Chapter 17
RYAN
If I hated being the messenger, I absolutely fucking detested being stuck in the middle. Marcus wanted updates all the damn time. Daniel kept asking for answers. Maggie wanted everyone to leave her alone—and somehow, I’d become the human bridge between them.
For some inexplicable reason, no one wanted to just pick up the damn phone and solve their own problems. Direct communication had run its course.
So now, instead of continuing to bounce around between three people who were doing the bidding of someone else, I’d come to the source.
Ha, I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it.
Cliff Pembroke’s office sat in a high-rise far above Manhattan, the people on the streets below so small from up here that they looked like ants. I watched them through the glass while I waited to be seen, wondering if those people down there were having normal days.
Because I was not.
My last totally normal day had been three weeks before the wedding, when I’d arrived in Chicago and hadn’t been to my mother’s house yet. Fuck, has it really been that long?
The conference room door opened and Cliff walked in, immediately extending a hand toward me. “Ryan, I’m sorry for keeping you waiting. I was just wrapping up a call.”
“It’s not a problem.” I took his hand in a firm grip. “Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”
“Of course.” He smoothed out his tie and sat down across from me, leaning back in the chair, but not looking relaxed at all. “You said you wanted to talk?”
“Yes, sir.” I folded my hands on the table and looked him right in the eyes, jumping straight into it.
“What exactly am I doing, Cliff? Everyone seems to think I can convince Maggie to get married, but it seems to me her complaints about the first wedding were valid. Surely, the family should be sitting down together to work it all out instead running everything through me.”
His expression remained impassive. “From what I’ve been told, she listens to you and you’re here because you want to help her. Is that not true?”
“With all due respect, she doesn’t listen to me. All I did was lay out the facts for her. She did the rest. She agreed to come back because of the facts. None of the arguments I made during those two days even swayed her in the slightest.”
“Ah, I see,” he said after a beat, his gaze skimming across my face. “You’re here to verbalize your grievances.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“It doesn’t matter how you put it. That is a fact. You came to me because you’re tired of being accosted from all sides and you’re hoping I can put the matter to rest.”
Holy shit. He’s either the most intelligent guy in the city or the most observant. Or maybe he’s just the most logical, but whatever it is, he’s good. Real good.
“You’re right.” I gave it back to him just as straight. “Maggie has made her terms perfectly clear. She’ll marry Daniel if you agree that she can make the decisions for the wedding. Until she gets your answer on whether you’ll let her do that, nothing is going to change.”
“Do you really think that’s all this is?” he asked pensively. “Can you sit there and honestly tell me that Maggie didn’t know how it was going to work from the very outset?”
“I can’t give you that answer. You’ll have to ask her what she did and didn’t know, but even if she did know, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe she didn’t want that wedding to begin with and her opinions were simply never taken into consideration.”
His jaw worked. “Her opinions were considered. They were simply overruled.”
“To such an extent that she wasn’t in control of anything by the end?
” I asked. “She didn’t even choose her own dress, Cliff.
Now, I won’t pretend to be an expert on brides, weddings, or even women in general, if I’m being honest, but it seems to me that the dress they wear on their wedding day is a pretty big deal to them. ”
“Maggie knew what was expected of her. She was at every dress fitting. Obviously.” He shook his head. “In any event, how well do you really know her, Ryan?”
“Not well at all. That’s why I’m not sure why I’m involved in any of this.”
He slid his elbows onto the table and steepled his fingers, pausing for a beat before he finally spoke again. “See, I know her quite well and I’m not convinced that this is about the dress, or the flowers, or the venue. In fact, I don’t think she’s planning on marrying Daniel at all.”
I frowned. “Well, right now, she’s not. Not until her terms are met.”
He offered me wry smile. “I know her game, son. Even if we do meet her terms, she’s not going to go through with it. She’ll think up some other hoop she wants us to jump through, then that will become her condition, and on, and on. She’s trying to wear us down.”
My heart thumped against my ribs. Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit. Does anything get past this guy?
“She knows perfectly well that she won’t get her inheritance if she refuses to get married,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do for her if she’s doesn’t marry and marry well, at that.”
I regarded him for a moment, this man my dad’s age who’d never lost anything in his life. Cliff Pembroke was silver at the temples nowadays, his dark hair shot through with gray and the lines across his face a mixture of laughter and tension.
Yet, for all his skills of observation and his experience, he didn’t know what it felt like to lose control. I did.
“What if you agree to meet her terms?” I said after a beat. “She gets to choose her wedding, the dress, the venue, the ceremony, and the guest list.”
He let out a long, almost disappointed sounding sigh. “I just told you, Ryan. This is a game to her. It doesn’t matter what we agree to, she’ll come up with something else.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also fair,” I said firmly. “In fact, it’s the bare minimum. She should get to choose the terms of her own wedding and marriage.”
“And what then? We just jump through the next hoop she puts up too, and the next?”
“No.” Alright, Ryan. Time to double down. “If you agree to her terms, I will ensure that she goes through with it, but not while there’s financial pressure on her too.”
