THEY RETURNED TO New York on a muggy summer’s day near the end of July, swollen with the threat of a thunderstorm that couldn’t quite bring itself to break. A lot like the weather they’d left behind in Hong Kong, in fact, as if they were personally delivering oppressive, gray summers around the world.
It suited Lachlan’s mood perfectly.
“I have you down for a few days’ break,” he said, almost idly, as the car took them back toward the city. Too quickly for his liking. “But you don’t have to take it.”
Bristol smiled at him the way she always did now, with all that distance in her gaze. Lachlan wanted to break things, but they were in an enclosed space. And also he wasn’t his father.
“No, thank you,” she said. Far too serenely. “I’ll take it.”
“Bristol...”
Her smile widened yet gave him nothing. “I’ll see you in a week, Lachlan.”
Though he raged and punched walls internally, externally there was nothing to be done about it. He knew what was in the contracts he’d been so insistent she sign. He’d long ago insisted on including these small, mandatory breaks following any international tour like the one they’d just taken. And it had never been for the girlfriend in question, it had always been for him. Lachlan liked the convenience of his arrangements, but he also liked his solitude. He usually needed to regroup, get his head back on straight, and deal, privately, with how the women he hired fell far short of the thing he really wanted.
But with Bristol everything was inside out.
He insisted they take her back to Brooklyn first. And he didn’t simply drop her off and continue on his way. He helped her with her bags, personally. Her bag, that was, because she’d only brought one, single personal item with her.
And she was leaving him the same way she’d come to him, something in him acknowledged. Leaving nothing of herself behind.
She isn’t leaving, he assured himself. She’s taking the mandatory break, the way they all do after a long trip. There’s still August.
But that didn’t keep him from standing there in what he supposed passed for a living room, glaring at Bristol. Who, he couldn’t help but notice, looked more at home in this crappy little apartment than she had in any of the spectacular five-star accommodations they’d stayed in on the road. Or even his own private island.
Why did that get under his skin? But he knew.
He didn’t want her to belong anywhere but with him.
“Take a good look,” she invited him, meeting his glare steadily. “I know it may come as a shock to you, but this is how real people live in New York.”
“Two of you live here?” He didn’t have to feign his astonishment. “You and your sister?”
“Indeed we do. And, actually, this is considered a very luxurious two-bedroom because we each have our own, genuine room. Not that you would recognize either one of them as an actual bedchamber, since I believe the bathroom on your plane is larger than both of them put together.”
“Amazing.”
But he was looking at her while he said it.
Bristol laughed and it was like a punch to the gut. When had she stopped laughing like that? When had she retreated into distance in those vague smiles?
But he knew the answer to that, too.
“Allow me to give you the full tour,” she said. She took one step back and opened her hands wide. “This is...the whole thing. You can view it as a kind of sociological experiment, I guess. Behold, Lachlan. This is how the common people live.”
“I got the point the first time.”
“It’s hard to get your head around, I know,” she continued in the same wildly amused tone. “No butler waiting on you. No suite of graceful, pointless rooms, lazily spread out over the top of a building with views to die for.” She moved over to the window and laughed again as she looked out. “That’s not Hyde Park, I’m afraid. That’s my neighbor’s window box and, if I’m not mistaken, that might be an illegal plant. But if you squint, you can pretend.”
When she turned back toward him, he remembered that first dinner a lifetime ago now. The light in her gaze. Her laughter.
How different she’d been then.
How exciting and uncowed and...not trying to impress him at all.
He’d loved that. He’d had sex with her in an alley, for God’s sake.
And then what had he done? He taken her and crushed her to fit into the same box he’d been carrying around his entire adult life. The same box where he’d put anyone who might, even accidentally, attempt to stray too close to him. What had he thought would happen?
“Bristol,” he began. “I wish...”
Laughter faded from her gaze. She inclined her head toward the door.
