be here! I didn’t come all the way from New York to the Keys to get away from you and all the rest of the disaster going on up there just so you could follow me here and make me even more miserable! Don’t you think maybe you’ve already done enough to hurt me? Can’t you just let me heal in peace? I gave you the ring back, Michael, we are done and you need to leave!”

Michael held his hands up to her again and lowered his brow just a bit. “Listen, I know I messed up, but I also know that you only know half of it, and you have to hear the rest of it before you make your mind up about us! I did come all the way down here because it’s worth it to me to try to fix it, Isabella, it’s worth it to me to try to save us because I love you and I don’t want to lose you!”

She waved her hand at him. “You only want to save your precious election! I saw the newspapers! There’s no way you are going to win without me at your side and now your election is in the toilet and you would do anything to save it by trying to get me back. I know what you’re doing here Michael, and I’m not falling for it again!”

She couldn’t believe that he was there at all, and more than that, that he had the audacity to try to talk to her and trick her into coming back to him just so he could win his election. The very idea of his doing it was loathsome to her.

He took a step toward her and tried to hold the intensity of his emotions in check so that he wouldn’t say something he regretted. “Please, Isabella, this is not about the election. It is true, it started out that way, and I admit that to you freely. When I proposed to you, it was because I had agreed to that stupid plan of Glenn’s, and it was to sway the voters in favor of me, but I cared for you right from the start, which is why I dated you, and that care grew to love over the time we were together,” he explained carefully, but he could see by the expression on her face that he was getting nowhere fast with her.

“You never loved me! I heard you say that it was all a plan! Stop lying to me!” she demanded angrily.

“I did fall in love with you, Isabella, I love you still. In fact, I love you so much that I came down here to get you back, not for the election, but so that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life without you! I can’t lose you! You only heard part of that conversation, and I don’t know what part you walked out on, but I know you didn’t hear the most important part of it! I was in my office with Carlos and Glenn, and Glenn admitted to us that he told Kelsey what she wanted to know about the marriage plan because she had sex with him. I was furious with him about that and Carlos was furious with us for not only coming up with the plan but even more so, for going through with it. I fired Glenn on the spot and he left the office right then. That’s how I know you left before you heard all of it. Glenn would have seen you. He told me later that he didn’t see you at all when he left.” Michael took a step toward her and she stared at him as he revealed the rest of the story to her.

“I told Carlos that you were the most important thing in the world to me and that I wasn’t going to let you go. I told him the truth, and that is that it started out as an election plan, but I fell in love with you, with everything about you, and I realized how lucky I am to have you in my life. I can’t live without you, Isabella. I don’t want to live without you. I know you can understand that because that’s how you love me, and I know you were ready to spend the rest of forever with me, so don’t give that up. Don’t lose this real, true, beautiful love that we have over the stupid mistake I made that turned out to be the best mistake I ever made in my life.”

He took another step toward her as tears rolled silently down her cheeks.

“Do you want to know how I got here? Do you want to know how I found out where you are? Marisol told me. She told me because I explained everything to her and she believed me enough to tell me where you were. Do you think I fooled the one person who trusts me the least? Do you think she would have given away your secret if she had thought for a second that I don’t really love you?”

Isabella stared at him in shock. Her heart skipped several beats as she listened to him. Her own sister had sold her out to him and told him where she was. She felt the pain of betrayal slam into her and paralyze her soul.

“She even promised not to let you know I was coming down here so that you wouldn’t be able to run away because she wanted me to find you, she wanted us to talk and she wanted you to hear what I had to say. She wanted us to have a chance at reconciliation because she knows how much you love me and she finally saw how much I love you and how true that love is.” He took another step toward her. “Isabella, beautiful Isabella, you must know how much I really love you. You must have felt it when we were together, when we made love, when we spent all of the time together that we did; our touches; our kisses; our laughs; our conversations; our love… our real, true, deep love. You must have felt it. That was real, Isabella, and it came from both of us. I love you, lady, and I always will. I want you with me for the rest of my life and the rest of your life.” He stopped talking and looked at her, waiting for her response.

