Chapter Three
T he guests at the Brodys’ christening ceremony the next day for their daughter, Zoe, spilled out of the church after the event, gathering below the wide stone steps at the front. It had been a beautiful ceremony, with Carolyn’s sister and brother-in-law being named as Zoe’s godparents. Little Zoe had been less than a fan of the whole thing, particularly getting drizzled with water, but Emily thought she’d never seen a cuter baby in her little, white christening gown and bonnet.
As promised, Liam had picked them up on the dot and taken them to the church this morning. She admitted to feeling a little giddy being near him. Giddy, the way she’d felt as a girl, seeing a boy she was crushing on. Which was crazy. But she wasn’t mistaken that she caught him looking at her during the service and she was guilty of the same.
Now she, Muriel, and Liam stood outside the church together as cabs began arriving to pick up people on their way to the reception which was taking place at a restaurant in midtown. Carolyn and Jess approached them, holding Zoe as they waited.
“You’re all coming to reception, right?” Jess asked with a wink at Liam.
“Of course,” Liam said, but turned to Emily. “Aren’t we?”
“Definitely.”
Muriel bit her lip. “I’d love to, but I’ve got a deadline for a photo edit and the art director of the magazine is killing me. It’s got to be in by tonight. I’m afraid I’ll have to bail on you. I’m so sorry.”
Emily began to protest, but Carolyn hugged Muriel. “That’s all right. We’re so glad you could make it to the ceremony. It really means a lot to us.”
Muriel hugged her back. “No, thank you for inviting me to tag along. I can’t wait to see what little Zoe Louise Brody becomes in this world.” She tickled the baby’s little feet, then hugged her sister and air-kissed Liam on two cheeks. “Sorry, you two. You’re on your own. But that’s all right, isn’t it?”
“ Photo edit? ” she whispered in Muriel’s ear.
Muriel just smiled. “You remember, I told you, for British Vogue ? I’m so behind. See you later, darling. Bye, Liam.” She flagged a cab and climbed in before Emily could say any more.
So, that was how it was. Abandoned. There was no photo edit. Her deadlines were all complete before she made this trip. It was just Muriel’s sisterly decision to leave Emily to her own devices with Liam. A deep flush heated her cheeks. Well… things could be worse than spending time alone with the man standing beside her, who looked utterly gorgeous in his dark blue jeans and peacoat.
“She just bugged out on you, didn’t she?” he said, leaning close.
“Uh-huh.”
“Thought so. We don’t have to go if you—”
“No, of course we’ll go. It’s fine. She… she’s just being Muriel. She’s always quite concerned that I’m on my own. Not involved ,” she clarified. “As if that makes me some kind of cat lady or something.”
“Do you own a cat?”
“ No. ”
“There you go then. Officially not a cat lady.”
“I could have a cat. I rather want one.”
He just smiled at her. “We have a few barn cats we can spare.”
She laughed. “That might be—” As the crowd dispersed, Emily spotted a woman carrying a microphone and being trailed by a cameraman heading her way. “Oh, no.”
“What?”
“I can’t believe this. How did they find me?”
“Who?”
“Let’s go.” She tugged his hand pulling him in the opposite direction. “Hurry.”
“Ms. Quinn!” shouted the woman who was obviously a reporter from Channel 8 News . “Ms. Quinn, can I ask you a few—”
“No!”
“But do you have any comment on William Bledsoe’s arrest? And were you involved in his bilking of millions of dollars from your clients at Bledsoe, Tamarin, and Carter?”
Emily froze. Horrified, she realized she was the subject of the stares of half a church full of people who’d turned to see what was happening.
She couldn’t quite catch her breath. Of course not! I would never , she wanted to scream, but all she could say was, “No comment.” Anything else was a minefield of trouble.
