Brave Enough(63)

Somehow, word about Tag’s identity leaked out and made its way around our circles. I’m sure my father had something to do with that.

For the last thirteen days, there has been a mixture of outrage, disgust and pity. The outrage coming from most of Dad’s associates. The disgust has been primarily with my mother and her friends. And the pity . . . well, that’s been coming from my friends. I’ve been getting calls and visits, but the one common factor that every caller and visitor shares is pity. It’s in the voices, in the eyes, in the tentative smiles. They’re fairly dripping with it, as if to say, “Poor Weatherly. She fell in love with a man who was just using her.”

And they’re right. All of them. I let first my attraction and then my love for Tag blind me. I was so desperate to find love on my own that I didn’t think about ulterior motives, even though I had one myself. Sort of. But mine didn’t hurt anybody. And he knew what it was. I can’t say the same for his. Tag’s are still hurting me. And he’s not helping.

In between visits and calls, I’ve had deliveries. Dozens of them. Flowers, candy, expensive jewelry, all with similar sentiments on the card—I’m sorry, Please forgive me, Don’t give up on us, I love you. At first, it was as though Tag was just lashing out with his money, but then, with later deliveries, I began to see the heart behind the gifts. It was subtly personal for a day or two. Wildflowers from the forest near the waterfall where he proposed, a basket of grapes from the field our cabin overlooked, earrings that match my engagement ring, bread from a little bakery we found on our honeymoon. The gifts haven’t stopped. Not for one day. They only seem to be getting harder to ignore, especially when my delivery came on Tuesday and I began to realize what our time together meant to Tag. Every moment, it seems, made an impression on him as well. The evidence came to my front door that day and every day since.

It was in the form of a picture. It was a photograph taken at Chiara, showcased beautifully in a heavy silver Tiffany’s frame. It wasn’t the frame that stopped my heart, though. It was the picture itself. The shot was taken at sunrise after a rain, in between the rows of grapevines. The earth was dark and wet, and there were puddles that held water, reflecting the fiery orange of the rising sun. I took one look at it and I knew which row it was. I knew why he took a picture of that exact puddle. There was a handprint in the mud, possibly the one that Tag left there as he drove his body into mine that first time. Chills spread over my skin when I saw it. I stared at it for at least a full minute before I sat down in the floor, leaned up against the front door and cried.

That wasn’t the only picture either. I’ve gotten eight so far. All of them have come in stunning frames, some even encrusted with jewels, jewels that I’d be willing to bet are real. But they’ve never impressed me. No fancy frame could do that. No jewelry or flowers or candy could do it either. Only the personal gifts, only the meaningful pictures.

Every day Tag has told me that he loves me. Not in words, but in the beautiful hues of a sunrise, captured at different spots throughout the Chiara lands that have special meaning only for us. Each of them has chiseled away at the ever-widening crack in my heart until it’s now an all-consuming chasm.

I might’ve weakened by now if it weren’t for my parents, my mother especially. In her artful way, she tells me what’s going on in the outside world. She keeps me informed of the fallout from Tag’s audacious maneuver. He’s the talk of the town in our circles, which means I am, too. In ways I never wanted to be. The elite Atlanta corporate world is divided—those on the O’Neal side and those on the Randolph side.

According to Mom, “people” are calling Tag the only man worthy of the Randolph name. They’re saying he’s a bigger asshole than his father. More cunning, more ruthless. His name is the worst kind of curse in my family and it gets worse by the day.

Some of the local papers have even begun to pick up on what’s going on, citing the whispers of a new corporate magnate on the scene. And evidently Tag is making this name all by himself. Randolph blood really must run in his veins. Turns out my hot-blooded winemaker is nothing more than a cold-blooded shark.





THIRTY


Tag

I rented a little office in Enchantment when I found out about my real father all those months ago. I knew I’d need a place to conduct business that was unrelated to Chiara and my life there. Maybe that was a by-product of the way I felt—somehow separated from my life there, as though my biological father drove a wedge between the past and the present.