If my uniform doesn’t get dirty, I haven’t done anything in the baseball game.
—Rickey Henderson
“She’s your what?” Ro roared so loud, even Jessie flinched.
Liam lifted his mug and took a long, slow sip as he leaned back against the counter. “My ex-wife.”
He hadn’t given Ronan any time to get comfortable, just dumped the whole story on him the second he walked in. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, it was better to do stuff like this fast.
“Your ex-wife. And so you thought it would be a good idea to bring her here? Shit, Liam, why don’t we give Mandy a call and see if she wants to help, too? I bet between the two of them they could fuck the whole thing up for us without batting an eye.”
“Ro,” Jessie said, using her calm negotiator’s voice. “If you’d calm down for a second, we can explain.”
“Explain what? The fact my brother got married and divorced and never bothered telling any of us? Or the fact his ex-wife has been here over a month and nobody bothered telling me that’s who she was?”
Even with Jessie’s mouth pinched tight, they could all tell she was trying not to laugh.
“Okay, well, all of that,” she chortled. “But in Liam’s defense, he wanted to send Kate packing the second he realized it was her. I’m the one who insisted she stay.”
“Are you out of your freakin’ mind, Jessie?”
“Clearly,” she snapped, all signs of laughter gone. “Because no one in her right mind would stay here and put up with the amount of bullshit you guys keep slinging at me. So sit down, shut up, and listen.”
Liam could easily hide his grin behind his mug, but Finn had to scramble away from the table and stick his head in the cupboard to hide his. Nobody ever yelled at Ronan the way Jessie did. It wasn’t that Liam or Finn was afraid of him; it was usually just easier to tell him to fuck off and walk away. Very few things got settled that way, but it sure saved a lot of fights.
When Finn finally got himself under control, he pulled two mugs out of the cupboard, filled them both, and handed one to Ro, who’d reluctantly flopped down on one of the chairs.
Liam let Jessie do most of the talking, only filling in bits of information when prompted. And by the time she’d finished, Ro was no longer the hulking mass of anger he’d been when it all started. Instead, he was sitting back in his chair, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles, with his coffee mug resting against his belly as he nodded slowly.
To hear Jessie tell it, the Buoys wouldn’t be in half the shape it was if it hadn’t been for Kate, and that wasn’t far wrong, because she really had worked her ass off for them.
And what a cute ass it was. For the better part of the last week, Liam had spent his nights getting reacquainted with it and every other part of her, and he’d been handsomely rewarded for his time. Hell, it wasn’t just nights he’d spent with Kate—they took every moment they could with each other. Even this morning in the sweatbox, he’d—
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Ronan choked as he suddenly sat up, his sharp gaze narrowed right in on Liam.
“What?” Liam asked, blinking himself back to the conversation at hand and away from that cute little ass he’d had in his hands a few hours earlier.
“Please tell me you’re not stupid enough to hook up with her again.”
To Finn’s credit, he didn’t actually rat Liam out, but he didn’t even try to stop the snort that ripped out of him.
Liam didn’t care what any of them said. Being with Kate again was the best thing that had happened to him since…well, since being with her the first time. It didn’t matter that there were things they avoided talking about; all that mattered was the way it felt having her with him, beside him, under him.
Or even better—on top of him.
“So where is she anyway?” Ro asked. “Working out what she’s going to do with her commission once her boss buys this place?”
A streak of red shot across Liam’s vision so fast it was as if something had exploded in his retina.
“Go fu—”
“Whoa.” Kate’s voice froze the rest of his words on his tongue. “That doesn’t sound like it’s going to be something you should say in front of ladies.”
If Liam didn’t already love her, watching her glide into the kitchen and head straight to Ronan with her hand out would have done it.
Decked out in a filthy pair of gray sweatpants and an old, ratty blue T-shirt, with her long hair pulled back in a messy knot and a couple of dark smudges across her forehead, she looked even better than she did the day she arrived.
But, holy hell, did she stink.