“The FBI is reportedly calling this a Ponzi scheme,” the woman shouted. “A lot of people find it hard to believe that those who worked under William Bledsoe were not also involved, including his partners in the firm. Do you have anything to—”
Emily ducked her head as Liam took her elbow, putting himself between her and the reporter. “You heard the lady. She said no comment.” He flagged a cab, and one pulled up to the curb. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
“Ms. Quinn—” The reporter was still following them as they climbed into the vehicle. “What’s your reaction to the news that there may be others charged within this case? Ms. Quinn?”
She slammed the door and told the cabbie, “Drive! Hurry!”
“Central Park West,” Liam told the man. “Step on it.”
The driver nodded, squealing away from the church and leaving in his wake the horrified stares of a dozen people she actually knew.
Emily sank down in her seat, slamming her eyes shut. Oh, God. She’d never be able to show her face here again. And not only that, she’d be the talk of the reception, maybe ruining the day for Carolyn and Jess. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you had to see that.”
Liam took her hand. “ Shhh ,” he whispered. “It’s okay now. They’re gone.”
She shook her head, actual tears sliding down her cheek. She swiped angrily at them with her fist. Somehow, she’d managed to put this whole mess at the back of her thoughts today for the service, but now the tears that had been lingering just below the surface since yesterday morning just erupted.
“I’m sorry.” She gulped back a sob. “I’m not a crier. I don’t cry. Ever.”
He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand. “Never?”
“Well, obviously not never. Because…” She gestured to her face.
She was about to ugly cry. Dropping her face in her hands, she turned away from him.
“Yeah, that rule is meant to be broken.”
She laughed in spite of her tears. “It’s a horrible mess. I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. You didn’t invite them to come and assault you at a private christening. And who the hell are they anyway?”
She snorted and swiped a knuckle under her nose. “J-just the biggest news channel in the city. And she’s one of their anchors. F-frickin’ Kyria Baldwin. I’ll be all over the five o’clock news. I’ve ruined the whole day. Just… just take me home, please.”
He glanced at the driver in his rearview mirror who was taking in their conversation. He sent Liam a sympathetic look.
“I could take you home, if that’s what you really want. Or… we could walk it off in the park where no one knows you or where to find you. Get some crisp February air, look at the ducks… get a new perspective…”
She gave a watery laugh. “The ducks? And a walk? A walk won’t change anything.”
“Not how I see it. Exercise is always the answer. A good walk through a park or a ride through a meadow on a good horse, that makes everything a hundred times better.”
They passed Columbus Circle where the horse-drawn carriages were lined up, waiting for passengers and then they entered the park. It was still cold, but not icy and the wind and rain had quit yesterday. A blue sky stretched out over the park and the trails were dotted with people who shared his philosophy. And honestly, the thought of returning to her apartment to wallow in the dilemma that had tossed her world upside down did not appeal.
She nodded at Liam, and he told the driver to pull over. He paid and the two of them disembarked onto the sidewalk of Central Park West.
For a long moment, they just stood there, watching the cab drive away. What could she say to explain herself? What must he think of her now? That she might be a criminal?
A few feet away, there was a man with a cart selling roasted chestnuts. The fragrance wafted to them on the thin, cold air.
“Look at that,” he said. “I’ve always heard about these things but never have tried one. You like roasted chestnuts?”
She nodded, giving her cheeks a two-handed swipe.
“Sold then.” He bought a small paper-wrapped cone of chestnuts, still warm from the vendor’s oven and handed them to her. “Here. Sad ladies first.”
She sputtered a laugh and pulled one out. At Christmas, when she was young, her father used to take her and her brother to buy roasted chestnuts from the cartman behind St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a church on Trafalgar Square. Maybe that explained her fondness for them. Because they were such a visceral memory of a time when they were closer.
Liam stared at the half-opened nut. “So, you just…”
She cracked open the shell on the puffy nut and pulled out the meat. “Just like that.”
He followed her lead, then popped it in his mouth. With a frown, he considered the taste. “Different. Smokey. A little nutty. I think I like it.”
She smiled, watching him chew. He had a scruff of beard on his jaw that, instead of looking scruffy, made him look pulled together in a cowboy-ish kind of way, along with that silver buckle on his belt.
