Rush and Restraint

Chapter Fifteen

You would think that after all the long, secretive years and the sneaking around, Oliver and I would be in a rush to finally tell everyone we were married so we could live a normal life as a couple once and for all.

But the truth did set you free sometimes, in some unexpected way.

Once we'd laid our cards down and still somehow ended up together, we lost the burden to establish the facts with everyone in some misguided effort to somewhat reinforce them. That in telling other people, you were convincing yourself of the reality you had to live with.

And we didn't need convincing.

Not anymore.

We knew what we started with, what we went through, what we lost and gained, what we still have together.

We didn't have to announce it to the world in some grand or shocking fashion.

We were alright.

I came home at the beginning of October for a couple of weeks and spent most of it with Oliver, temporarily living at his family's big old home where we started planning renovations. We were hoping to move in there around spring, once the place had been refurnished and brightened up again. We decided to wait until the holidays to tell our closest family and friends just because I had to fly back to Paris at the end of the month to finish the first ever official wedding gown for my line. I was dressing the niece of Monaco's current reigning monarch so it was critical for me to see the whole thing through, including staying for the wedding which was happening right around Thanksgiving.

I was scheduled to come home in the first week of December and I made a point not to travel anywhere else until early March. It would give us plenty of time to talk to people, organize some paperwork and hopefully start the renovations.

But I hadn't even been in Paris for a week when Dad called me in what I could only describe as complete, almost comical, hysteria.

After twenty-two years of a fruitless and frustrating search, Dad found my baby sister—Cassandra.

And apparently dating Sebastian Vice of all people!

"What do you mean he looks like he's whipped?" I demanded on the phone with Oliver. "I don't speak playboy!"

I was pacing the room in the chateau that we'd specifically reserved for working on this gown from a year ago when the princess came to do the final consultation. No one had seen this gown other than myself, since I handmade most of it, and the few staff that had been working on the intricate beading and embroidery in the last several months. I could sit in this room for hours and get lost in my work but Dad's call had gotten me all riled up that I couldn't keep still. Even if this was a rant I already had with Stellan just five minutes ago.

Oliver sighed. "I don't either and you know what whipped is because that's what every man is around you including me—especially me."

I narrowed my eyes into a frown. "Well, what I know of the word doesn't make me inclined to believe that it's applicable to Sebastian. He's a womanizer."