Wedding Party Collection: Always The Bachelor. Barbara Hannay

high school and graduated at the top of her class.

      With the snap of his fingers, Dillon’s father had snatched it away. To this day she wasn’t exactly sure why.

      Was it because she’d never been impressed by his money and power? Because she couldn’t be bought? Not for any price.

      May be he’d done it to put her in her place. To prove the power he held over her.

      To add insult to injury, no one would give her a student loan, not when she was married to a billionaire. She’d had to go to work full-time to cover her tuition and living expenses until the divorce was final, and Dillon’s father saw to it that it took a very long time. By then she was so far behind, she’d graduated two years later than she’d originally planned.

      “I didn’t find out what he’d done until it was too late,” Dillon said. “If I had known at the time I would have stopped him. Or at least I would have tried.”

      She’d convinced herself that he’d known all along and had let it happen, and she’d hated him for it. But the truth was, he’d never been vindictive. Just arrogant and misguided.

      And she believed him. If he could have stopped it, he would have.

      “Working harder for it just made me appreciate it more,” she told him, and it was the truth. It taught her to be independent and self-sufficient. She learned she was tough enough to handle just about anything.

      “I would have paid your tuition if you had only asked.”

      She knew that, too, but she’d been too proud to go looking for a handout. Too embarrassed to admit how badly she had screwed up. She had to do it on her own. As Miranda had said earlier, Ivy had a stubborn streak.

      “You didn’t even have to go to school,” he told her.

      “I would have taken care of you.”

      “I’m sure my dad said the same thing to my mom. Then he walked out the door. Besides, if I had quit school, we both would have been bored silly within a month.”

      “Probably,” he agreed.

      “So, I guess our marriage failed because I was a good student,” she said, half joking. He didn’t return her smile.

      “It wasn’t just that.”

      Oh, great, there was more? Was there anything she did right?

      “You sure you want to hear this?”

      She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. “No, but tell me anyway.”

      “After we got married you nagged me constantly.”

      Oh, ouch. That one really stung.

      Her mother’s nagging had driven her nuts. Had she really done the same thing to Dillon? “I nagged you?”

      “No matter what I did, it wasn’t good enough.”

      That wasn’t true. Although she did recall thinking that being married hadn’t been what she’d expected. In fact, it hadn’t been any different than when they’d been dating. Dillon hadn’t changed at all.

      May be that had been the problem. She’d been expecting him to change. To mature overnight.

      “I think I had certain expectations about being married,” she told him. “I thought we would settle down and get serious. Start acting like grown-ups. But things didn’t happen the way I planned. You were so…irresponsible. I think May be it scared me.”

      “I wasn’t ready to grow up,” he said. No apology, no excuses. Hadn’t that always been his M.O.? This is the way things are and if you don’t like it, tough cookies. But that wasn’t the way it worked.

      “Part of marriage is learning to compromise,” she reminded him.

      He opened his mouth to argue, she could see it in his eyes. That stubborn, I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong look. Then he caught himself.

      Jeez, were they both that stubborn?

      He sighed and rested his head back against the headboard. “You’re right. It is. I guess May be I felt as though you were asking me to be something I wasn’t.”

      “And the harder I pushed you to change, the more you rebelled and acted the complete opposite.”

      He nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

      “And the more you rebelled, the harder I nagged and pushed, making things even worse.”

      “Until we self-destructed.”

      “Exactly.”

      And there it was. Their entire relationship in a nutshell. It was a genuine “lightbulb” moment.

      Two stubborn people, neither willing to meet the other halfway. She had never considered the possibility that it wasn’t entirely his fault. It had never even crossed her mind.

      “All this time I’ve had myself convinced that it had to be either your fault or mine. But the truth is, we both screwed up. It’s both our faults, isn’t it?”

      “I guess so.”

      “We were young and stupid and had no clue what we were getting ourselves into.”

      He shook his head. “Well, damn. I guess I’m not as perfect as I thought I was.”

      Neither of them were.

      Knowing that, accepting it, seemed to lift the weight of the past ten years from her shoulders. She felt free.

      Until the meaning of it, the repercussions, dropped on her like a ten-ton block of solid steel. Then she just felt like she wanted to barf.

      She’d been basing her life’s work on her own experiences, her own failed marriage. All this time she held herself up on some sort of pedestal. She’d been wronged, she was the victim. The real truth was, she had been just as responsible.

      She was a statistic. Just like everyone else.

      Even worse, she was a fraud.

      Half of what she’d written in her book had turned out to be untrue, and the other half was skewed so far out of proportion it was hardly credible.

      How many times, as a form of therapy, had she suggested her patients write down their feelings in a personal journal, or in a letter that they would later shred? To accept and validate their emotions. Which is exactly what she’d done. Then she’d sent them off to a publisher and printed them for the whole world to see.

      And the really frightening part was people had actually listened. They had taken the ranting of a hurt, embittered woman and made them sacred.

      What had she done?

      And how could she justify doing it again?

      She had a contract. She’d taken an advance. It was too late to back out now. To say, oops, I was wrong. What I said before, just ignore that. This is what you should really do.

      She didn’t even know what this was. What if she never figured it out?

      “You look disturbed,” Dillon said, genuine concern in his eyes. “I thought you would be happy.”

      “I am,” she lied, because to admit what she was really feeling was a humiliation she just couldn’t bear. And she owed him a huge apology. “I’m sorry for all those things I wrote about you.”

      He shrugged. “Like you said, you didn’t write a single thing that wasn’t true.”

      “May be, but I had no right to publish it in a book. If I had issues about our marriage, the only person I should have talked to was you or my shrink.”

      “I guess we’ve both made our share of mistakes. What do you say we forget what happened in the past and start fresh. Right here, right now.”

      He had every right to hold what she’d