They strolled down the sidewalk without talking, in no hurry to go anywhere and eventually they polished off the chestnuts.
“Feeling better?” he asked finally.
“Quite. Thank you. I am.”
“You… want to talk about it?”
She rolled her eyes. “First you meet me in my most humiliating moment, then you rescue me from the next. I hardly think you queued up to hear my sad tale.”
“Well. I have no other plans, considering we just officially ditched Jess and Carolyn’s reception. Lemme check.” He glanced at his watch. “Oh, yeah, I can squeeze a tale of woe into my schedule.” He flashed the smile she found irresistible.
“Well, I suppose you do deserve an explanation. And the fact that we’re practically strangers, is both weird and oddly freeing. Since you and I will probably never see one another again after you go back to Montana. While I—” she crumpled up the chestnut wrapper in her hand and tossed it forcefully into a waste bin—“while I stay here and attempt to figure out my life.”
He stopped on a small footbridge to look over the side at the water of the park’s pond. “Hey. You never know,” he said, staring at the ice forming on the edges of the water. “Life’s a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure thing, isn’t it? If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in the past couple of years it’s that expectations are a trap. Things hardly ever turn out the way we expect them to. And that’s not always a bad thing.”
She sighed. “I suppose maybe someday I’ll be able to think of this that way. The whole in hindsight it was a brilliant mistake! thing. But right now, I’m just… I can’t quite see where I’m going.”
“That’s fair. So… tell me what happened. You could start at the beginning.”
The beginning was too far, even for her. But reluctantly, she told him the story of her downfall at Bledsoe, Tamarin, and Carter as they walked beneath the naked maple trees, past the park benches filled with old men sharing coffee, and around slips of ancient rocks that marked the paths. He listened without asking questions, slowing down when she got to the part where the FBI came in, scowling when she mentioned the extent of the crimes they’d already discovered Bledsoe had committed.
“He was my mentor for years,” she finished. “We were introduced six years ago in London at a dinner party and, honestly, I needed something of my own, unconnected to my father or my overachieving brother. I moved to New York City for this job and never looked back. But I don’t know how I could have missed what he was doing or how he hid it all this time. They say it’s been going on for more than ten years. Maybe from the beginning of the firm. It boggles the mind how he could have so betrayed everyone, including his family and friends and all of us, as well. He’s apparently taken full responsibility, claiming he did it all alone, but as you can see from that reporter’s implications, not everyone believes that. So, who knows if anyone will believe me?”
“I do,” he said, though he had honestly no way of knowing if she was telling the truth.
“That’s kind of you. On the bright side, I can only say I’m fortunate that I made it a firm rule from the start not to work with friends and family, and so I sent them elsewhere. I didn’t want to contaminate my friendships with business, especially that business. It’s much too volatile. That is one lesson my father taught me that has apparently served me well. But I’m afraid I haven’t seen the last of the reporters chasing me down with microphones.”
“Maybe you need to get out of town for a while. See things fresh.”
She shook her head. “I need another job. I’ve worked too hard at this profession to let this beat me.”
They approached an open field where a boy and his father were flying a kite, in the middle of winter. The boy was determinedly running across the field, boosting the kite while the father cheered him on. The wind was failing them, but the boy who looked to be around six or seven, seemed completely undeterred. She and Liam stopped to watch, fascinated by his determination. Finally, the kite launched into the sky and climbed above the treetops and the boy screamed with joy and jumped up and down while his father proudly watched him from a distance.
“Brilliant,” she murmured under her breath, then exchanged smiles with Liam as they continued on. “Thank you for this. I do feel better just to say it out loud. I… hope I haven’t ruined your day.”
“The opposite. And look. The sky’s still up there. Tonight, the moon will rise. We’re feeling the walk a bit in our legs—”
“Speak for yourself, cowboy,” she teased.
He laughed. “Okay. I’m feeling it. Probably just the smog.”
“Probably.”