“I’ll see you in a week, Lachlan,” she said with a quiet certainty that made everything in him tense. “As agreed.”
He wanted to argue. He wanted to impose his will on her with a wave of his hand. Make her change her mind. Make her understand.
But the rules were the rules. He knew that all too well, because he was the one who’d made them.
Lachlan saw the choice before himself starkly then. It was moments like this, moments he’d never imagined he’d ever find himself in, that showed him how narrow his path really was. How no matter how he tried, he could never do enough good in the world when inside him, he was still a Drummond.
Still a monster.
He could see too well how easy it would be to be like his father, of course. Ignore any rule he didn’t like, do as he pleased, and laugh about it if anyone ever tried to stand up to him.
That he could see why that was appealing, even after all these years of trying his best to be different, to be better...horrified him.
Lachlan murmured what he hoped was a neutral enough goodbye. He turned before he lost control of himself and truly became his worst nightmare. Then he let himself out, jogging down the rickety stairs, too disgusted with himself to really register any details except the need to put distance between him and the one woman he actually didn’t want any distance from.
Because that was what she wanted.
When he found himself outside on the street, he waved off his driver. Then he took his waking that same old Drummond monster inside him as an opportunity. He started walking himself back into Manhattan, hoping the city would speak to him and maybe even soothe him as he moved.
It was a long walk. And a good one, even on a sweaty evening like this. He’d just crossed the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan when the thunder started.
He could relate. It growled and rumbled up above while the air grew thicker.
By the time he made it to his building, he was soaking wet, but it still hadn’t rained. The humidity was so intense it soaked him straight through, and no matter how fast he’d walked, or how furiously he let his feet eat up the blocks, Lachlan was no better off.
He was in no way soothed.
His head was full to bursting with Bristol March even while he had the sinking, lowering sensation that she was tucked up in her bed in that closet-sized apartment, sleeping blissfully and sweetly without him.
His home in Manhattan had been in his family for even more generations than that town house in Murray Hill. It was an old, much-renovated house on a cobbled street in Greenwich Village that was usually clogged with tourists snapping pictures.
But even the tourists were sheltering inside on an evening like this.
Lachlan stripped as he went inside, tossing his soaked-through clothes aside. He headed up the stairs, making his way to the roof that had long ago been converted into a private garden. My oasis in the middle of the city, his mother had always called it.
And for all Lachlan prided himself on his lack of sentimentality, he’d always found he could exhale better here.
Which was exactly what he did the moment he stepped outside. He could smell the flowers. He could lose himself in the potted trees and bright blossoms. The thunder muttered all around him, but he was deep in the green.
And he understood, after all these years, that the roof garden reminded him of the island. He could feel his grandparents here. He could remember those bright, brief stretches in between his parents’ wars that had always smelled like this, green and sweet.
How had he missed that until now?
But that was another question he shouldn’t need to ask himself, because he knew the answer. It was Bristol. He had visited that island a thousand times, but now when he thought of it, he pictured her. He’d stood at the window in his office, too many dreary voices in his ear, and had watched her pick her way through the olive trees. The sun in her dark hair and a smile on her face that she would have contained if she knew he was watching.
He even saw her here, where she’d never been. Distance in her dark eyes and that wicked twist to her mouth.
As if she knew how futile it was for him to look for some kind of clarity no matter where he went.
Even if it was to this hidden patch of green surrounded by so much concrete.
But that was where he stood, stripped down to his boxer briefs with his head tilted up, as the rain finally began to fall.
That was where he stayed, arms open as if the storm could wash him clean.
But it didn’t help.
And the next morning, Lachlan got in his car, left Manhattan behind him, and drove himself north.
Catriona and Ben lived in the Vermont countryside, closer to Canada than New York City—by design. Ben’s ancestors had once farmed these rolling acres miles away from any neighbors, but now Ben, a world-renowned architect, used the converted old barn as his studio. He’d used the barn as his base for years, while Catriona had quietly made the old farmhouse into a happy, rambling, picture-perfect home for her family.