“You must be Ronan,” she said. “I’m Kate; it’s nice to meet you.” She didn’t give him time to say anything, and when he made to stand up to shake her hand, she waved him down. “I’m guessing by now you’ve heard the whole sordid story about your brother and me, yes?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Kate’s eyes widened as she chuckled uneasily. “Believe me, I think we’d both like to say it wasn’t quite as crazy as it sounds, but…yeah.”
Without even looking, she reached over, tugged Liam’s coffee mug from his hand, and took a long sip, wiggling her free hand back and forth until she returned the mug.
“Oh, and by the way,” she said as she swiped her forearm over her mouth, “I don’t work on commission, so even though it would have been much more fun planning a retail retreat, in case you can’t tell, I’ve been out in the garden all morning, literally up to my elbows in manure.”
“Oh, we can tell.” Liam snickered.
“Watch it,” she warned. “Or I’ll make you help. Jessie gave me the rundown on what you guys usually plant, but I made the executive decision to increase the size of the plot a little, because Liv’s going to need a big garden to work with.”
Ro’s mouth opened slightly, then closed hard, his eyes getting wider and wider as he watched Kate lean against the counter next to Liam, as if she was as big a part of the Buoys as any of them.
And she was. At least to Liam.
He shoved that thought down as deep as he could, then lifted his mug again, not to hide his grin this time but to hide his frown.
“Anyway,” Jessie muttered, rolling her eyes over a small smile, “you’ll be happy to know, Ro, that the only big job left to do is the landscaping. I don’t think Jimmy cut the grass or weed-whacked since he shut this place down, and he clearly didn’t spend a single minute working on the path or trails.”
“That’s it?” It seemed to take Ro a second to blink away from Kate.
“Well, no,” Jessie said. “We still need to give everything another once-over before we open, but the yard work is the only big thing left.”
“What about the plumbing? The sink in Orange has been leaking since—”
“Done.”
“The dock? Those chains were—”
“Done.”
Ro continued to spout off things and Jessie continued to respond the same way, until Finn tossed the clipboard with the torn-and-tattered list at him.
“It’s done,” Finn snapped. “All of it.”
They all watched as Ro’s eyes moved slowly over each handwritten line, squinting around the scrawls and strike-outs as he tried to make it all out. Then he whistled quietly and lifted his mug in salute.
“Well, shit,” he said, finally smiling. “I guess that means I can spend my three days here out on the water, then, eh?”
“Yeah, right,” Jessie snorted. “There’s still stuff to do, so finish your coffee and suit up.”
“That reminds me,” Kate said. “The showerhead in my cabin started dripping this morning. I tried to tighten it but it didn’t help, so if one of you has a second, would you mind having a look at it? Just watch the bucket—I’m trying to catch as much of the water as I can to use on the garden.”
Liam cleared his throat quietly, trying to cover up his smirk. It was Kate’s fault the thing was leaking; she was the one who insisted there was enough room in the shower for both of them. There wasn’t, but neither of them cared, not even after Liam bashed his head on the damn thing twice.
To see her standing there now, though, innocent as light, no one else in the kitchen would have guessed.
Once they’d finished their coffee, Kate went back to the garden while Jessie took the boys into the office and tried to explain the new reservations system to them. Unlike before, when Jessie did it all by hand, everything was online, including payment options. She could still add reservations manually if need be, but the whole thing looked fairly user-friendly, and with Olivia moving in next week, she could be their tech support if anything went sideways.
The first two weeks of June were booked, and spots were filling up in July and August, which was great, but if they didn’t fill up the whole of June, none of the rest would matter. They needed every single spot filled and paid for if they were going to get anywhere close to what they needed.
As they sat there watching, another reservation popped up in the admin side of the system: half of the third week of June booked.
“Hell yeah!” Finn cried. “Now we’re cookin’.”
Liam wanted to be excited, too, but he couldn’t be. Not yet. Two months from now, if they were all huddled around that computer with their name still on the deed, then he’d be excited. Until then, he was going to keep trying to come up with ways to bring in more cash.
There was one option, something he hadn’t told any of them about yet, but going that route brought a whole slew of other problems with it.
They spent most of the afternoon in the bar, going over the business end of the whole operation, from schedules to the boat situation to where they might be able to cut expenses. With the number of people they had booked in at the start of the season, they were going to need both boats in the water every day, which meant they were screwed if something went sideways with either one.
