Harper
In life, there are people who really are like two ships passing in the sea never meant to stop or know one another, but what happens when they do?
The idea of leaving New York City and Eric behind is brutal, as if I’m leaving a piece of myself, and that’s just nuts. Last night was sex, nothing more. Six years ago was also sex, nothing more. He came. He made me come. He left. He didn’t look back. And yet here I am, fretting over leaving without seeing him again, to the point that I’m pacing my hotel room and contemplating skipping my flight with a deep need to see Eric again clawing at me.
I tell myself it’s because I need his help, but I know this runs deeper for me. That man affects me and if I wanted closure that allowed me to move on from that party six years ago, and him, I didn’t get it. I just got more of him and more seems to feed my need for even more.
The doorman knocks on my door, which means I’m out of time. It’s officially decision time and for me, that comes back to one key thing: Eric was right. I haven’t told him everything and I can’t. I can’t look him in the eyes and tell him that I have. I can’t lie to him the way everyone else has, but if I tell him everything there is to tell, his words will prove true: he’ll ruin the Kingston family and that means my mother and my father’s legacy along with it. I was playing with fire coming here, thinking I could stay silent. I need to just go home before I do something stupid. I let the doorman in.
An hour and a half later, I’m on a plane, and when I should be trying to decide how to move on without Eric’s touch, I’m thinking about him—every touch, every kiss, every word we’d shared plays in my mind over and over again and my regrets are many. I should have said more. I should have stopped him from walking out that door, but I remind myself I couldn’t. He saw too much and you don’t expect a genius who sees too much to stop seeing too much. You don’t ask a genius to help you see what you can’t and expect him not to see everything.
By the time I’m on the ground, it’s early evening, and when I walk into my downtown home, I strip down to sweats and a T-shirt, order Chinese food, and sit down at my computer. It’s time to focus on what’s before me. My cellphone rings with Gigi’s number and I let it go to voicemail. I need a plan before I talk to her. She’s no spring chicken and the idea of Eric helping us seemed to have calmed her down. I need to give her another rope to hang onto. Heck, I need to give myself another rope to hang onto. I need to hire help and that help has to be someone that can’t be bought off by Isaac, and Isaac has a lot of money. I have limited resources.
My mind reaches and I grab my purse and pull out the business card I’d grabbed from Eric’s desk. His cellphone and his email are on it. I pull up my email and before I can talk myself out of it, I start to type:
Eric—
I grabbed your card from your desk. I wanted to call but it felt like you were pretty finished when you left. I wasn’t, but that just seems to be how things work with us.
I stop myself. What am I doing? This isn’t a personal email. I should delete that. I start again.
Eric—
I grabbed your card from your desk. I wanted to call, but I thought you might welcome an email more freely. I know that your history in Denver runs deep and dark. I shouldn’t have asked you to come back here in the first place, but I need someone to help me figure this out. I need to hire someone and Isaac has money and resources that I don’t. I need someone I can trust who can’t be bought off. So, this is me asking for help one last time. Who would you hire to investigate Kingston Motors? Just a referral would be appreciated and I don’t even have to mention your name.
Harper
I read the message and there’s more I want to say, so much more, but I don’t. I hit send and hope for a reply. In the meantime, I start researching and looking for someone I can hire to help me solve these problems at Kingston. I make a list of operations outside of Denver who will be less influenced by Isaac and my stepfather, who may or may not be a part of what’s going on. Until I know, I can’t talk to my mother. She will tell him everything.
Hours later, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. I grab my phone from the nightstand, pull up my email and with the discovery that there’s nothing from Eric, disappointment fills me. Obviously, I was just his bastard and princess conquest he needed to get out of his system, which would make me feel foolish if I hadn’t gone into that night with him knowing that he felt that way. He did. I knew, and for reasons I can’t explain, it felt like something more happened between us, like there was a real connection, something lasting, but clearly, I was wrong. It’s time to move on. And yet, as I fall asleep, I’m back in the past, living that moment by the pool when his eyes had found me, the tingling sensation running down my spine. The lift of my gaze and the force of that man’s attention. I’ve clearly never recovered.
My memory floats forward to me standing on that stage, scanning the crowd for Eric and catching a glimpse of him disappearing back down the path to the cottage. I’d wanted to pull him back.
“Good riddance,” Isaac had murmured next to me. “I hope he’s leaving.”
And he had. He’d left. I’d felt that certainty like a sharp knife in my chest even before I knew. And yet still, the minute I was free of that stage, the minute the world of people focused on my stepfather, not me, I’d hurried to confirm. I’d walked that path toward the cottage, my heart racing in my chest, and found the door unlocked. I’d found the cottage empty. And I’d gone to bed, like I am tonight, with the feel on his hands on my body, the scent of him in my nostrils. Those piercing eyes haunting me, and the two nicknames that define our separation in my mind: the princess and the bastard.
***
Eric
I’m sitting on the slate gray couch of my living room with a whiskey in my hand and my MacBook on the coffee table in front of me, that damn email from Harper open and staring back at me as it has for a good two hours. I down the amber liquid in my cup, a smooth thirty-year I need to stomach anything Kingston before I grab the Rubik’s cube sitting on the table and start turning it, the numbers in my head telling stories that no one else would understand, and doing so every damn moment of my life. Right now, they’re telling the story of the bastard and the princess and the numbers want the woman as much as I do.
I set the damn cube down and stand up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling window to the left of the main living area. I stop in front of the glass and nothing but inky black touches my eyes, a storm on the horizon, but out there beyond that darkness is a spectacular Manhattan skyline to kill for that I worked my ass off to earn. That no one named Kingston gave me. They don’t get to give or take from me ever again. And they did take.
I press my hands to the glass, cold seeping through my palms and sliding up my arms, but there is fire in my blood, memories of the only person that could ever get me to give two fucks about anything Kingston in my mind: Harper.
My lashes lower, numbers exploding in my mind that become her again. That become me replaying exactly ten different moments with Harper in my arms, with me inside her, the scent of her on my skin, the taste of her on my lips. What the hell is it about that woman that makes me need another taste? That makes me remember how she tastes? What is it about that woman that drives me fucking insane? I finally had her. I fucked her, so what if I want to do it about another twenty times? It’s over. That’s how it has to be.
I need help, she’d said.
My lashes lift and I shove off the window. I do not help the Kingston family.
The end.
The princess is part of their clan now, and six years deep. Helping her is helping them, and she wasn’t even honest with me. There was something she wasn’t telling me. She didn’t even deny that truth. I sit back down on the couch and refill my glass. I don’t like unknowns and where the Kingstons are concerned, that gets personal. Especially after they sought me out through Harper.
What don’t I know and what consequences are there to not knowing?