Lachlan thought about his sister’s choices as he turned down the long drive that wound in and around the woods and the rolling hills and eventually ended up in front of the old farmhouse. There were no photographers here. No paparazzi waiting to sell every sighting to the tabloids. Catriona and Ben guarded their privacy. And their children got to grow up with two parents who not only doted on them but who, better still, also cared for each other.
It was nothing short of revolutionary, given how Catriona and Lachlan had grown up.
And in case he’d had any doubts about that, he saw them both come out together from Ben’s barn-turned-office, holding hands as they came to see who’d pulled in.
He’d never seen his parents touch, Lachlan realized. Not casually. They’d either performed affection in public or beat on each other in private, but there had never been what he saw between his sister and her husband. Intimacy, he thought. Two bodies that knew each other so well, two hands clasped together because clearly that was their default position.
How had he not understood what this was? Or that he’d longed for it all this time?
“Are you all right?” Catriona asked sharply, scanning his face as she drew closer. “You look...”
“A little edgy,” Ben supplied.
“I was in the neighborhood,” Lachlan said, even though his grin felt forced.
“We don’t have a neighborhood,” Catriona retorted. “Deliberately.”
Ben looked back and forth between them, then smiled at his wife. A thousand messages passed between them in another display of intimacy that really, Lachlan thought, he ought to celebrate. Given it was something neither he nor Catriona had ever witnessed in their youth.
“I think I’ll leave you to it,” his brother-in-law murmured, then headed back toward his office.
Catriona slid her arm through Lachlan’s. Then she steered him away from the barn and the house, toward a well-worn trail toward the woods that Lachlan had taken with her before.
“Why don’t you walk with me,” she murmured.
This was obviously what he’d wanted or he wouldn’t have come here.
And for a long while, they simply followed the trail. The path meandered in and out of the woods, gradually making its way up the side of the nearest hill. But it wasn’t until they stopped at the top, with a view that made it seem as if they were the only people left on the planet, that Catriona settled herself on a big rock that might as well have been a sofa. And turned her sharp blue gaze on her brother.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Bristol.”
Lachlan blew out a breath.
“Bristol,” he agreed.
He waited for Catriona to jump on that. To start lecturing him, so he could disagree. Or have something to fight about.
Turned out, he really wanted a fight.
But Catriona was a canny one who knew him far too well, and so all she did was wait.
“Where are the kids?” Lachlan asked.
Obviously stalling.
Catriona looked amused. “They’re all at summer camp, hallelujah. Is that what you drove up here to ask me?”
It wasn’t as hot this far north as it had been down in New York City, which was a good thing. It stripped away one of the things gnawing at him. Lachlan shoved his hands into his jean pockets and was glad he was wearing a T-shirt. That he wasn’t in his usual work clothes.
But as he glared out at all those rolling Vermont hills, he couldn’t help feeling that the only thing he’d accomplished yesterday, standing up on his rooftop in the rain like a lunatic, was bringing the storm into him.
He didn’t feel washed clean. He didn’t feel made new.
He felt sullen and low, like a brooding summer sky, when all there was before him was blue skies and sweet sunshine.
“Tell me how you do it,” he muttered, though the words felt bitter on his lips.
Or not bitter, maybe. It was possible he interpreted them as bitter because they were so unfamiliar. So dangerous.
Because he’d decided, long ago, what was and wasn’t possible.
But long ago, he hadn’t known Bristol. And he hadn’t imagined how different the world could look when someone actually got inside the way she had.
He would have said it was impossible.
He’d been certain.
“It’s simple,” Catriona said softly, not pretending that she didn’t know what he meant. “All you have to do is decide that it’s worth the risk to make yourself vulnerable. Then do it. Especially when it feels impossible.”
“As easy as that, then,” Lachlan scoffed.
His sister smiled. “I said it was simple. I didn’t say it was easy.”