“You know, Montana skies are blue pretty much all the time. It’s cold, but no smog. And definitely no reporters stickin’ microphones in your face. Just sayin’.”
“Is that an invitation, Mr. Hardesty?”
“Oh, it definitely is.”
Embarrassed now, she shook her head and kept walking. “You know, I’ve done nothing but prattle on about myself. That’s horrifyingly rude, really. Tell me about you. I want to know.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, what is it you love to do?”
“Love?” he repeated as if that question stumped him. “I don’t know. When I was younger I loved rodeo. But after one too many injuries, I gave that up.”
“The belt buckle?”
He glanced down at it as if he’d forgotten he even wore it. “Yeah. Remnants of my past. I did okay for a while. Now, I don’t know. I… I love building things. Putting this guest ranch we’ve got going together. I love a good ride across a pasture at dawn when the fog’s just rolling off the grass. Seein’ a newborn calf stand up for the first time. I love workin’ with my family. Years ago, I thought I’d do anything just to get away from that place. But now… now I love it again.”
“Why did you want to leave?” she asked. “Before. If you don’t mind my asking.”
“I think…” he said, seeming to work it out in his mind just then, “I was just stuck. Resenting that my life was mapped out for me. Not something I chose. Not really seeing the gift it was. Lonely was part of it, I guess. But like I said, life’s a choose-your-own-adventure thing. I guess I just created a different adventure out of it.”
She considered him with a sideways look, having vastly underestimated a cowboy’s capacity for insight. She supposed she’d always lumped them together with jocks or construction workers on the streets of New York whose deepest insight was to whistle at her as she walked by.
Life’s a choose-your-own-adventure thing.
Perhaps she was at some sort of inflection point in her life and now the choice was hers. But her apartment rent needed to be paid and her green card was a ticking time bomb now that she was officially unemployed. But she’d think about that tomorrow.
They walked on, talking about cattle and ranches, London and carriage rides through the park. He told her they had pretty much the same thing on the ranch only with hay instead of velvet seats and fuzzy blankets. She told him about the horse she used to own when she was a girl and the dressage competitions she would enter because her father thought it was the only civilized way to ride, unless one was on a hunt.
Eventually, they found themselves on her street, a few parked cars away from the front of her building. From a distance, they could see a bevy of reporters camped out below her window at the brownstone and media trucks parked nearby. She stopped dead, ducking back behind a tree, unsure if she wanted to brave the gauntlet.
“I take it that’s your place,” he said.
“Yep.” She turned to him. “ Bollocks. I’d better go this one alone. No need to get yourself tagged on this disaster.”
“Right,” he said, not having any of that. “Take my hand.”
“What?”
“Stay beside me.” He wrapped his warm fingers around hers and tugged her toward the entrance of her brownstone. Immediately, the reporters spotted her and swarmed in her direction. Emily covered her face and leaned into him as he shoved them away with one arm, shielding her from the microphones and the shouted questions.
“Ms. Quinn, were you complicit in the fraud your company perpetrated on—”
“Did you know what the managing partner of your firm was up to when he—”
And another shouted, “Why won’t you answer our questions?”
“Because she has no comment,” Liam barked at them as they hurried up the stone steps. Emily fitted her key in the door and shoved it open, and the pair of them dove inside, slamming the door behind them. It rattled in its frame.
Emily leaned against a nearby wall, eyes slammed shut. She was shaking. Muriel appeared in the hallway. “Oh, my God, Em. Are you two all right? They’ve been here all day. I barely made it inside myself.”
Emily nodded, looking up at Liam who seemed a bastion of calm. “Thanks to Liam. Thank you. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“No apology needed. They’re like damn vultures out there, sniffing out the carcass of a story.”
Emily exhaled. “What they don’t know is… I don’t know anything. They’ll be hugely disappointed to learn that it was all William Bledsoe and the rest of us are simply collateral damage.”
The three of them stood there for an awkward moment before Emily invited him in. “Please come and stay for a bit.”
He swallowed hard. “I’ve got a flight back to Montana this evening and I really should try to make a showing at the reception. I should go.”