She blinked, letting the words he spoke filter through the protective wall of determination she had put around her to keep him out. The betrayal of her sister had stunned her, but she knew he must be right. Marisol didn’t trust Michael or like him at all. If he had managed to get her to tell him where she was, he must have truly convinced her of his love.

Then, she thought of the words her grandmother had told her, the way that true love exists and feels and works. She had felt love with him, and she was beginning to realize it wasn’t just her own love that she felt. She must have been feeling his love as well. She had felt a lot of it, and it had become something she thought she would always have, something she didn’t want to live without until she found out it was a lie.

But he was standing before her, pleading with her, telling her he loved her and it felt to her like he really did. She thought of the dream she had, the dream about the boat and she understood it. If their love was going to make it, they had to hold on to each other and work together for it to be successful. If she clung to her misgivings, their love would sink and fail, like the little boat they had been in together.

Isabella took a step toward him and he reached his hand out to her. She felt like she was moving in slow motion as she raised her hand to touch his. The moment her fingers reached his, he closed his fingertips around her hand and closed the gap between them, reaching for her face and holding it in his hands.

“I’m so sorry. I need to ask you to forgive me for what I did and for agreeing to such a horrible plan in the first place. I wouldn’t hurt you for the wide world. I need you in my life, not because of the election, but because I love you, and if you want me to prove it, I will drop out of the election. That’s how serious I am about this. If you want me to, I will leave the senate race to be with you. You are everything to me, and I’ll do anything to prove that to you.” He rubbed his thumbs over her cheeks and tears formed in his eyes.

She choked on tears and happiness as she looked at him and began to shake her head slowly. “No, don’t give up your race for the senate.” She spoke quietly. “I don’t want you to lose that.”

He lost his control over the tears and a few of them fell from his thick black lashes and ocean blue eyes. “What about you? I can’t lose you. Please stay with me. Please, Isabella, please marry me.” He watched her, waiting breathlessly for her answer.

Isabella nodded. “Alright. I will marry you, but only for love.” She smiled a little and he grasped her in his arms and planted his lips on hers in a grateful kiss. At first she held back, but as she slowly let go of her reservations about taking him back, her hesitation was replaced with overwhelming love and relief.

He moved his lips over hers, kissing her fervently, and then he let her go a little and looked down into her eyes. “I love you with everything in me. Do you believe me?”

She let herself laugh for the first time since the morning she was trying on her wedding dress. “I could use some more convincing,” she said shyly, looking at him with a crooked smile. He laughed back at her and kissed her again, this time with more tenderness and sweetness, tasting her and sending the familiar warmth through her that his kiss always elicited.

Isabella found his love in their kiss, and she knew that he was telling her the truth. She knew they had just saved their boat from sinking into oblivion. He found his redemption in her kiss, and knew that he had been saved by her love.

They spent the remainder of the afternoon in each other’s arms in the sand, kissing and loving, comforting each other in their promises to bring about a strong and healthy marriage together. One thing kept bothering Isabella and she finally had to bring it up.

“What are we going to do about the press? No one is going to believe we are getting married for love, now that the papers have all printed stories about us only getting married for the election.” She pushed her feet into the warm sunny sand and looked at Michael with a worried expression.

He bit his lip and nodded. “You know, I was thinking about that,” he said quietly as he leaned against her shoulder and looked at her. “First of all, we haven’t responded to the accusations. There has been no formal statement made by us about any of it. Second, and stop me here if you have any guilt or negative feelings about this, but social media has actually lent us a helpful hand with that whole thing. The photos that the girls at the dress shop posted have gone viral around the whole state of New York and most of the people who are looking at them have said that Kelsey deserved what she got, that she is just starting the whole thing as a rumor to make us look bad because she’s jealous and is trying to break us up. That’s true, that’s exactly why she broke the story and what she is doing, but how do you feel about letting that be the response we go with, letting her hang herself and tell people that we aren’t letting her ploy break us up and that we are getting married for love, which is also true. What do you think?”