“You’ll ensure it?” He arched an eyebrow at me. “I’ll believe that when I see it, but okay. Let’s give it a try. I’ll give her access to her money. For a short amount of time, but she comes home.”
“That might do more harm than good.”
He let out a long sigh, looking back at me for a moment before he jerked his chin in a nod. “You might not be wrong about that. Neither her mother nor Daniel’s will be happy about giving up control of the wedding.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Then we’ve got a deal?”
Cliff’s head cocked. “Not quite. There’s one last thing.”
I stopped halfway through pushing my chair back. “What else is there?”
“I know Marcus offered you money.”
My eyes narrowed. Obviously, he fucking knows about that. Is there anything happening in my life right now this man doesn’t know?
“I don’t need it,” I said. “So I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. No, thank you. Don’t bring it up again.”
His gaze remained fixed on mine. “Think about this very carefully, Ryan.”
“I already have and I don’t want your money, so thanks, but no thanks.”
“That’s not thinking, son. That’s reacting.” He pushed his chair back a little from the table and hooked an ankle over his knee, his features suddenly softening a little. “Your family has had a lot of troubles these last years. I know what you’ve lost.”
“So do I,” I countered. “I was there.”
“If you get Maggie to that altar again,” he said. “I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll give you double what Marcus offered.”
A shiver of unease crept down my spine. “I still don’t want your money, Cliff. This is all truly unnecessary.”
“Perhaps, but do this for us and I’ll ensure the Thayer family sees success in the circles your mother so sorely misses.”
My stomach turned because that was the real offer. Two million dollars was couch change to a man like him. Three, four, five. He wouldn’t miss it. I could make it. Both of us knew that about the other.
Access to the circles we’d been excluded from, however, was a different story. Cliff could give us back a seat at the table.
If it had been only about me, I still would have told him no, but now he’d brought my mother into it.
Cornered and feeling pretty weird about it, I finally stood and started walking around the table. “I’ll do what I can, Cliff. Again, thank you for taking the meeting.”
I gave his hand a quick shake and left, leaning back against the railing in the elevator as it descended and letting my head drop forward. Cliff had the same kind of natural, effortless dominance as men like Alex and Sterling.
Usually, I respected that. Hell, I didn’t even just respect it.
I aspired to it, but Cliff had also decided the Thayers were no longer worth knowing when my father had gone to prison.
Before that, he’d been a friend, but when my family had fallen apart, he was one of the people who’d looked the other way.
The fact that he was now offering me a way back in left a bad taste in my mouth.
When I got back to my apartment, I was still feeling awkward about the whole thing, but when I opened the door and caught a whiff of roasted meat, garlic, and butter in the air, I shoved the thought aside and replaced the awkwardness with suspicion.
“Hello?” I called. “Maggie, are you here?”
“In the kitchen,” she replied happily. “How was your day?”
I blinked hard, feeling like I’d somehow gotten sucked into a twilight zone somewhere between here and the Pembroke building. “Uh, it was fine?”
Shrugging out of my jacket, I hung it on the coat rack by the door and followed the smell to the kitchen. Maggie stood at the oven in one of my sweatshirts, wearing an apron I hadn’t even known I had, and she pulled out an actual roast when I walked in.
Tendrils of her dark blonde hair had escaped from her ponytail, framing her face in golden waves when she straightened up and smiled at me. I swore I nearly had a stroke.
Between that smile and her wearing my sweatshirt, Isaac had been wrong. This definitely wasn’t going to be fun, but it sure as hell was dangerous. “What are you doing, Maggie?”
“Making dinner.”
“You cooked for me?”
“Yes.” She carried the roast to the dining table and set it down, waving toward a chair. “Come sit down.”
I did what I’d been told without argument, my brain still struggling to catch up to what my eyes were seeing. Frankly, I was stunned. Even more so when I realized she could actually cook.
She moved around the kitchen like she’d been living here for years, bringing over a few more dishes before she joined me at the table. The vegetables were perfectly roasted. The meat was tender.
It took me a minute to regain my composure as it sank in that she was taking care of me. I’d never had anyone do something like this for me before, and after the afternoon I’d had—and the ick I’d gotten from her father—it was probably the most comforting thing I’d ever come home to.
Instead of saying that, however, I looked at her across the table and told her something completely different.
“So, uh, I have to go to Chicago for work. I’m sorry I’m only telling you now.
It kind of slipped my mind before with everything else going on.
I go there every two weeks and I have a flight out tonight. ”
“Oh.”
I expected relief or maybe even excitement that she’d have the apartment to herself, rent free, to use for whatever scheme she was cooking up with the whole wedding thing.
Or maybe to turn my living room into conspiracy headquarters while I wasn’t here to complain about how her grandfather had probably just been a widower.
This was how I would exit the drama, but instead of any of that, she nodded slowly and then smiled. “I’ll be packed and ready to go within the hour.”
“You’re coming to Chicago?”
She shrugged. “What else would I do?”
I almost groaned out loud. The universe sure had a strange sense of humor, but apparently, we were going on my work trip. Together.