Lachlan shook his head. “Maybe you and Ben have it figured out in ways that wouldn’t work for anyone else. Nice and calm, no bumps in the road. Easy.”
Catriona cackled. “I can’t wait to tell him you said that. You’ve never seen us fight.”
He turned, scanning her face. Then he frowned. “You fight?”
“Of course we fight, idiot. What do you think? We’re real people, Lachlan. One time, and not as long ago as you might think, I was so mad at him I threw a coffee maker at his head.”
She nodded when all he did was stare at her, confirming that he’d heard her correctly.
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry to inform you that you’re not the only Drummond around. I have a nasty temper and, as I think you know, I never learned how to channel it appropriately. That’s been a pretty steep learning curve and sometimes I revert to type.”
He couldn’t take that on board. Catriona had always been so solid, so stalwart when everything else around them was noise and fury.
“But you...”
“Here’s the thing, Lachlan.” And his sister’s gaze was steady. Direct. “You’ve spent all these years doing your best not to end up like Dad. Because you’re so sure you know what happened on that plane and you’ve made it your mission to make your life a monument to being anything at all but that.”
“We both know what happened on that plane.”
“But what you’re forgetting is that Dad didn’t have that relationship by himself.”
Something in Lachlan stilled.
Catriona kept going, even though Lachlan was pretty sure she knew that her words had clobbered him. “If he crashed that plane deliberately—”
“He did.”
Catriona nodded, slowly. “I agree. But then you know that Mom goaded him into it. You know she picked and prodded and laughed all the way down. That’s who they were, Lachlan.”
Lachlan shook his head, reeling. That storm he’d taken into himself was wrecking him. Howling, raging—but his sister still wasn’t done.
“Their relationship took both of them.” Her gaze was intent on his, a piercing blue that rivaled the bright summer all around them. “I want you to take that on board, for once. They were both toxic. And they were both responsible.”
But all he could do was shake his head. “You know Dad...”
Catriona waited as his words trailed off.
“Alone, neither one of them could have done so much damage.” She held up the index finger of each of her hands, then moved them both together to make one. “Together they might as well have been napalm. They made their own tragedy. Deep down, I know you know this.”
Maybe he did. Maybe it was easier to blame his father.
Because maybe it was easier to have someone to blame.
“If I blame him, it’s better,” he managed to get out. “Because...”
“Because if there’s a villain, then they didn’t race to their inevitable conclusion without a single thought for the kids they were leaving behind,” Catriona finished for him. “I’ve thought all this myself. But they did.”
Something in him shifted, big and hard like the huge boulder his sister was sitting on, surprisingly easy after all these years. As if it had been waiting all along for him to get here.
To understand that he’d wanted the anger. The fury.
He’d found it clarifying.
Because there was nothing on the other side of it but grief.
Even all these years later.
“They did,” he agreed, his voice rough. “They really did.”
“As for you and me? It’s easy.” Catriona separated her fingers. “Don’t pick an atom bomb, Lachlan. Don’t be an atom bomb. And you’ll be fine.”
“I thought that’s what I was doing. What I’ve been doing. You like to call the precautions I take squalid.”
“Please.” His sister scoffed. “You’ve been hiding. And how will you ever know who you really are or what you’re capable of if you don’t stop hiding?”
Lachlan hated that darkness in him. He hated what it told him, what truths it laid bare. “I already know what I’m capable of—what I could be capable of. We’ve seen it play out right in front of us.”
Catriona only shook her head, as if he made her sad. “If you only let fear talk, baby brother, fear is all you’ll ever hear. Soon enough, it’s all you’ll have. And at that point, you might as well have gone down with them.”
“Jesus Christ, Catriona.”
But all his older sister did was smile at him then, as if all this was worth it. As if it was heading somewhere.
“I have a better idea, Lachlan,” she said softly. “Fear has taken up enough of your time. Try love.”