Chapter 17
17
Kit
H indsight was a tricky thing. After I found out the truth about what my dad was doing, so many things started to make sense. The way we lived two kinds of lives. One that was often posh and had nice clothes and fancy dinners. One that sometimes had us leaving our nice hotel in the middle of the night, only to end up in a shitty hotel where we ate gas station food.
Dad had sold this double life to me like it was a lark. Like we were constantly in the middle of an adventure and gas station hot dogs were his favorite treat.
At first I’d been too young to question it, and why would I? It was just fun. Dad could have sold me anything and I would have bought it. Then, it was just the way things were.
I went to boarding school for three years and had missed probably the worst of his gambling along with the trouble his gambling had gotten him into.
When I’d come home, there hadn’t been a single thing amiss. Everything was exactly as I expected. He had this big house in Northern New Jersey. A fancy car. He’d immediately bought me my own. He’d begged me to hold off on college, while he was getting his new investment firm off the ground, for so many good reasons.
He’d needed my help with the growing business. And he argued, helping him with his business would be invaluable experience for me.
But the worst, the absolute worst lie he told me, was when he’d started having me join him at various charity functions around the country. New York. LA. Chicago. Always cities with pro teams.
Nashville.
“You’re a natural at this, honey. I need you to know every player in the room, every important stat he has. I need you to know their mother’s name and the name of the pet they had as a kid. You’re my in, honey. My secret weapon.”
What an idiot I’d been. What an absolute fool to think he’d been teaching me the business, using me for my skill at remembering details. Buying me gorgeous dresses that were also just a little sexy.
Gas station hot dogs were never anyone’s favorite treat.
I should have known how deep the lies went, but I didn’t.
Now, I was here. Stuck in another lie. If I was smart, I’d get the hell out of this beautiful beach house. Away from this charming town and this man who stirred up a hurricane of desire inside my body.
But at this point, I think it was pretty clear - I was not smart.
So instead, I sat down at the big kitchen table and ate delicious falafels. I talked about birds with Tess and laughed at Liam’s bad bird jokes.
It was almost like I wanted to get hurt. I wanted to have this weird hope, only to have it yanked away from me. Like I could see the tornado approaching and all I had to do was walk away, but no. Not me. I was going to dive right inside.
Kit Barrington was nothing if she wasn’t a sucker for punishment.
I needed to get as far away from Liam Locke as I could, and instead I made a grocery list of things we’d need for the week.
“I can Instacart that stuff,” Liam said, coming into my space, looking over my shoulder. His breath was warm against my neck in a way my brain hated but my body loved.
“He Instacarts everything,” Tess said. She sat across from me rolling falafel in hot sauce and eating them in two bites. It was legit. That girl loved hot sauce.
“There’s no Instacart here,” I said. We were in rural Maine. An out of the way beach community. There would be one local grocery store. I’d been in enough places like this around the country on my journey of atonement to know I was right.
“Instacart is everywhere,” Liam said. “I once was able to Instacart myself new underwear at the Espys. Trust me. I got this.”
“Why in the world did you need new underwear at the Epsy’s?” I shook my head. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. Fine. Knock yourself out, here is what we need.”
I handed him the list. He winked at me and ruffled Tess’s hair. Then he went out to the truck to bring in all our luggage. While he did that, Tess and I thoroughly explored the beach house. We found cabinets under the stairs (like Harry Potter, only unlike Harry Potter they were only filled with shelves of jars and dusty old wreaths). We found a spacious bathroom with a huge window that opened over a claw foot tub. There was a room full of books and inexplicably two bicycles that Liam immediately took outside to hose off. There was a terrifying attic that Tess tried to dare me to go into, but I was no fool.
Liam let me have the primary bedroom with the private bathroom. It was right next door to the bunk bed room where Tess would sleep. Liam claimed a guest room with a queen bed tucked under the eaves upstairs.
There was a television. Internet. A washer and dryer.
“Everything we could need,” I said.
Run! My gut said. Get out while you still can. This is going to feel like a home.
Tess ran from her room to the screened in porch with a stack of her books.
Liam was frowning at his phone and I thought about that scene today with that man, Nick. His half-brother.
I knew how to keep myself safe with almost nothing at my disposal. I could cobble together a weapon of self-protection with sarcasm and fear of abandonment. The best way to keep myself safe right now was to not get involved in Liam’s family drama.
But there was something about the way he looked in that moment. The way his brow furrowed like someone had hurt him and he just didn’t understand why.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up and shaking off the pensiveness on his face. “I just…” he let out a long breath. “I need to talk to my brother about what I did today.”
“You mean Nick?”
“No. My other brother. Who is going to be furious with me for coming here.”
“Wyatt.” The brother who just married the pop star in Vegas.
“Yeah. We were going to go easy with Nick. Give him time to get used to the idea of having brothers, and I, of course, did the opposite of that.”
He smiled at me in the way of a guy who is used to doing the wrong thing and getting yelled at by his big brother. It made me, stupidly, want to push the hair off his face and give him a hug.
