Chapter 15
15
Liam
D illon was so pumped about me coming up for a vacation, I almost felt bad. Like, how could I live up to this guy’s excitement? He had a house for us to stay in – something right on the beach with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
But I realized as we drove north and the land got wilder and the traffic lessened, I was getting excited on my own. It reminded me of home. Of growing up in the farmhouse in Vermont. Hunting with Wyatt and Dad and playing shinny every winter until it got too dark to see the puck.
It made me want to call my dad.
Also, Tess was really excited and that shit was infectious.
“Is that an eagle?” Tess cried and Kit whirled around in the passenger seat trying to look out the back window.
“I think it is!” She cried. “Good job, Tess. We should get a book about birds and animals in Maine from the bookstore.”
Tess made a happy squealing sound and I laughed.
“What?” Kit asked, sitting in the passenger seat of my truck.
“You guys are real nerds,” I said.
Kit gasped like she was offended.
“Mom says being a nerd is a good thing,” Tess said in the tone of voice of a little girl who’d been called a nerd once or twice.
Kit and I made eye contact and I could see the same sympathy in her eyes. “I meant it as a good thing,” I said.
“I was a nerd,” Kit said. “I loved books so much. The summer after my mom died I went to the library every day, all day. I read all the Harry Potter books. Might have been the best summer of my life.”
I had the good sense not to say what I was thinking.
That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.
I looked over at her and watched the blush climb her cheeks. She’d revealed more than she’d wanted. It was interesting stacking that little girl at the library all summer against the beautiful, sophisticated woman in Nashville. The seductress in the red dress.
We got to the first turnoff for Calico Cove but my GPS told me to take the third one.
“There are seven different coves in this town,” I said. “And I have no idea what a cove actually is.”
“A cove’s a cove,” Kit said, looking out the window at the waves crashing up on the rocky beaches along the highway.
“Oh thanks, that clears it up,” I laughed.
“It’s the nerd in me,” she said.
“Do they have names?” Tess asked. “The coves?”
I shrugged. “Probably. We’ll find out.”
Finally, I took the exit into the main part of town. We curved past some houses and ended up driving down a road with a beautiful, wide, sandy beach on our right and a charming town square with a gazebo to our left.
“Oh,” Kit cried. “How cute.”
There were tons of little boutique shops. An ice cream place. A bookstore – Tess made the squeeing noise again when she saw it. A surf shop.
“Hey, surfing!” I said, excited about the prospect.
“Have you done it?” Kit asked.
“Never. You?”
“I’m actually very good.”
“Bullshit.”
She shrugged and looked coyly out the window.
“Can we stop?” Tess asked.
“Absolutely,” I agreed, given, this felt like a real vacation and I hadn’t had one of those in a long time. I was not in the mood to deny anyone anything.
This felt the way summer vacations were supposed to feel. Chill and happy. Like there was time enough to do anything, and if getting ice cream was all we did, then it was a good day.
I pulled into the far side of the square and parked in a diagonal in front of a shop that sold sand buckets, umbrellas and towels.
“What do we do first?” Kit asked.
“Bookstore,” Tess said at the same time I said, “Ice cream.”
“Bookstore and then ice cream,” Kit decided, and we jumped out of the truck. The sun was hot and the breeze was cool. I stretched my body, lifting my arms up over my head. Sea gulls squawked around and the air smelled like sunscreen and something fried coming from the food trucks around the park. We would be checking those out after the bookstore and before ice cream.
“This is awesome,” I said and Kit looked my way. She wore a pair of cut off shorts and a blue tank top, big glasses and sandals. There was nothing provocative about that outfit even a little bit, and yet, I was provoked. I wanted to slide my hand up the back of her strong thighs under the ragged frayed edge of those shorts. I thought about the kiss I’d made her promise me.
A bad idea? Probably. I was good at those. But the only way I could reconcile the woman from Nashville and the woman in front of me right now – might be a kiss.
“This feels like a real summer vacation,” I said.
“You must have had a lot of vacations like this growing up,” she said, and for some stupid reason that library story of hers came back to me and I found myself shaking my head.
“No, actually. I mean, we lived in the woods so summer vacation was already pretty epic. But we only did a vacation once. Fort Lauderdale when my brother and I were in high school.”
“Was it fun?”
“Total disaster,” I said with a smile that didn’t stick. “My mom wasn’t great at traveling and my dad wasn’t great when my mom wasn’t great. So my brother and I spent a lot of time eating out of vending machines and hanging out at the hotel pool.”
“Thank God for your brother, huh?” she asked. Those glasses of hers were so big I couldn’t read her expression. “You always had someone to hang out with.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know your mom died.”
“I was young,” she said with a shrug that wasn’t at all convincing.
