Chapter 20
It’s supposed to be a red flag if your place of work puts too much emphasis on being a family.
Consider this: sometimes, a family is what you need.
Not me personally. Not Devereaux Madden, the man who fell from the heights of grad school to land among the stars of Phoenix Enterprises. The Hills? They needed a family. Somebody who would step in when it was inconvenient. Somebody they could trust not to judge them for how they handled things. Somebody who could keep a billion-dollar company running while any number of people had breakdowns or walked in elementary school graduations or got arrested.
I still don’t need a family. That’s not my point.
My point is?—
Hang on. The business of running a multi-billion-dollar company like Phoenix never stops. I can’t just stop sending emails to dwell on the nature of family.
My point is, I might not need a family, but I like being on the periphery of one. I like that Mason didn’t second-guess my abilities and hired me on the spot, two minutes after he met me. You can make the argument that he was sleep deprived to high heaven. To that I say—he didn’t fire me when I woke him up from his nap, and that’s what counts.
Everything that’s happened since counts, too.
I have to admit—although it pains me to say it—that there might be some value in feeling like part of a family. Not actually being in the family. Just being near it and watching how things play out through the years. Am I allowed to take any credit for that? I think I am. I’ve covered Mason when he had to pick up his youngest sister, Remy, from school, and when there were parent-teacher conferences, and when he was losing his mind over Gabriel’s recent foray into a nasty business group, and when he almost decided to sell the company so he could find Jameson and bring him home.
It’s nice. That’s the point. It’s nice to see the happy ending part of the story. It’s hard to work with and for a man and watch him—and his siblings—fight their way through heartbreak and hardship and not feel relieved when it all works out.
I like how it’s worked out.
Fine. I’ll admit the rest, too. I like being close enough to family to come to pool parties and brunches. Do I take them up on every offer? No. Do I want to? Yes. But most of the family parts of life aren’t Sunday brunches. They’re late night emergency legal sessions and helping a nine-year-old with her homework and letting a grieving teenager take over your office when he can’t stand to be in school and putting food in front of people when they’re too busy or stressed or sad to eat.
When family stuff comes up, Mason talks about it in front of me. He talks about it to me. Phoenix isn’t the family. The Hills are, and I’ve known Mason long enough to be sure that if push comes to shove, it’ll be his siblings before Phoenix every time.
All this to say: I don’t need a family other than this one. I don’t need a stranger to make me feel like I belong. I belong here. Standing by. Ready to leap into action.
“Are you thinking about him?” Jameson whispers in my ear.
I bat him away. “What is wrong with you?”
He leans back in his seat at the restaurant where the five of us—Mason, Gabriel, their devil of a brother, his assistant Kirk, and I—are having a working lunch. It was supposed to be a working lunch, anyway, but the vision hasn’t materialized into reality. It’s materialized into me drinking a hard lemonade and attempting to guide a discussion about the stock market into productive territory.
Jameson narrows his eyes. “I was trying to catch you off-guard. It’s a technique.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
I know exactly who he’s talking about. I attended a pool party at a friend of Mason’s over the summer—several of them, when everything was said and done, but who’s counting?—and at one of those parties there was…
…a man.
He was just a man.
A man with navy swim trunks and lean muscles and dark hair and dark eyes who looked for all the world like he’d just jumped down from the deck of a ship. I saw him standing there in the sun, and then Mason’s friend’s brother Poseidon tackled him into the pool.
The moment had to be over, I thought.
I was wrong.
He resurfaced, all wet hair and glistening body, laughing, his smile wide and white and beautiful.
Again—he was soaking wet. He had been tackled into the pool.
Need I say more?
Soaking wet.
I can’t help the way I reacted. I’m only human, and I’d had several long sips of hard lemonade by then. The alcohol was beginning to enter my bloodstream. And between the heat and the water and the man who was in the water?—
I looked.
I might’ve stared.
And then the moment should have been over.
It should have.
Except he turned and looked at me, still smiling, and that light in his dark eyes got even brighter.