So soon? Disappointment washed through her. She wasn’t quite ready for him to disappear from her life. She wanted more time. Especially today when she felt like every fragile thread of her life that was before what happened yesterday was unraveling. It was all ridiculous, she knew, with him being from there and her from here, but still, there was something… fateful about their meeting and she’d learned long ago not to ignore that.
Muriel hugged her, then gave him a hug, too. “Thank you for watching out for my sister.” She pointed back toward the kitchen. “I’ve just got something in the oven warming up. I’d better—”
Emily nodded to her and Muriel winked. “Bye, Liam.”
“Muriel.” That delicious smile kicked in again.
When her sister was gone, Emily turned back to him. “She thinks you’re quite all that.”
“Yeah? What about you?”
She blinked. “I think… I think I quite agree. But you know… here we are about to say goodbye forever. Because the stars didn’t quite align, did they?”
He stepped closer. “Oh, I don’t know. I think they did alright, helping us find each other twice in this big pond.”
“I suppose so, yes,” she said.
He pulled his hat off and dropped it to his side. “Anyway, I don’t like goodbyes. So, let’s just say, if you’re ever in Montana… you have my number.”
“And you have mine. Is it foolish to say let’s stay in touch?”
He shook his head, a smile spreading over his face. “About as foolish as sayin’ the stars will decide if we never see each other again.”
“Then… let’s at least say we will,” she said and reached up to kiss him on the cheek. But he turned his face toward her and kissed her on the mouth instead.
If it was an accident, it didn’t matter, because neither of them tried to undo it. Instead, he doubled down with a look at her and kissed her with real intention.
His lips were warm, and his cheeks were cold, and he wrapped an arm around her back without really pulling her closer. He tasted sweet and his lips were soft, and she wanted to lose herself in his kiss. But he kept it brief, maybe because he didn’t want to scare her away or push her. Yet, it was the opposite, really. It was a farewell kiss that felt as natural as the walk they’d just had together through the park and the inevitable culmination of their first meeting, and it had her pulse beating in her ears.
“ Mmmm ,” she murmured.
“Yeah,” he answered.
He fitted his hat back on with a smile. “Until then, Emily Quinn.” He walked out her door, and reluctantly, she closed it quickly behind him.
But between the window curtains, Emily watched him deal handily with the journalists until he’d cleared the crowd and then disappeared around the corner, never once looking back. Instead, already on his phone, he was moving on.
She turned and stared down at the gauntlet of reporters just as a ding hit her cell phone. A text message alert appeared on her screen. A slow smile curved her lips.
Him: “Did I mention I can’t stop thinking about your flourless chocolate cake?”
Her: “You did, actually, mention it.” She added a heart emoji. Then, she frowned, deleted it and added a winky face.
Him: “Just wanted you to know.”
Her: “I’m glad you liked it.”
She waited as the three dots that told her he was typing scrolled across the text thread. Finally, her phone dinged again.
Him: “Liked? No, I loved it. In case you missed it, that’s my subtle way of luring you to Montana to bake me another one.”
She bit her thumbnail, grinning like an idiot, as she typed again.
Her: “You only want me for my cake.”
Pause.
Him: “That is a close call.” Three dots blinked again. “Kidding… It’s definitely not.”
She felt herself blush again, something that was becoming routine around him.
Her: “Safe travels back home, Liam.”
Him: “…”
She waited, wondering if he was typing and erasing, too. Finally…
Him: “I’ll be thinking about that… cake and that kiss.”
She hearted his text and waited for more, but that was it.
Finally, she sat on the chair near her window and stared out past all the chaos at her window, at the city she loved so much. She was a city girl, after all, and always would be—once this chaos all died down. Still, she tried to picture Montana—halfway across America, with its cattle and prairies and jagged mountains, seeing Liam there in his element. But likely, this weekend was just a blip. An accident. A brief encounter.
She read his words again, remembering that kiss, too.
But yes. A blip. That was all it would ever be.