“Hey!” Tess shouted, pulling open the door to the bookstore with her entire body weight. Her back foot in her rainbow sneakers was coming up off the ground. “You coming or what?”
“Coming!” Kit said and helped her open the door. The two of them disappeared into the bookstore and I stood there trying to remember the last time I was even in a bookstore.
Then I tried to remember the last time I’d felt like this. So easy. So…excited about something that wasn’t hockey or my brother or partying.
This is what Harrison’s life is like. With Denise and the kids.
It dawned on me that every time he left a party to go home, I thought he was sacrificing his fun. When he knew the whole time, this was more fun.
“Liam?” Kit asked, standing at the door. “You coming?”
“In a minute,” I said. “I am going to pick up some beach supplies.” I jerked my thumb at the beach shop and Kit nodded.
“Good idea. Get lots of sunscreen. Maybe a beach umbrella? And some good beach towels.”
I nodded and she went into the bookstore.
Yeah. All of this was weird. But a good weird.
Kit
Tess was a bookstore pro. She picked up every book she was interested in and read the back cover. Then she read the first page.
“How many can I get?” She asked, holding two books in her hand.
I’d already collected some nature books about the birds of Maine.
“Liam’s buying,” I said with a shrug. “All of them?”
Tess got this incredibly wise look on her face. “Mom said that Liam works very hard for his money and I can’t take advantage when he wants to buy things.”
Hmm…her mom was a better woman than me.
“Okay, I think three books is a good number of books.”
Tess nodded and took off back to the kid’s section. The bookstore was super charming. The kids’ section had a carpet and big stuffed animals and a fantastic selection. There were two cats prowling around and the staff were smiling and attentive. There was even complimentary tea and coffee. Was this heaven?
There was a bookshelf of signed books by local authors. I pulled out an Antony Renard cookbook. My dad and I met him back in the good old days when we ran with that kind of crowd. Some New York foodie charity event. He’d been charming and unbelievably handsome. He’d gone a little more silver judging by the picture on the front of the book, but he was still gorgeous.
The bell over the door rang and Liam walked in, filling the doorway. He was smiling his excited boy on vacation smile and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling back at him.
“There are tacos in these food trucks. And falafels,” he said, like he’d discovered gold.
“Falafels?” Tess lifted her head over one of the bookshelves.
“You like falafels?” Liam asked.
“Yep.”
One of the guys who worked at the shop, pointed at the cookbook in my hand.
“His wife makes them. Or she used to. Passed down the recipe though, so they’re just as good,” he said. He was a teenager with long hair and glasses. He looked like a camper who only drank out of Nalgene bottles.
“Antony Renard’s wife? Used to make falafels out of a truck? You’re kidding me,” I said and added the cookbook to my stack.
I liked cooking when I had the time and these full color hardcover cookbooks were the kinds of things I usually checked out of the library. But it was signed and I was on vacation.
And…after this was over, I was done. Any money I saved would be for me. Any money I spent, wasn’t money I should have been giving to someone else. It was mine. The sense of liberation was jarring. And oddly, the rush of gratitude I felt to Liam, for handing this to me, was profound.
“You ready?” Liam asked, and a little shell shocked, I nodded. Tess was at my elbow with her own little stack of books. We walked up to the counter and Tess put her books down. Liam pulled out his wallet.
He looked at the stack in my hands and pointed at the desk where Mr. Camper Guy was checking us out. “That’s okay,” I said. “I can buy my own books.”
I hoped my expression conveyed what I felt in that moment, because what I felt was…pride. The exhilaration of no longer being in crippling debt. I felt weightless.
“Okay. I get it. But this is for Tess,” Liam said, pulling my bird book off the stack and putting it on the counter. “This one…” He looked at the cookbook and back up at me. “You cook?”
“When the spirit moves me,” I said.
“Well, if the spirit moves you while we’re here, then this one benefits me and Tess.”
I was reluctant to give him the cookbook because my last book would be revealed. I wasn’t one of those romance readers who was embarrassed to read romance because of a hot guy on the cover. No. I read my smut on the bus with the cover on full display. But there was something about the energy between Liam and me that felt like revealing my romance addiction was going to tip it further into danger.
But he was stronger than me and I wasn’t about to wrestle him over a book in the middle of a bookstore. He pulled away the cookbook and looked down at my romance novel with the cartoon cover of a girl holding a dog and – shit – a hockey player.
“Is this what I think it is?” he asked, his voice low, his eyebrow quirked.
“Do you think it’s a book?” I asked.
“I think it’s a romance novel. About a hockey player.” His smile went from flirty to deadly in no time. “Are you into that kind of thing, Kit?”
I was. I was deeply into that kind of thing.
“We’re at the beach,” I said with a casual shrug, like I wasn’t an avid fan of this whole series by my favorite author. “I thought I’d get something fun to read while we’re here.”
