Chapter 8 #2
He paused. He hadn’t spoken a word of his own bitter history to anyone, not since arriving on the Cape, but something made him want to confide in Brooke—if only to take that guilt out of her eyes.
“For me, it was my business partner,” he admitted to her.
“My best friend. We built a company from the ground up, and then . . . he tried to take it all.”
Brooke frowned. “That’s terrible.”
Riley found himself wishing he had a glass of that whiskey in his hands, after all. Somehow, tea didn’t take the edge off that betrayal that still reared its ugly head whenever he thought about Tate, and everything that went down between them.
He took a gulp. “It’s a long time ago now, going on . . . four years. We had a tech company, over in Silicon Valley.”
“Wait, what?” Brooke looked so surprised at that he laughed.
“I know, not a lot of streaming video apps in Sweetbriar Cove,” Riley agreed.
“I was always into programming, ever since I was a kid,” he explained.
“Tate was my roommate in college, and we landed on a way to compress video files—I won’t bore you with the details.
We found some investors, lived off ramen, built the thing ourselves, working eighty-hour weeks for years until we had something… ”
Even now, he couldn’t help but smile at the memory. It had been stressful and chaotic but there was nothing like it, that feeling when you’d been working all night but suddenly you found the fix that turned everything around.
“Anyway, things blew up, we got too successful, too fast,” he continued. “Suddenly, we were being courted by the whole town: press, investors, the works. It’s what we always wanted, but, well, be careful what you wish for, I guess,” he said, rueful.
Sure, they were on the VIP list for every hot event in town, getting flown on private jets, and giving talks to adoring crowds, but at the end of the day, that stuff was a poisoned chalice.
“We started fighting more, the people we hired were picking sides . . . It got toxic. Then a big competitor came along, offered us stock options and all the perks to sell out. I said no, but Tate wanted to take the deal. We went round and round on it, God, it was ugly.”
“So what happened?” Brooke asked, her eyes wide.
He shrugged. “He stabbed me in the back. Got some of the investors together and held a vote of no confidence, used some small-print buried in our partnership agreement to try and say I was jeopardizing the future of the company, and was unfit to have a say.”
“No.” Brooke looked outraged, but it wasn’t even a fraction of the anger Riley had felt, the pain that had fueled his fight and stopped him from just rolling over and letting Tate take the whole damn thing. “What did you do?”
“I fought back. I sued him, he counter-sued, we dragged the whole mess through the courts. It took another couple of years,” Riley said grimly.
“But I didn’t stick around to wait it out, I moved out here and let the lawyers duke it out.
We settled last year,” he said with a sigh.
“They finally caved to a fifty-fifty split.”
“That’s great,” Brooke said. “You must be relieved to have it all behind you.”
“Not quite.” Riley gave her a wry look. “We’re not officially divorced just yet.”
Brooke shook her head and sighed. “I don’t understand people,” she said, looking out into the dark. “How they can just lie and cheat and steal. How are you supposed to trust anyone when the people you love can just turn around and stab you in the back?”
Riley had wondered the same thing for a long time, but the worst of his bitterness was behind him now.
“Not everyone,” he told her gently. “The assholes are out there, sure, but there are good folks too. People with integrity. The trick is, you just take things as they come until you can figure out which one they are.”
“It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.” Brooke looked over at him.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Riley said. “But I’m working on it.”
They fell silent, and for a moment, he listened to the distant crashing of the waves and a couple of noisy crickets nearby.
It was peaceful out here—with her. Some people couldn’t sit still, they vibrated with restless energy, but Brooke was calm and totally at ease.
She didn’t say a word, she just seemed content to sit there in the stillness with him, under the dark, star-scattered sky.
“You can actually see the stars out here,” he said, looking up. Back on the West Coast, there was so much light pollution, it had taken him by surprise those first nights out on the water on his boat, seeing the constellations lit up so clearly.
“Hmm?” Brooke yawned.
He looked over and saw her curl in her chair, sleepy. She wasn’t just calm, she was almost out for the count. He smiled.
“Come on, you should get to bed while you’re still tired.”
She got up, yawning again. “Thanks again for the ride. And the conversation,” she added, taking their empty mugs. “I’m glad we’re going to be friends.”
Friends.
Riley looked at her. Her blonde hair was falling out of that braid, and the sleepy smile on her face seemed so innocent and warm, it was like all her anxious defenses had melted away.
She was beautiful.
And just a friend.
Riley bit back a sigh. “Me too,” he said instead, and he meant it.
Whatever Brooke wanted right now, that was just fine with him.