Until he smacked the guy.

That was fifteen years in the making.

Wait until I told my dad that Vaughn got the chance to do something he’d wanted to do since I was nineteen: break the nose of the asshole who broke his daughter’s heart.

It was funny looking at Spence now. I didn’t even recognize him as the boy I’d loved. He was the man version of the boy who had told me I wasn’t good enough for his world. Smarmy, oily, slick, and it freaked me out that he had deceived me so well the summer we’d spent together.

And Vaughn . . . well . . . not only had he caused a scene in public, which was so very un-Vaughn-like; he’d definitely proven that he couldn’t give a crap that we came from different worlds.

That took me back to wanting to know why then? Why was his guard up?

So I found myself leaving my best friend’s wedding reception—Jess shoved me and Vaughn out the door, and I didn’t blame her—and strolling along the boardwalk with Tremaine.

It was lit up in the dark, all the neon signs blinking brightly out at the ocean. The boardwalk was always busy this time during the summer and tonight was no different. Laughter, music, sounds of the arcade games, and conversation floated all around us. I shivered in the breeze that blew up from the water and rubbed at my arms.

Like something out of a movie, Vaughn shrugged out of his tuxedo jacket and draped it over my shoulders. A second shiver rippled down my spine as he lifted my hair out from under it and his fingers brushed the skin at the nape of my neck.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He stopped and glanced down the beach.

I read his thoughts. “It’s quiet down there.”

“What about your dress?”

“It’s not like I’ll be wearing it again anytime soon.” I slid out of my shoes, grabbed them up in one hand while I lifted the hem with the other.

Vaughn followed my lead, unlacing his dress shoes and slipping them and his socks off. We slowly walked down the ramp onto the beach, and I relaxed at the feel of the dry, cool grain underfoot.

“Did he get you?”

“What?”

I gestured to his face. “Oliver?”

Vaughn rubbed his jaw. “He got in a lucky hit, but it wasn’t too hard. I’ll survive.”

We didn’t speak after that, not until the soundtrack of the boardwalk nightlife faded into the distance, and all we heard around us was the quiet rush of the dark ocean against the shore.

“I’ll start,” I said.

The right corner of his mouth tilted upward. “Of course you will.”

Ignoring that, I proceeded. “I will say that I’ve been holding on to what Oliver did to me for way too long. Yes, he broke my heart years ago but I don’t even know who that man in there was. Maybe I never really knew. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that I let him make me think less of myself. But I took that power back from him after Tom cheated. I’m not letting another man take it away again. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He stared at me in open admiration. “Completely.”

“You know, you staring at me with your emotions all there and smoldering out in the open for me is very unnerving. I’ve spent the last few years trying to read you and failing so, um . . . not going to lie, the open-book thing you’re doing is freaking me out.”

“I didn’t know I was being an open book. And if I am, it’s only around you.”

Okay.

Then . . . it was time to be brave. “Say I believe you; say you really do care about me . . . that doesn’t change anything. I’m still me. You’re still you.”

He watched his feet as we strolled and nodded. “True. But I’m not the man you think I am.” Vaughn looked up at me. “I’m not the man I thought I was, either.”

“What does that mean?”

“Remember the day at the festival when you suggested that my problem was my father and his inability to really let go of my mother?”

“Yes.”

“I never thought about it before. Or maybe I didn’t want to think about it. Yet, you’re right. I was only five when my mother died, and my memories of her are very vague, like they happened in another life. But I remember my father in the years after she died. I remember the couple of times after he’d read me a bedtime story how I’d crept out of bed and wandered down the hall to the living room only to find him weeping into a glass of scotch.

“It was crippling.” His words were hoarse, and they tugged at my heart. “To see a man like my father, who was this big powerful giant to a little kid, crying tears into a glass of whiskey. And even then I knew it was about her. As hard as he tried, the grief clung to that apartment. I was glad when we moved a few years later. I was glad as I got older I heard the rumors of my dad’s womanizing ways. To me it meant he was living again, in some small way.

“However, I started to think he had the right idea—don’t get serious with a woman. Keep it free and easy. I inherited the ambition bug from my father, and career has always been important to me. I concentrated on college and starting my own business. It wasn’t until I was about twenty-four years old that I even went on a third date. Around the same time my dad started dating Diane monogamously.” He threw me a crooked, boyish smile. “I didn’t even put that together. Not so smart for a smart guy.”

“You saw your dad finally taking a step toward something serious and you emulated him.”