It was a chance they’d have to take, though, and all they could do was hope that regular daily maintenance would keep both boats in top running condition.
Finn leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over the top of his head. “So if we scrap hiring a dockhand, that’ll free up those wages plus save a little on what it would cost to feed that person, and then Liam and I’ll just have to do that job.”
Jessie’s head was already shaking. “You can’t be out on the boats all day, come back, clean and package the fish, and then do maintenance on the boats; that’s crazy. When are you supposed to sleep?”
Finn turned to Liam and they both shrugged.
“Season ends in mid-September.”
“That’s not funny,” she said. “I can work the fish shack. I mean, I’m not as good as Finn—”
“Who is?” Ro snorted.
“—but I can clean and fillet better than most people.”
“That’s true.” Finn nodded. “But then we’ll need someone up here in the lodge while you’re in the shack.”
“What about Kate? She has a degree in hotel management. I could train her up in no time, and if she has any questions, she just needs to call me on the radio.”
She lifted her gaze to Finn first, then to Ronan, before they all turned to Liam. He knew what they wanted him to say, but he couldn’t, because he didn’t know.
“What?” Ronan asked, swiveling on his stool. “You don’t think Kate can do it?”
“No, I’m sure she can do anything you throw at her.”
“Then what? Is the shine wearing off already? You ready for her to leave?”
Liam ground his teeth together for a second, then cocked his jaw to the side. Punching Ro wouldn’t help, but it might wipe that freakin’ smirk off his face for a while.
As if he could feel it coming, Finn stepped away from the bar and moved a little closer to Liam. “She works for Foster, remember?”
“Thanks, dipshit, I’m aware of that. But I thought she and Liam were—” Ro stopped, dragged his impatient gaze to Liam. “Aren’t you?”
Liam bobbed his head slowly from side to side. “It’s complicated.”
“So uncomplicate it for me.”
“What do you want me to say?” Liam asked, annoyed not just at Ronan but at himself.
Neither he nor Kate had come out and said anything about the nights he’d spent in her cabin, but it wasn’t a huge secret, either. Everything from the way she helped herself to his coffee to the dwindling box of supplies in Finn’s drawer gave evidence of what was going on.
“She’s only been here a little over a month, Ro, so it’s not like we’ve really planned anything.”
“Why not?” he scoffed. “It only took you a couple days to marry her the first time, so what’s the holdup now?”
“You know what?” Liam pushed off his chair and charged toward him, but Jessie and Finn both stepped between them.
“Stop it,” Jessie said, sounding about as annoyed as Liam had ever heard her. “Don’t be an ass, Ronan, and Liam—back up. Back up!”
Liam stared his brother down for another few seconds before finally shaking his head and turning away so he could go lean against the wall.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s talk about this like normal civilized human beings. Liam, what do you think she’s going to do?”
“I don’t know. Seriously, I have no idea. I sort of jokingly told her she should quit her job and stay here, but she kind of blew me off.”
“What do you mean you ‘jokingly’ told her?” Jessie asked, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“We were talking and I just said it, and then I think I rattled off all the great things we have to offer her, like long hours and no pay.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Turning his back to Liam, Ronan scrubbed his hands over his face and groaned.
“It’s too bad,” Jessie said quietly. “She works like a dog, that woman. I’d love to have her here permanently.”
Liam would love that, too, but he couldn’t ask that of her. Not now.
No one said anything for a long moment, all seeming to chew on their own thoughts and none coming up with a solution, until Finn hopped off his stool and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Jessie asked.
“To ask her.”
Liam’s breath froze in his lungs, and he was pretty sure his heart stopped beating altogether for a second.
“Wait!” Jessie cried. “You can’t do that!”
“Why not? We need her help, and God knows she works harder than any of us—I mean, jeez, Jess, look around. The four of us are sitting in here drinking coffee and shootin’ the breeze, and she’s outside up to her armpits in shit.”
“What about Liam?”
“What about him?” Finn shot him a halfhearted apologetic shrug. “He’s been on the phone with his agent twice this week that I know of, so if he’s planning to take off, we’re going to need her more than ever.”