“Is it a hot one?” he asked. He took it and started leafing through the pages.
It was in fact a hot one and I knew the second he landed on a page that interested him.
His eyebrows went up and then his mouth fell open. “Are you kidding me?” he mouthed at me.
“Stop it,” I said and snatched the book out of his hands. I could feel my face get so hot my head was probably steaming.
“You’re going to read this in front of Tess? In front of me?”
“You’re not funny,” I snapped. I was about to put it back on the table with the rest of the summer blockbusters, but Liam plucked it out of my hands and added it to the stack that was being cashed out. “You don’t have to do that,” I said, feeling mulish and embarrassed.
“I want to do that,” he said, his voice low. Intimate. “This isn’t about me paying for your books. Got that? It’s a gift. Because I really, really want to watch you read that book.”
I’d been putting that stupid kiss stipulation out of my head all day, but now, with his scent in my nose, it was fully occupying my brain. He wanted to watch me get turned on reading a romance novel about a hockey player with a filthy mouth and pierced penis.
How in the world was I going to survive this vacation? Honestly.
The books were bagged up and Tess asked if she could hold the bird book. Liam handed it to her and then led our way out of the bookstore. We were like little ducks following our massive dad duck.
“You hungry?” I asked the two of them as we stepped out into the fragrant warm mid-day sun.
“Yes!” Tess said.
“I could eat,” Liam said, leading us across the grass to the trucks.
“So,” Liam said as we crossed the street to the pretty park with green grass and orange and pink day lilies planted on the edges. “About this book?”
“The bird book?” I asked, putting my glasses over my eyes.
“No. The romance novel.”
“What about it?” I asked. He stepped in front of me, forcing me to stop. Tess was ahead of us, standing in the shade, reading.
“Do you read them and get off?” he whispered, his eyes on my mouth.
“That’s very private information,” I said.
“You’re right,” he said. “But I’m curious. Did I just buy you something that’s going to make you touch yourself?”
My breath caught in the back of my throat. A sudden vivid image of Liam watching me while I touched myself. Me watching Liam while he touched himself. It was sensory overload.
“Can I borrow it when you’re done?” he asked.
“Why?” So he could make stupid jokes? No thanks.
He got close then, so close that I could feel his breath on the shell of my ear. It felt like his voice was making my body purr. “So I can get off on what gets you off.”
Holy crap, my knees buckled. I caught myself before basically swooning in his arms.
“I think that’s a bad idea,” I managed to say.
“Really? I think it’s the best idea I’ve ever had,” he said. I couldn’t help but stare at his mouth, those choir boy lips. He licked them, like he was getting them wet for me and I had to swallow a needy little moan that crept out of my throat.
His eyes flared and narrowed like he was zoning in on me. Like I was prey and he was about to give chase. It didn’t matter that Tess was a few feet behind him engrossed in a bird book, or that we were surrounded by twenty strangers in the middle of an adorable town.
If he kissed me now, I’d let him.
If he kissed me now, I’d kiss him back.
“Fuck, Kit,” he breathed. “You feel it too. Don’t you? You’re killing me.”
“Is this a joke?” A man shouted behind Liam.
Liam jerked away from me as if he was breaking the tractor beam he’d been caught in. He pulled Tess behind him before facing a man in a pair of unzipped coveralls with the arms tied around his waist. The tank top he wore underneath was smudged with black grease and he had a streak of it over his bicep. He wasn’t as tall as Liam, but he was thick, like a working man.
Also handsome, and in some ways…familiar?
The longer I looked at him the more he looked like Liam.
Weird.
“Nick,” Liam said with a smile, relaxing when he realized he knew the guy. “Good to see you, man. This is wild, isn’t it? I’ve been in town like five minutes, and I’ve already run into you.”
“What are you doing here?” Nick asked.
He did not look happy to see Liam, which was very strange. As a rule, people were thrilled to see Liam. He was a giant, rich Stanley Cup winning hockey player. If you didn’t care about that – he was very handsome. This guy was unmoved by all of that.
“I’m on vacation,” Liam said.
“Vacation?” Nick spat, like Liam said he was moving in. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“I’m thinking maybe I should have given you a heads up,” Liam said. “I realize now that might have been a mistake.”
“Hey?” Another man stepped up to us wiping his hands on a cloth, and it took me a second to recognize the man from the cookbook I just bought. Antony Renard. In the flesh. In the gorgeous silver fox flesh. Goodness, he was handsome.
“Holy shit,” I said and everyone turned to stare at me. “You’re…ah…Antony Renard.”
Liam gave me a look that said now was not the time to fangirl.
“Sorry,” I said. I couldn’t help it. “But I’m a big fan. I just bought your book.”
“It’s always great to meet another food lover,” Antony said, with the smile I remembered from when we’d met before, charming and confident. “And of course I recognize my favorite Bruiser. Why don’t you introduce us, Nick?”
