Before You Say I Do: The BRAND NEW must-read, second-chance, sizzling holiday romance for fans of Emily Henry by Sharon Ibbotson

Author:Sharon Ibbotson [Ibbotson, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Choc Lit Contemporary Romance: A Joffe Books Company
Published: 2024-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15: Thirty-Seven

There were very few men who Marnie liked and even fewer who she respected. Perhaps it was her upbringing — that sheltered youth as the prodigal daughter of a deeply talented but also deeply disturbed man. Perhaps it was the plethora of men who seemed to constantly surround him, dark-suited and tall, who glanced at her childish presence with annoyance and then later, when she developed into a rebellious teenager with resentment and attitude, a deep and unsettling suspicion.

She hadn’t understood Doug either, if she was entirely honest with herself. Doug had been sexy and exciting, and she’d been seduced more by the idea of him than anything else. To discover that beneath that alluring exterior had been a kind man with a compassionate heart had been a surprise — discovering that she liked that kindness had been a seismic shift that had rocked her to her very foundations. Doug’s kindness had been both a gift and a curse. Deeply attractive on the outside and unable to withstand causing hurt within, Doug had been easily led and easily swayed. Married — perhaps unsuitably — to a woman with a core of steel who was always working, Doug’s affairs had been many, and he’d adopted a devil-may-care lifestyle that Marnie could never fathom but likewise never condemned. The women, the gambling, the airplanes . . . even now, Marnie was taken aback that not only had their shotgun marriage worked, it had lasted until Doug’s death. Marnie had loved her husband, but she hadn’t always respected him.

And her boys.

Corentin and Tom had been the brown-eyed babies of her dreams. When they’d first placed her tiny infants in her arms, which curved naturally around them, she’d looked down at her little sons and wondered where they’d been all her life. For they were so much a part of her in that moment that she couldn’t remember a time when they’d ever been away from her. In her boys, Marnie found a reason to justify her not-always-happy marriage, her decisions and life choices. In them, she found a renewed sense of purpose. She had to make a good world for her sons. She had to leave the world a better place than she’d found it. Her error, Marnie knew now, was misplacing that sense of purpose into working more and working harder, and not spending her time with her precious babies, who did not remain babies for long, but became wide-eyed toddlers and then, with alarming speed, quiet and pensive boys. Before she knew it, Corentin and Tom were grown. Corentin, as calm and placid and self-aware as he’d been as an infant, was happy enough, his choices and decisions his own. Tom though . . . It hit Marnie hard that where her beautiful boy once stood, a sullen and resentful man had taken his place, and she’d been struck with the first pangs of regret at her absence from his life.

She loved both her sons, but she didn’t always know them.

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