Both Jessie and Ronan turned shocked wide eyes to Liam, but he kept his eyes fixed squarely on Finn’s. There was no point denying it, but there was no point getting worked up about it, either, because like everything else lately, it was complicated.
And one of the things complicating it was the fact that his fingers hadn’t even twitched when his agent called, and his fingers always twitched at the thought of throwing the ball again.
Weird.
By the time Liam shook that from his brain, Finn had left. Jessie turned and pointed her finger at Liam first, then shook her head and pointed it at Ronan.
“Go with him.”
“But—”
“Just go!”
With a hard glare at Liam, Ro reached for his mug and followed Finn outside, as Jessie headed for the window to watch.
“There’s no way she’ll say yes,” she said. “Is there?”
“Well,” Liam sighed, “if you were her, and my family and I were asking you for something like this, what would you do?”
“That’s a tricky question,” she said, never turning from the window. “Because if I were Kate, the second I realized this was your place, I’d have been on the phone calling for a Helijet and charging it to your account, and you can bet your ass you and I wouldn’t be standing here right now.”
“Yeah.” Part of him was dying to go look out the window, too, to try to gauge what Kate might be saying, but fear overruled that part of him, so he stayed right where he was.
“Can I ask you something?” Jessie turned her head just enough to flick her gaze over him before turning back to the window. “Do you love her?”
When he didn’t answer right away, she nodded slowly, as though she already knew the answer, but he still couldn’t quite bring himself to answer truthfully. Instead, he pushed off the wall and began to gather the rest of their mugs.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Are you kidding me?” she choked. “It’s the only thing that matters.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, snorting quietly. “I think you’ve been reading too many of those Caroline What’s-Her-Name books.”
“Linden,” Jessie said. “And I’m serious. If you love her, and I mean really love her, do something about it. Don’t be such an O’Donnell this time.”
“Don’t be—” Liam laughed as he shifted the mugs to one hand so he could straighten the chairs with the other. “I hate to tell you, Jessie, but I am, in fact, an O’Donnell, and I doubt very much that I can be anything else.”
He’d just stepped through the doorway into the kitchen when Jessie’s quiet but rock-steady voice reached him.
“How do you know if you won’t even try?”
“I’m sorry,” Kate said, blinking hard as she pushed to her feet. “What?”
“We want to know if you’ll work with us,” Finn repeated, a little slower this time.
Kate jammed the tip of her shovel into the ground beside her and then leaned on the handle. “And exactly what is it you think I’ve been doing this whole time?”
“God almighty,” Ronan grunted, giving his brother a soft shove. “It’s no wonder Jessie sent me out here with you. What he’s trying to say is that we’d like—or, rather, we were wondering—if you would like to work here permanently.”
“Permanently?”
“Yes.”
“Here. With you guys.”
“Yes.” The exasperation in Ronan’s expression wasn’t helping make it make sense.
“You want me to quit my job?”
“Y-yeah,” Finn said haltingly. “We know it’s shitty to ask, but we need you, Kate, so what do you say?”
“I…I don’t know.”
A minute ago, she’d been happily planting rows of kale and carrots, and now she was being asked to turn her whole world upside down. If there were some kind of guarantee that come July they’d all still be there, then it’d be a hell of a lot easier to say yes. But if she quit her job with the Foster Group and that didn’t happen, she’d be screwed three ways from Sunday.
And, yeah, it was more than just the work. Being there with Liam was better than any other place she’d ever been, but how long would that last? If she gave everything up to jump on the Buoys full-time, where would she be if Liam decided, again, that he’d had enough of her?
Sure, everything between them was clear skies and smooth sailing right now, but she’d be kidding herself if she thought that’s how it was going to stay. When the storm hit, whatever that storm might be, where would she end up? Because if there was any chance of her ending up the same way she had ten years ago, then there was no way in hell she could even consider any of this.
“Kate?”
“Yeah, sorry,” she muttered. “I, um, wow. I’m going to need to think about it.”
“Sure,” Finn said, nodding. “Fair enough. But we kind of need to know in the next few days, because if you’re both leaving, we need to figure out what the hell we’re going to do.”