The older man clapped a hand on Nick’s shoulder. It looked like a dad move that communicated a hundred different things. Calm down, keep your cool, be polite.
Don’t take a swing at the guy.
While there were days when all I wanted to do was take a swing at Liam Locke, I couldn’t fathom where the insta-hate energy came from with this man.
“This is Liam Locke,” Nick said to Antony. “My…” he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Half-brother. This is Antony, my dad.”
Liam lifted his arms like he’d just won something, and I felt my jaw drop. Half-brother? Was he for real?
“Yes!” Liam said and reached out to shake Antony’s hand. “Yes. Nice to meet you. This is Tess,” Liam said, stepping aside to reveal Tess standing behind him, watching the tense meeting under the oak tree with the end of her ponytail in her mouth. “And this is Kit,” Liam said.
We all exchanged awkward and brief hellos and head nods while Liam, charging right ahead with his celebration, didn’t notice the undercurrents between Nick and Antony. The tight-lipped expressions. The deep breaths and slow exhales.
“This is my home, man,” Nick said. “My work is here. My family. You can’t just show up here and force the situation.”
“I’m not here for that. Really. This wasn’t some plan to ambush you. I promise,” Liam said. “I was invited here by a hockey friend. Yes, I knew you were here but I was so eager to get out of Portland, I didn’t think too much about it.”
Liam turned to me, like he needed an assist, but I didn’t know how to make this better. I didn’t understand what was going on. At all.
Half-brother? Since when? Why wouldn’t Liam tell this guy he was coming? Also, which hockey friend invited him? And why didn’t he tell me any of this?
“I’ll stay out of your way, if that’s what you want,” Liam told Nick.
“You do that,” Nick said tightly. “Professional hockey player or not, I fight dirty.” Nick walked away without a goodbye. Antony shot an expression of pained awkwardness in our direction, as if apologizing for his son’s rudeness, but also acknowledging there was a reason for it. Then he followed Nick.
I turned to Liam, but before I could even ask what the hell was going on, Liam was being hoisted off his feet.
“Liam Locke,” the guy who was bouncing Liam like a baby yelled.
Liam howled and the rest of us stepped back so we didn’t get accidentally kicked.
“You made it!” The man said. He set Liam down and Liam turned to hug the man, the two of them pounding each other’s backs hard enough to drive nails. “So good to see you!”
He stepped back and lifted an old beat-up Bruiser’s cap from his forehead. Suddenly all the blood froze in my body.
Dillon Le Coeur.
There was no mistaking him with that scar running across his face. He was older, grayer. But it was him. There was nowhere to hide. When his eyes turned my way all I could do was pray for spontaneous combustion. Or a very selective avalanche that would take me out and spare Tess.
The smile dropped from the man’s face. He blinked at me a few times as if he wasn’t sure he was seeing clearly. Hot tears burned behind my eyes.
Dillon was one of my father’s first clients. And because my dad had made sure Dillon’s investments looked successful, Dillon had recommended dozens of his teammates and friends. The two of them had been close. I’d once considered Dillon a non-related uncle.
Until it all fell apart. The damage my father had caused this man was compounded over and over again. And Dillon had been one of the witnesses called during my dad’s trial. He’d been there every day. He saw everything.
“Kit,” he breathed, like he’d just seen a ghost. “What are you doing here?”
“I…uh…I…”
“Oh shit, that’s right,” Liam said. “You guys must know…” his face fell as he realized exactly how we knew each other.
When I struggled to say something, Liam kept talking.
“She’s my nanny while I’m watching Tess over here. Tess, come here and meet my friend Dillon.”
Dillon dropped to a crouch in front of Tess. I caught the wince of pain in his face, the penance for all great athletes as they got older in life.
“Well, hello young Tess. Are you ready to have the best beach vacation ever?”
Tess nodded enthusiastically. “I already got a bunch of books and we’re going to have falafels.”
“An excellent start.” He stood up, the warm smile falling from his face. He looked at Liam and me. “So how did this happen? Kit working as your nanny?”
“I didn’t know…I didn’t know you would be here,” I said, through a thick throat. “I…uh…owed him.”
Dillon shot Liam an arched eyebrow. “Really?”
I wasn’t ready for them to talk about me like I wasn’t there or try to pretend that my father and I hadn’t done our best to destroy their lives. The guilt and shame were crushing. Ten minutes ago I’d been weightless, the future in front of me full of possibility.
Now I was in that court room all over again. Swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
“I’ll wait for you in the car,” I said through numb lips, and turned on my heel for the truck.
“Wait!” Tess cried. “What about falafels?”
“Liam will get them for you,” I said, smiling at the girl as best I could over my shoulder. “I’m just going to sit in the car for a second.”
Sit in the car for a second and die.