Chapter 4
DAREK
I’d been pacing my kitchen for twenty minutes, wearing a path in the Italian tile. The morning sun streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Atlantic. It usually calmed me. I loved to stand in the kitchen and sip my coffee while watching the ocean do its thing.
Today, it did nothing.
Today, Liza was arriving, and I was apparently having some kind of breakdown about it.
I checked my watch for the fifteenth time.
Her flight had landed in Portland an hour ago.
The car I arranged should be pulling up to the gate any minute, assuming Maine traffic cooperated.
Daisie was at school, wouldn’t be home until three thirty.
That gave me time to get Liza settled, explain the layout of the house, establish some ground rules.
I was not the nervous type. I negotiated deals with oligarchs and tech moguls and old-money families who thought new money was gauche. I didn’t pace. I didn’t second-guess.
And yet here I was, wearing a track in my kitchen floor like an expectant father in a hospital waiting room.
This arrangement was insane. I still couldn’t quite believe I was going through with it. Hiring a woman to pretend to be my girlfriend was crazy. Crazier still was inviting a stranger into my home and into my daughter’s life, all because of one goddamn photograph.
My hands clenched into fists at the thought of it.
That picture. The one that made me look like I’d been ignoring Daisie while she dangled over the edge of the dock, seconds from falling into choppy water.
The one that had been plastered across every gossip site from here to California, accompanied by headlines I was pretty sure could be called defamatory.
But if I sued every person that said shitty things about me, I would be making a lot of lawyers very rich and earning a worse reputation.
It was bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
I had been there. I remembered that day with perfect clarity—the kind of clarity that comes from having it replayed in your mind a thousand times, looking for the moment where everything went wrong.
We had gone to the yacht club so I could do a final walkthrough on a custom build my team had just completed.
It was supposed to take five minutes. Ten at most. Just a quick inspection to make sure everything met my standards before we handed her over. And then Daisie and I were taking our boat out for the afternoon, just the two of us, the way we did most weekends when the weather cooperated.
Daisie had been wearing her life jacket.
She always wore her life jacket near the water, that was non-negotiable.
She had spotted some crabs near the pilings and wanted to see them up close.
So she leaned over. I held onto the back of her life jacket with one hand while I glanced at the yacht with the other.
I had a grip on her the entire time. The water had been calm, barely a ripple.
It was May, for god’s sake, one of the most beautiful days we’d had all spring.
But that single frame, captured from that one angle, made it look like she was about to pitch headfirst into stormy seas while I stood there admiring a boat, oblivious to my daughter’s peril.
The background looked rough in the photo.
Choppy water, dark clouds. Nothing like what I remembered.
My lawyers were looking into it, trying to determine if the image had been digitally altered, but so far they had no luck.
The yacht club claimed the security footage was automatically erased after thirty days, so the original video was gone.
All we had was this single frame, and my word against what the image appeared to show.
And it was only my word against everyone else’s lying eyes.
My word didn’t count for much these days. Not with Sasha’s lawyers painting me as a workaholic who cared more about his business than his daughter. Social media tearing me apart, calling me negligent, demanding that Daisie be taken away from me for her own safety.
I wasn’t going to show Liza the photo. I told her about it and that was enough. I knew how bad that picture looked. I didn’t want Liza to believe it. Why? I didn’t know why I cared what she believed. I wasn’t paying her to believe me.
Liza had been thoroughly vetted by Della. I had done my own background check too, hired a private investigator to make sure there weren’t any skeletons in her closet that might come back to bite me. I paid top dollar to get the quick turnaround.
She was clean. A graduate student working on her PhD in marine biology. No criminal record, not even a parking ticket. No history of substance abuse, no questionable associations, no red flags whatsoever.
She seemed like a good person. Normal. Maybe a bit of a nerd, but that was fine. I was pretty nerdy about boat building.
My phone rang, the screen lighting up with a call from the security gate. I answered before the first ring finished.
“Sir, we have a problem,” Julian, the head of my security team, said.
My stomach dropped. “What kind of problem?”
“We caught a photographer trying to get past the gate. She’s claiming she’s not press, but she’s got professional camera equipment.”
In the background, I heard a woman’s voice filled with irritation. “The camera is for the whales! I’m a marine biologist, for god’s sake, not a—would you please stop manhandling my equipment?”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
“That’s not a photographer, Julian. That’s my guest. Let her through.”
“Sir, are you sure? Because she’s got a telephoto lens and, well, to be blunt, she doesn’t look like one of your typical guests.”
I heard Liza curse and call him some very colorful names. I didn’t blame her.
“I’m sure. Send her up to the house.”
I hung up and headed outside, still smiling. The mental image of Liza arguing with my security team about whale photography was somehow exactly what I’d needed.
