Chapter 12

“Being part of a family means smiling for photos.”

Harry Morgan, Dexter

It wasn’t that Ronan didn’t like the dog episode, because it was just as good, if not better, than the first episode of Hooked, but he hated that it gave the guests more reason to seek him and JD out.

The social part of the Buoys had never been something he was good at. Where Liam and Finn were easygoing and had no trouble making conversation with anyone, Ro tended to stumble and falter, so it was just easier for him to keep in the background, and it no doubt made Hope’s job easier, because her team was saved from having to bleep out things he said.

Easier or not, it was only a couple of weeks later, after they’d watched the fourth episode, that Hope sat them all down and broke the news.

“You’re not going to want to hear this, Ronan,” she said, “but you’re going to have to stop hiding in the kitchen so much.”

“I’m not hiding,” he said. “It’s my job to keep them fed.”

“Funny,” Finn snorted. “Olivia always had time to come out and chat up the guests.”

“Yeah, well, she wasn’t feeding as many people, was she?” It was a pathetic excuse, one that no one in the room was buying. “Did anyone talk to her this week?”

“Yes,” Jessie said. “She’s hating rehab and thinks her nurses are trying to kill her; now, stop trying to change the subject.”

“I’m not.” He absolutely was. “Fine. What the hell am I supposed to talk about? It’s easy out on the boats, ’cause they all want to talk about fishing and shit, but standing out there in the lobby, I got nothin’.”

“Ask them about themselves,” Hope said. “People love talking about themselves. And then tell them a few things about you.”

“Ha! Like what? Liam can talk baseball, tell them all about what it’s like to sit in the dugout next to Verlander, and Finn’s got all that fish-whisperer magic shit that he does, but I’m a divorced ex-farmer who spent the last ten years digging ditches and cleaning out drains. Not exactly riveting stuff.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Liam said, nodding. “You’re boring as hell.”

“Liam!” Kate gave him a soft shove, but she was laughing with the rest of them. “Talk about JD—people love talking about their pets, haven’t you noticed that? Last week that woman from the orange cabin, Evelyn, bawled like a baby when she told me about her cat dying last year. Last year! Then she tells me her husband died four months ago—nothing. Not a single tear. I’m tellin’ you, Ro, you need to use that dog. He’s your ticket to stardom.”

“I don’t want stardom.”

“We know.” The only one who didn’t groan that out was Hope, who sat in the chair across from Ronan, her mouth twisted to the side, trying not to laugh.

“Ronan,” she said, “like it or not, you and JD are what the viewers want. I’m not saying we make full episodes of the two of you, but if you could maybe pop out of the kitchen once in a while to interact with the guests, that’d be great.”

“You said you wanted us to be who we are,” he said. “Well, this is who I am.”

“The token miserable old shit,” Liam snorted. “Every family has one.”

“I’m not miserable,” Ro said, maybe a little louder than he meant to. “I’m perfectly fine.”

Hope leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “Ronan.”

That’s all she said, but it was enough.

“Fine. I’ll come out of the kitchen once in a while, I’ll be friendly, but I don’t want to hear any bitchin’ when your dinners are late.”

“Thank you.” She took a deep breath, then looked at everyone in turn. “We’ve aired four episodes and the editors are putting together the fifth as we speak, so I need to ask you guys what your plans are going forward. Have you given any thought to the rest of the season?”

As one, they turned to Jessie, who was tucked up next to Finn.

“We have,” she said. “But we wanted to wait to see this episode before we made our final decision.”

“Fair enough.” Hope sat up a little and nodded. “I don’t expect you to have an answer right away, so if you’d like to talk about it, I’ll give you some privacy.”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

Ro wanted to reach out for Hope’s hand as she walked past him, but he didn’t. This was business, and he needed to keep that part of things separate. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t watch her walk out of the room, though, because this was the first time he’d ever seen her in a dress and he wanted to take in as much of it as he could. He expected her to go down to her room, but instead she went outside and closed the door behind her. No one said anything for a few seconds, but then Liam laughed quietly.

“I’m guessing this is going to be a quick vote.”

Finn and Kate nodded, but Jessie kept her gaze fixed on Ro.

“What do you think?” she asked. “I know you still don’t like having them here and that you don’t want to talk about what’s going on with you and Hope, but strictly as a business decision, there’s no denying Hooked has been the boost we need. You’ve seen the reservation list.”

He had, and Jessie was right. With the exception of a few spots here and there, they were booked almost solid for the rest of the summer and had already taken more reservations for next season than they anticipated. There was money in the bank, the bills were all paid, and if they signed on for the rest of the season, Ro’d be able to pay Liam back every cent.

And, yeah, even though he might not admit it to anyone else, a huge perk of signing on for the rest of the season would mean keeping Hope around, and he really liked that idea. Too much, maybe. In the almost month since he’d first kissed her, he found himself wanting to do it more and more. Like every time he thought about her—basically, all the time.