There was something that told me Liam would be an amazing hugger.
“Did you always know Nick was your half-brother?” I asked, putting my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t do anything stupid.
Liam shook his head and tucked his phone in his back pocket. “Our mom died just before the playoffs started. She left us a letter and told us about Nick. She’d married her first husband when she was very young, He turned out to be an abusive drunk. They had a son. She said she’d stayed as long as she could, but in the end she walked away. She didn’t know how to do that and take her son with her.”
“She left Nick with his father,” I said and closed my eyes.
Liam nodded. “Our mom had mental health issues. I don’t know how equipped she was to take care of herself, much less a kid.”
“She raised you,” I said.
“Well, truthfully, my brother raised me,” Liam said with a half grin. “Or we raised each other. Our dad took care of our mom and we were left to our own devices a lot of the time.”
I did not want to feel sympathy for the millionaire professional athlete. He didn’t need any more emotional investment or involvement from me. Not if I wanted to walk out of here in one piece. But his childhood wasn’t easy. And if there was one pain I knew – it was that one.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Well, it was nothing compared to the shit Nick had to go through,” Liam said. “He ran away when he was fourteen and luckily ran into the chef guy you were drooling over at the park.”
“Can’t help it,” I said. “Antony Renard is hot and he can cook.”
“I’m hot,” Liam said.
“But you can’t cook. It’s a combo move, I’m afraid,” I said, fighting a smile.
“I can show you all kinds of combo moves, sweetheart,” he said.
“Stick to the story, hot shot.” I tried not to smile but it was impossible. “So, what happened after you got this letter?”
“We made contact with Nick, just after the finals, and it didn’t go great. Nick’s not exactly in the market for two half-brothers. Wyatt and I decided we were going to give him some time to get used to the idea of having brothers before reaching out to him again.”
“How is a guy supposed to get used to having a brother unless he’s around?” I asked.
He looked at me and slowly smiled. “That,” he said. “is a very good point. One I will use when my brother is yelling at me.”
I pretended to tip my hat to him and immediately blushed because it was so stupid.
“How old were you when your mom died?” Liam asked.
I felt everything inside of me stiffen. No. Nope. I shook my head.
“I don’t…” I stopped. How could I say I don’t talk about her and still sound like a rational person? But he’d shared his story. I took a breath. “I was almost ten.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“What was her name?”
“Catherine. I’m ah… I’m named after her.”
This is more than I’d talked about my mom in years. I felt rusty.
“What was she like?”
No one ever asked me that.
“She was smart. And quiet. She liked books and puzzles. She was always really patient with me. I think I wanted to be a teacher in part because she wanted to be a teacher but never got that chance.”
Stop. Stop talking. Just…close your mouth and walk away.
“What happened when she died?”
It was strange. I didn’t really know. For me it felt like I was seeing the past through this weird thick mist. Events were sketchy. Sadness coated all my experiences.
I hadn’t asked him, but I wondered if that was when my father turned to gambling. Something to distract him from the grief of losing my mother. Or had she died knowing he’d been a cheat?
“My dad travelled a lot for…well, I won’t call it work. I just joined him on the road until I turned fifteen and he sent me to boarding school.”
“You went to boarding school?”
“Yeah, for three years of high school. I have no idea how Dad made that happen, but he did. He did have this way about him. This ability to convince people he was someone bigger than he was. He was…magnetic.”
“Yeah, that’s what everyone said about him,” Liam said, his voice a little harder. His edges not quite so soft. I was reminded why I could not let my guard down around him. Why it was a mistake. “Most good liars are.”
There was no real heat behind his words. Just an acknowledged fact.
A strange laugh bubbled out of my throat. “You know, it’s not easy when you realize your father is a con man and the worst con he ever got away with was the one he played on me.”
Everything in Liam sharpened. “What do you mean?’
I shook my head. I’d already said too much. More than I wanted to. It was being in this house with him. It was the kiss. It was fucking with my head.
“Were you able to get all the stuff we needed from Instacart?” I asked, changing the subject.
“No!” He cried like he was suffering such an injustice. “You’re not going to believe this. They don’t have Instacart here.”
“What?” I said in mock shock. “You’re joking.”
“Apparently, we’re no longer in America. I have to actually go to the grocery store,” he said.
“Okay. I’ll make sure Tess is settled in. Put her things away.”
He lifted his hand and I wasn’t sure what he was doing. Or what he wanted from me. He picked up my hand and slapped our palms together.
“Go team,” he said with his big goofy smile.
I laughed a little harder than I needed to and he preened like he’d made the best joke ever.
I’d never been part of a team. Not really. I’d thought for so long that my father and I were a team. That we were working towards the same things. Only to have every dream I’d ever dreamt used as fuel in the fire he set to our lives.
I turned away from Liam, tired suddenly and raw. But of course he grabbed my hand.
“What?” I asked, exasperated by him and the pull he had over me.