The circular driveway in front of the house was paved with a grassy area in the center.
A gorgeous maple tree stood in the center with a bench underneath.
That was Daisie’s suggestion. The five-acre property was protected by a fence and a gate, but the back opened to the sea.
That was a touch more difficult to secure, but unless someone had a death wish and tried to climb the steep rocky incline, they weren’t getting past the single gate that blocked the stairs I had put in.
I stood in front of the door, glancing over my shoulder.
I believed in making good first impressions when I sold a boat.
My house was massive. Stupidly big for two people, if I was being honest. But it gave off an amazing first impression with all of the windows and the sheer size alone.
The front of the house wasn’t the best part though.
It was the back of the house that faced the Atlantic that would really take a person’s breath away.
The car pulled up and stopped. Liza emerged from the back seat looking like she wanted to murder someone.
Her blonde hair had escaped from its ponytail, wild around her face. Her cheeks were flushed with anger or embarrassment or both. And clutched in her arms, like she was protecting a child, was a professional camera with a lens I knew wasn’t cheap.
She spotted me and her expression shifted from fury to something that might have been relief or might have been horror. Hard to tell.
“I am so sorry,” she said, the words tumbling out as she approached.
“Your security team thought I was paparazzi and they wouldn’t believe me that I’m supposed to be here and they tried to confiscate my camera.
” She stopped, seeming to realize she was babbling. “I might have called him a few names.”
“I heard.”
The driver popped the trunk and pulled out two of the sorriest looking suitcases I had ever seen. I couldn’t believe the airline even allowed the things on their plane.
“Is that it?” I asked.
She scowled at me. “I’m only here for a month,” she snapped.
She looked ornery as a wet cat, and something about that almost made me laugh.
“Sorry about the security team,” I said, grabbing her bags while she carried an oversized backpack and her camera. “They’re paid to be paranoid.”
“It’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine. That was what she really meant.
She paused and tilted her head back and slowly took in the exterior of my twelve-thousand square foot home.
“What the hell?” she muttered and shook her head.
“Excuse me?”
“You live here?”
“I live here.”
“This is a compound. This is what supervillains live in.”
Despite myself, I grinned. “Are you calling me a supervillain?”
“How many people live here?”
“Just me and Daisie. And now you, for the next month.”
“That’s insane. You could house a small army in there.”
“The guest wing is mostly empty.” I started toward the entrance.
She followed, still looking around like she’d stepped into an alternate dimension.
“You’ll have your own suite,” I said. “Bedroom, bathroom, sitting area. There’s a desk if you need to work on your school stuff. High-speed internet throughout the house. The kitchen is fully stocked, help yourself to anything.”
We stepped inside, and I watched her reaction. Most people had one of two responses to the interior of my house: either they were impressed and tried to hide it, or they were intimidated and tried to hide that. Liza looked like she was experiencing both simultaneously.
The foyer was two stories high which made the whole place look so much bigger.
It was an open floor plan, so the moment you stepped through the front doors, you were looking straight out to the ocean through the floor-to-ceiling windows that covered the back side of the home.
Light streamed through the windows, reflecting off the polished tile floors.
“I can’t believe people actually live like this,” Liza muttered, more to herself than to me.
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I really don’t think I will.”
I led her through the main living area and down a hallway to the guest wing. Her suite was at the end, with views of both the water and the gardens.
I opened the door and gestured her inside. “This is you.”
She stepped in, set down her camera carefully on the desk, and just stood there looking around.
The room was large and I knew it was several times bigger than most New York studio apartments.
It was decorated in soft blues and whites that were supposed to be calming.
There was a king-sized bed, a sitting area with a couch and chairs, the desk I mentioned, and a door that led to the bathroom.
“The closet is through there,” I pointed. “Bathroom has a tub and a separate shower. Towels are in the cabinet. If you need anything—toiletries, extra blankets, whatever—just let me know.”
She turned to look at me, and for the first time since she’d arrived, she seemed uncertain. Vulnerable, even. “This is really happening. I’m really here.”
“You’re really here.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay.”
“My daughter will be home in a few hours. Settle in. Get yourself together. She can’t see you pissed or freaked out.”
She scowled at me. “I’m not pissed or freaked out.”
“You are.”
It wasn’t up for debate. It was very apparent she was both those things.
“Right. Okay.” She took a breath, seemed to steel herself. “I should probably unpack.”
“Take your time. Rest if you need to. Daisie will be excited to meet you, but I’ll make sure she doesn’t overwhelm you.” I hesitated at the door. “Liza? Thank you. For doing this. I know it’s a lot.”
She smiled. “Thank you for not letting your security team confiscate my camera.”
After I left her to settle in, I went back downstairs and took some of my own advice. I couldn’t look as panicked as I felt when Daisie got home.