He liked watching her interact with the guests, he liked watching her hunch over her phone every time she needed to research something on the go, and he liked watching her direct Chuck and Kevin. Most of all he liked watching her expression change when she caught him staring at her. She’d smile, blush, and he could tell that her brain was getting ready to churn out one of her crazy snippets of information, even though she didn’t do it as much anymore.

He was exactly where he’d sworn he never wanted to be again, and it was partly Jessie’s fault. She was the one who made him think he might actually have a shot at being happy with a woman. With Hope. But up until this very moment, Ro hadn’t really believed it. He did now, though, because the thought of not having Hope near him, of not being able to see her or kiss her…That just screwed him up, made everything inside him tight and miserable.

“Uh…Ro?” Jessie waved her hand back and forth in front of his face until, with a quick jerk of his head to clear his mind, he blew out a breath and nodded.

“You guys are all in?”

Without hesitation, four heads nodded at him.

“Well, shit,” he muttered. “The last thing I want to do is admit that Luka was right about the new format.”

Jessie waved her hand in circles to hurry him up. “But?”

“But…yeah.” There was no denying the Buoys was benefitting from Hooked filming there, and they’d be unbelievably stupid to give that up now. “Let’s do it.”

They all grinned back at him, but no one made a move to get up.

Ronan looked at Jessie. “So aren’t you going to go tell her?”

“Who?” Jessie asked. “Me?”

“Well, yeah,” he said, lifting his hands a bit. “You’re the one who likes to make the decisions around here.”

“True.” Jessie tugged Finn’s arm around her a little tighter, then threaded her fingers through his. “But she needs to hear it from you.”

“Why me?”

The four of them sighed in unison, as if they were too tired to deal with him.

“If you can’t figure that out,” Liam said, chuckling quietly as he turned on the ball game, “then you really are as stupid as you look.”

And as if that settled it, the four of them turned away from Ronan and cheered when they saw that the Blue Jays were winning.

Clearly he’d been dismissed, so with JD at his ankle, he pushed up from his chair and went outside to find Hope. She’d started a fire down in the pit and was crouched next to it, slowly adding a couple of pieces of wood as she watched a pair of loons swim by in the cove.

“Hey.” He lowered himself onto one of the chairs, then held his hand out to her and, with a gentle tug, pulled her down on his lap. JD tried to jump up, too, then resigned himself to curling up beside the chair.

Hope tucked her forehead against the side of his neck and sighed.

“So about the show.” He brushed a soft kiss against her head, then tipped her face up so he could look into her uncertain eyes. “Looks like it’s a yes.”

It took a second, almost as if she was waiting for either his words to sink in or him to say he was joking. Then she let out a whoop that sent the loons into a flap and threw her arms around his neck.

“Thank you,” she breathed. “I really didn’t want—”

She stopped, squeezed him tighter.

“You didn’t want what?” he asked, loving the way she fit against him, even at the odd angle she was in. “To have to go up to Tuk?”

He was kidding, but when she pulled away and looked up at him, she wasn’t smiling.

“I really didn’t want to leave here. The Buoys.” Her gaze drifted down to his mouth before slowly working its way up, and Ro held his breath the entire time. “I didn’t want to leave you.”

Shit. It was shit like this that screwed him up. He felt the exact same way, so why couldn’t he just say it? Why couldn’t he repeat those words right back at her? They were right there, ready to be spoken, but his brain wouldn’t let them loose, so he did the only thing he could do.

He kissed her.

They didn’t cling to each other the way they usually did, and he didn’t pull her up so tight that each could feel the other’s heart beating, yet somehow this slow, gentle kiss made him feel more than any of the past ones. The knots in his heart, the ones he’d worked so hard to keep tied up for so long, suddenly loosened, and he was flooded with things he’d either never felt before or thought he didn’t want to feel again. It scared the crap out of him.

And it was fuckin’ brilliant.

“Hmm,” she murmured, smiling against his mouth. “I was kind of hoping the feeling was mutual, but a girl never wants to assume, you know?”

He kissed her again, just as slow, hoping it would give him time to sort out the tsunami of crap crashing around inside him, but it didn’t. It only made him want to do a hell of a lot more than kiss her. He wanted to peel that long, loose-fitting dress off her, he wanted to know what it would feel like to run his hands and mouth over every inch of her, to feel her arch into his touch, and to hear her scream his name as he drove her over the edge of sanity. And God help him, he’d thought of plenty of ways to do that.

All he needed was for her to give him the signal that she was ready; until then, he’d just need to find a way to cool his jets. Again. Easier said than done when she tucked herself up against him like that and breathed a kiss against his neck.

“You warm enough?” Instead of waiting for her to answer, he wrapped his arms around her and held on tight, as if that would warm her. “Do you want to go in?”

“No. Do you?”

God, how he wanted to say yes, to take her inside, downstairs, and lock them both in her room until they’d had their fill of each other.

“I’m okay,” he lied. “But if you’re gonna keep sitting on me like this, with your ass right there, you’re gonna need to talk about something really awful so I can try to forget that your ass is still right there.”

Her laugh tickled his neck, making him suck in a breath and curse quietly, but he had no intention of trying to move her. He’d stay right there in that fuckin’ chair all night if that’s what she wanted.