Both? Kate frowned as she watched them walk back to the lodge. Who else was leaving? He must mean Ronan; he was only there for a few days. But somehow that didn’t make sense to Kate. There were only two other people he could mean, and there was no way in hell Jessie was going anywhere.
The May sunshine that had made her sweat just a little while ago now wasn’t doing a damn thing for her. It was as if her entire body had been injected with glacial water; her fingers shook so badly that she couldn’t open the pack of seeds and had to resort to using her teeth. Her heart rattled more than it beat, and no matter how many times she swallowed, that damn lump would not be dismissed.
So Liam was leaving; she’d known it was coming. It was why he’d spent so much time out on that damn mound every night. It was what he lived for; it was what he wanted.
And Kate wasn’t going to be the one to make him second-guess that. No way. Even if that’s what he and his brothers probably expected her to do, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
But they were all kidding themselves if they thought Kate could stay on at the Buoys now, because, once again, she’d been stupid. Sure, she’d been able to pick up and make a life after he left her the first time, because she didn’t have to see him every day, didn’t have memories of him in every corner of her day like she did now at the Buoys.
And how awkward would it be when he came home to visit? And—ugh—sooner or later he’d probably bring a woman with him, and that was just going to be too much.
Even if she stayed with the Foster Group and Paul formally offered her the position of general manager here at the Buoys, she wouldn’t be able to do it. Not now. The thought of it actually made her nauseous. In fact, the mere idea that the Buoys would be run by anyone else at all made her nauseous.
“This is what you get for letting yourself get soft and ignoring Strong Kate,” she muttered, suddenly realizing she’d dug a hole almost two feet deep instead of two inches. “Damn it.”
The iciness inside her began to slowly give way to a low-grade burning anger, not just at herself for falling so hard again but at Liam. Why hadn’t he told her? They’d spent every night of the last week together, talking about everything and nothing into the wee hours of every morning, and not once had he so much as mentioned the possibility of him leaving.
And why hadn’t he come out with Finn and Ronan?
“Hey, Kate!” Ronan came walking across the back lawn with the same beat-up wooden tool crate she’d seen Liam use before. “Which cabin’s yours?”
“Uh, number two.”
With a wave of acknowledgment, he headed straight for her cabin and closed the door behind him, and it was only then that the first tear breached her defenses and slid down her cheek. She was going to miss that stupid cabin. So tiny and cramped that she usually felt like she should go outside to turn around, it had somehow become more of a home than the apartment she’d lived in for the last eight or nine years.
Just the thought of moving back there, with its paper-thin walls and view of the brick apartment building next door, was enough to make her drop to her knees in the dirt. She couldn’t do it; she couldn’t go back to that place.
Maybe it was time she took some of her savings and looked for a new place instead of hoarding the money for “one day.” Clearly she’d had no idea what the “one day” was that she’d been waiting for.
“You should get yourself a cat,” she mumbled. “A fluffy one.”
Yeah, that was it. She’d find herself a nice new place to live and fill it with cats. That didn’t sound depressing at all. In the meantime, she still had seeds to plant, because no matter what happened with her, she wanted Liv to enjoy her new job.
By the time she was done and had cleaned up, she had a skull-quaking headache and enough crampiness to know the only place she wanted to be was in bed with a hot-water bottle. She forced herself to sit through dinner but didn’t bother hanging around afterward.
“You okay?” Liam asked, following her out the back door.
“Yeah,” she lied. “An Aunt Flo thing. I’ll see you later.”
She didn’t even kiss him, just turned and walked straight down to her cabin without so much as a glance back. Armed with her hot-water bottle and a couple of Advil, she bypassed the coziness of the tub chair and climbed into bed with her laptop, notebook, and pen.
It had been a few days since she’d emailed Paul to update him on how things were progressing, so she’d do that first, and then she’d check out what was available to rent these days. It was unlikely she could afford to buy, not in Vancouver anyway, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t look.
New emails from both Laurel and Jeanette and two new emails from work. The first was nothing but the monthly newsletter Lorraine sent out, which Kate usually deleted without reading, and the other one, which had just landed in her inbox with the subject line FG-0630, was one Josh had looped her in on.