Mason and Gabriel’s stock market observations have become more intense. I don’t think they notice Jameson leaning closer.
“Our pool party friend.”
“There were a lot of people at pool parties over the summer.”
“I’m sure you remember this guy.”
“I really don’t.”
Jameson’s eyes glint. “Caspian.”
Caspian. The name makes me think of sparkling adventures on the high seas. It makes me think of cutting the lines to everything I’ve ever known. It makes me think of the phrase wild blue yonder.
Those are all things I don’t need and don’t want and never, ever dream about. Sailing away? On what ship? I don’t even know that Caspian has a ship. And crewing a ship, from everything I’ve read in books and seen in movies and looked up on the internet, is more like a red-flag family than a company. Putting your life in someone’s hands when you’re surrounded by miles of open ocean is a serious commitment.
“I wasn’t thinking about Caspian, no.” I should get some kind of honorary distinction for saying his name like it’s just a name and not the name of that dark-eyed, soaking wet man.
I might’ve been thinking about him last night as I fell asleep.
As I tried and failed to fall asleep, then tried some other things to distract myself, then finally fell asleep well after midnight.
I might have been thinking about him in the shower this morning because I think of him every time I turn on the shower. It was all those glistening droplets. It was how they glinted in the sun when he looked at me and I?—
“I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t have to buy it. You have to eat lunch. How’s Lily, by the way?”
Jameson looks down at his plate, the skin near his eyes tensing with nervousness. “Really, really pregnant.”
“Is everything going okay?”
“Yeah.” He drums his fingers on the tabletop. “I just don’t want to let her down.”
“You won’t.” Jameson meets my eyes, and I get a little stab of guilt. I mean what I’m saying to him. I haven’t made a habit of lying to any of the Hills, or anyone else, really. But I asked him about Lily on purpose. I can’t afford to think about Caspian right now. Not if I’m going to have to stand up and walk out in sight of other people.
“I might,” he says, softer.
“No. You’ll be great. You’ve trained all your life to improvise in high-stress situations.”
Jameson grins, and I have a vivid memory of him at sixteen, looking dead tired and at his wits’ end, saying can you not tell Mason I’m here? I had to leave school and I just can’t.
His face lit up just like this back then, when I’d ordered him a veggie burger and a mountain of fries and a small bucket’s worth of ketchup and let him gather himself before he told Mason what had happened at school.
“I’m glad you’re here.” Jameson sits up taller and reaches for his drink. “You’re, like, a cornerstone. Building would collapse without you.”
“I’m ready in the event it tries.”
I’m always ready.
I’m always here.
That’s how I like it.
Eleven days later,I’m in the shower, thinking of Caspian’s wet hair and his wet body and the light in his dark eyes, hard to the point of pain and nowhere near any kind of release, when my phone rings.
Mason has kept his phone with him at all times since I met him, so I do the same. My phone vibrates against the countertop.
I let go of my cock and tip my face up to the stream, doing my best to shake off the pool party memories.
Then I shut off the shower, lean out, and grab my phone.
“It’s me. Everything okay?”
“Dev.” There’s rustling in the background. “Lily went into labor in the middle of the night. She wants us at the hospital, just in—no, I don’t know,” he says, I think to his wife, Charlotte. “She wants us there. Jameson wants us there. We’re not barging in on her.”
Sometimes, I find it surprising how much Mason Hill cares what I think. He’s the hero of Phoenix, not me, and still—my opinion matters.
“I’m sure you’re not. You wouldn’t.”
“I won’t be in. I don’t know—depending on how things go, I—” He lets out a long breath. This is not a side of Mason Hill most people outside his family are allowed to see, but then, I’ve been seeing this side of him since the day we met. “I want to be there for both of them,” he finishes. “I feel like I should be there. And available. So it might be a couple days.”
“Gabriel, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Mason?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t worry.” I can almost hear his relief over the phone. “I’ve got it covered. I’ll be here when you get back.”