“Where’d you go?” he asked. “One second we were a team and the-”
“We’re not a team,” I snapped. Then winced at the sharpness in my voice. “We’re not a team,” I said more calmly. “I’m your nanny, you’re paying me, and I’m just doing my job.”
The screened in porch was a reader’s paradise. There was a lamp. A ton of comfy places to sit or lie down. Pillows. Blankets if the ocean breeze turned cool. All was great if you could ignore the bugs on the other side of the screen, attracted by the reading light.
Liam would hate this room.
I sat in a big chair with slouchy cushions with my back to the screens.
“Oh wow,” Tess said, from her spot on the couch. “That one is huge!” She pointed at the corner of the screen, where last I’d checked there’d been a moth the size of my hand.
“I’m not looking,” I said, my face buried in my book. I was not reading the romance. Liam had made me self-conscious about it, so I was reading the Antony Renard cookbook and getting hungry all over again.
Tess had an iPad that was in a big pink protector and it sat on the table waiting for her mom’s nightly FaceTime call. So far, I hadn’t met her mom, but apparently Tess had told her all about me. If it was weird that the mom hadn’t talked to me, it was just one more weird thing about Liam being left in charge of Tess.
Even though I knew Janice’s story, and Liam’s history of big favors, something just felt off about all of this.
Except when you saw Liam and Tess together. Then it felt right. They adored each other. They had inside jokes and treated each other like family.
Maybe what was weird was that it wasn’t weird at all.
The iPad buzzed and Tess jumped up to answer it.
“Mom!” she cried.
I could hear the buzz of a woman’s voice asking questions.
“Yep. We made it. You want to see it?” Tess stood up and took off with the iPad, probably to give her mom a tour of the place.
I turned a page on Antony’s cookbook and wondered if I was skilled enough to make his Mushroom Wellington for Tess.
“My mom wants to talk to you,” Tess said, coming back into the porch. She held out the iPad and after a second’s hesitation I grabbed it.
“Hi,” I said to the beautiful but exhausted looking woman on the other end. She wore scrubs and was clearly in a hospital.
“Hi, you’re Kit? Like the fox.”
I smiled, of course that’s how Tess would introduce me. “I am,” I said. “And you’re the mom to a pretty amazing six year old.”
“Five and a bit – don’t make her older, I want her to stay this age forever.”
I smiled because I understood the impulse. “She is amazing.”
“Thank you. I’m Janice.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“I knew it would only be a matter of time before Liam hired a nanny,” she said.
“He’s got many talents,” I said. “But the practical management and feeding of vegetarian kids might not be at the top of that list.”
Janice laughed. “Oh yes, I know his greatest talents. I remember them well.”
I went bright red at the innuendo and shook my head. “Oh. I’m not…”
Sleeping with Liam was what I was going to say, but Janice put a hand over her mouth looking horrified.
“I’m so sorry. That was so not cool of me. Of course you’re not,” she swallowed. “Experiencing his talents. I did not mean to imply that you were.”
“It’s all right,” I said, ignoring that kiss today and the random electric pulses that rattled through my body when I thought about it.
“It isn’t,” she said. “But thank you. I’m so tired right now I’ve lost all filters and basic decency.” She ran a hand over her hair which was pulled back in a frizzy and wild bun.
“How are things going in Carson City?” I asked.
“Fine. I mean, not fine. At all. But I’m okay. The important question is, how is Tess?”
“Well,” I said with a smile at the girl who was curled back up on the couch, buried in her book. “She’s a very cool kid, but you know that.”
I told her about the books and the bird-watching we were going to wake up early and do. The plans for swimming and ice cream eating.
“It sounds like you’re going to have a real summer vacation,” Janice said. The FOMO in her voice was genuine.
“It is,” I said carefully. “But she misses you.”
Janice turned her face away and blinked. I was suddenly so sad for her. She was a single mom trying her best, believing she was doing the right thing for them both or she wouldn’t have taken the job.
“Sometimes,” she said, wiping under her eyes. “I think I’ve done this all wrong. And if I’d just been… braver, or more confident in myself, maybe it wouldn’t have to be so hard.”
I had no idea what to say to that.
“I’m sorry, again,” she said with a big fake laugh. “Whew! I’m having a night tonight.”
“Hey,” I said, pulling the screen closer and lowering my voice. “Tess is okay. She’s safe. She’s having fun. Liam is entertaining and I’m…responsible. You have nothing to worry about.”
Janice’s face melted like she might cry for real and I wondered if I could somehow hang up on her before that happened. Then her face morphed from near tears to wide-eyed terror. “Kit,” she breathed. “Behind you.”
“What?” I asked, her fear spreading through the screen to me.
“Don’t look.”
I mean… does anyone not look behind them when someone says that to them? I immediately looked behind myself.
Apparently, the moth the size of my hand had friends. Lots and lots of them.
“All right,” I said, standing up. “I’m going inside.”
“Do it slowly,” she said. “I think they’re listening.”