Typical. The office might close at five, but Josh never stopped working regardless of the day or time. She quickly scanned the long thread, which appeared to have originally started between Josh and Paul before they cc’d both Lorraine and one of Paul’s lawyers.
>>Kate—thoughts?
>>The only money they have is coming from the ball player, and he’s tapped. Even if he does sign a new contract, it’ll be too late. I’m counting on Kate to make sure of that.
Sure of what? Thoughts on what? Frowning, she took screenshots of the entire thread and saved them to a new folder for easy access if she needed them again later, then started at the first message and worked her way up the entries, which bounced back and forth in concise blasts.
Paul wanted an update on FG-0630, a project number Kate wasn’t familiar with—until Josh’s responses started to make it clear they were talking about the Buoys. But that wasn’t the project number Kate had for it. What the hell?
She scrolled some more, then reread it all, even though there were only a handful of words that jumped out at her: “ex-husband,” “has-been,” “underbid,” “need-to-know.”
“Son of a bitch!”
How the hell had Paul found out about her and Liam? And what kind of asshole would use something like that to his advantage? Paul Foster, that’s who. What Paul Foster wanted, Paul Foster generally got; they all knew that.
Not only had Paul gone digging around in things that were none of his business, he’d flat-out lied to her and the O’Donnells. He’d sent her to the Buoys with promises of a promotion and all sorts of great things, when clearly that was nothing but a steaming load of crap. It wasn’t written anywhere in the messages, but she knew, she knew, that the minute Paul got his hands on this place, she’d be whisked out of here and sent back to the chrome-and-glass cage on Burrard Street.
And, worse than that, he had no intention of making any kind of decent offer to the O’Donnells. His lawyer’s message assured Paul that both offers were ready to go whenever he wanted them, but the details and the prices listed weren’t even in the same ballpark as Paul had told Kate.
The first, which Paul directed to be sent out on June 20, undercut the value of the Buoys by hundreds of thousands, and the second bid, due to be sent out late on June 30, was worse, but it would probably still be more than what they’d get if the province snapped the property away from them.
So if he was going to be such a prick, why not wait until it actually went up for auction?
“Ugh,” Kate growled. “Because once it goes up, there’ll be competition for it.”
And Paul Foster didn’t do competition. There was a reason he had a Monopoly board set up in his office, and it wasn’t because he liked to play with the thimble.
Fuming, she was staring blindly at the screen when a pop-up box suddenly appeared, asking for her to allow the sender of the last email to retract it.
“Retract this, asshole.”
Kate agreed and then sat there waiting, knowing a new message would be coming any second. Yup, there it was.
From: Joshua Rivers
To: Kate Hadley
Subject: Call me right away
That was it: no actual message, just the order to call him. Oh, she’d call him, all right. Throwing off the covers, Kate pulled on the first things she could reach, jammed her feet into her gum boots, and marched straight back to the lodge.
“Hey,” Jessie said. “How’s the headache?”
“Pounding, actually. Can I use the phone for a minute?”
“Of course. You might want to close the door, though, because Finn’s hooked up the Xbox in the great room, and it’s about to get really loud in here.”
Nodding, Kate closed herself up in the office, took a long, steadying breath, and planted a huge Suzy Sunshine smile on her face before dialing Josh’s number.
“Hey, Josh, what’s up?…Oh yeah, no, I’d just opened it when the retract request showed up. I figured it must have been sent by mistake anyway, because I didn’t recognize the project number….Yeah….So it wasn’t anything for me?…Okay, good.”
With the phone gripped tight in her left hand and Jessie’s stapler in her right, Kate fought to keep her voice light, breezy, Kate-ish, while the noise level on the other side of the door got increasingly louder.
“How are the wedding plans coming?…His mom?…Oh, good, I know Kyle was worried she wouldn’t be up for the trip, so that’s great….Yeah….Here?” She lowered her voice for effect. “They’re really great people, but there’s no way they’re going to make that tax payment….No….I wouldn’t be surprised if they call Paul in the next few days to work out a deal….Yeah, it is too bad.”
She played along for another minute or two before sending Kyle her best and hanging up.
“Call my husband a has-been, will ya? You little shit.”
Slamming the stapler down, she yanked the door open, then went back and stood the stapler up gently, setting it where it belonged. And, rules be damned, she filled both hands with chocolate chip cookies before heading for the door.
“Uh, Kate?” Jessie stood just inside the kitchen door, her grinning eyes fixed on Kate’s stash.
“I got my period,” she said, laughing over a shrug. “Trust me, there won’t be a single crumb left anywhere for even an ant by the time I’m through.”
“Oh God,” Jessie groaned in sympathy. “Take the bag if you want.”
“Tempting, but it’ll take long enough to run these off next week.” With a wink, she ducked out and headed to her cabin, where she spent the next few minutes digging up the contact info she had for Robyn, her financial adviser at the bank.
She should have thought of this before, but before now she’d been living under the glittering delusion that the years she’d put in with the Foster Group meant something.
Bullshit: That’s what those years had amounted to. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. If there was one thing she’d learned, it was that if you wanted to succeed, you needed to strike first and strike hard, and that was exactly what she was going to do.
The only difference between her and Paul Foster right then was that he liked to say his actions were all business, whereas Kate was quite willing to admit hers were personal. It was personal to her that he’d lulled her into believing she was an asset to the company; it was personal to her that he’d gone digging around in her private life and then used that against her.
And it was damn personal that he was going to try to yank the Buoys out from under the people she loved. Sure, there might be a few problems ahead, but those problems would be hers to deal with, because when she viewed it through clear eyes, instead of the Liam-covered lenses she’d been wearing, the main issue here was bigger than how much she loved him.
I love Liam.
Kate let the words rip their gash through her heart, because she didn’t have the strength just then to stop it. Strong Kate never would have left her heart open to that kind of pain; she would have stayed good and closed off, so it wouldn’t matter one iota that Liam was leaving and hadn’t bothered to tell her.
Strong Kate wouldn’t have cared less what he did or what Paul Foster was trying to do.
Too bad the real Kate cared so much.
Suck it up, Hadley; you need to focus. Look past him and see the big picture.
Right, okay, she could do that, couldn’t she? Ugh. No, she couldn’t, because Liam was the big picture. If she couldn’t look past him, maybe she could try to move him over to her peripheral vision. Yeah, that should work. Maybe.
As soon as the bank opened, she’d call Robyn and get things in motion, but before she did that, she needed to run the numbers herself, make sure she was covered either way. Sitting there on her narrow bed, with her now-cold hot-water bottle tossed to the side, she couldn’t imagine why her plan wouldn’t work—it was her money, after all, and she could do whatever she wanted with it, but still.
Mixing emotions with financial decisions was rarely a good idea. And that’s why she’d never be as successful as Paul Foster, because no matter how hard she tried to deny it, she wanted emotion to play a role in her decisions.
And that was why she didn’t stop Liam when he opened her door a couple of hours later.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked, whispering as he stood in the darkened bedroom doorway. “You okay?”
“It’s my period; it’s not terminal.”
She knew he’d smile even before she saw the white flash of his teeth.
“Does that mean I’m banned, or can I still—” He flicked his fingers toward the blankets and waited until she scooted over to make room.
With his clothes in a heap next to the door, he climbed in beside her, holding his arm up for her to curl under, just like on every other night, the only difference being that he was the only one naked this time.
“Finn talked to you about staying on?”
“Mm-hmm.”
A few long seconds went by before he nudged her gently. “And?”
“And I’m thinking about it.” She pressed her hand flat against his chest so she could feel his heartbeat. “You like having Ronan home, don’t you?”
“He’s a giant pain in the ass,” he said over a soft snort. “But yeah. It never feels quite right unless we’re all here.”
She let his words settle around her as his fingers moved in slow strokes up and down her arm.
“Liam?”
“Hmm?”
“You got an offer, didn’t you?” She knew it was stupid to whisper, but she couldn’t help it. If she asked quietly, maybe he’d answer quietly, and then it wouldn’t hurt so much.
His chest heaved beneath her cheek and it seemed to take him a really long time to answer.
“Yeah.”
One word, that’s all it was, and yet it changed everything.