When she did finally say something, her voice was hardly more than a whisper.

“Tell me more about growing up here. It must have been amazing; I mean, obviously the isolation couldn’t have been easy all the time, but you and your brothers are so tight…Tell me what that’s like, to know that no matter what, you’ve got family behind you.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just…when you grow up the way we did, you only have one another to depend on for protection, so…”

Hope eased back a bit and frowned up at him. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” he said, trying to backtrack, but she just talked over him.

“What did you need protection from?” she asked, then inhaled a sharp breath. “Oh my God, Ronan, was it your dad?”

Ro huffed out a deep sigh. “Hope, you don’t want to know all that shit.”

“Yes, I do.”

He started to look away, but she hooked her finger around his jaw and turned him to face her.

“You try to act like you don’t need anyone, but it’s there every time you look at your brothers. The three of you need one another. It’s like you’re carrying all this pain with you, and no matter how much time has passed since the first scar left its mark, the pain’s still there. And, sure, you might have managed to keep it shoved down somewhere, but you never get rid of it, do you?”

He didn’t answer. Not because he didn’t want to but because he was worried that if he started telling her some of the shit that went on here, he’d end up telling her all of it, and no one wanted to know all that. Mandy sure as hell never did.

But Hope wasn’t Mandy.

Shit. After a deep breath, he pressed a kiss against her forehead, then nudged her head back to his shoulder.

When he thought back on it later, he couldn’t remember exactly how much detail he’d gone into, but he did remember Hope gasping softly against his neck when he told her about the night Maggie up and left, how she dumped the blame for all her unhappiness on ten-year-old Finn’s shoulders, then called in a charter and flew away without so much as a wave goodbye to any of her kids.

“Oh my God,” Hope whispered. “You must have been devastated.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t good,” he said, hoping his dry chuckle would lighten things up a little. It didn’t.

“And all these years, she’s never called or written or anything? Not once?”

Ronan shook his head slowly. “Not even a Christmas card.”

“Oh my God, that’s awful.” There was more than sympathy in her voice; there was anger, disbelief, and a shot of hostility, too. “Is that when your dad started drinking?”

“Yup. And Jimmy O’Donnell never did anything half-assed.”

He didn’t want to tell her anything else, just wanted to sit there with his arms around her and forget everything.

“Did he hurt you?” she asked, snuggling in against him. “Is that what you needed protection from?”

It took longer than he thought it would to finally push the sound off his tongue.

“Yeah.” Ronan closed his eyes as if that would help slow the memory, but it didn’t. The sights, sounds, and smells swept over him, as clear and sharp as the day it happened.

“The first time he hit me was about a month after Maggie left. I’d been doing most of the cooking, and I was horrible at it, but Da wasn’t going to do it, which meant if I didn’t, Liam and Finn would have lived on peanut butter sandwiches and macaroni. So this one day I was cooking up some bacon to have with supper, and I got distracted because I could see Liam outside pitching to Finn—even back then he was something to watch. Next thing I know the smoke detector’s screaming and Da comes running, swearing up a storm, clutching an empty mickey of rum, and I swear to God I never saw it coming. I pushed the pan off the burner, then went to grab for something to wave the smoke away, and…he clocked me. Took me out with the goddamn bottle.”

Ro felt Hope flinch against him, so he tightened his hold on her.

“It hurt like a sonofabitch,” he said. “But worse than the pain was how much it surprised me. We’d been whooped before, sure, but never anything more than a swat on the ass when we needed it—and even those had been rare. So this…this was…yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“I did what he told me to do: I cleaned up the broken glass and served dinner.”

They’d grown up in completely different worlds, he and Hope, so it couldn’t have been easy for her to listen to the things he told her, but every time he stopped, she’d ask more questions, and he’d end up telling her more.

Like how he and Liam would try to hide Finn in cupboards or up in the tree house when they knew Da was in his cups. Or how Da would sometimes forget to boat over and pick them up from school in Port Hardy, so they’d spend the night as stowaways on one of the other boats at the dock.

“Why didn’t you leave?” Hope asked. “I read in the notes that you left here when you were nineteen, but why didn’t you leave sooner?”

“I couldn’t,” he said. “Liam and Finn were still here.”

“Yeah, but they were still here when you…when you did finally leave.” As the last words slipped off Hope’s tongue, Ro knew she was making a connection, as if she was beginning to understand something but was still missing a piece.

He didn’t want to tell her that piece. He’d never told anyone except Finn, and that was only because he had to, so to avoid it, he lifted her off his lap and went to stoke the fire.

“Come on,” she said, her voice impossibly soft. “Let’s walk.”

At the sound of the word, JD was on his feet, tail wagging and tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. They couldn’t go far from the fire, so Hope took Ro’s hand and started toward the dock, and Ro knew if he didn’t tell her now, he might never work up the balls. If he was going to give it an honest try with Hope, he needed to tell her this. Besides, it was ancient history, it shouldn’t be so hard to talk about anymore, and yet…

It was a damn good thing she didn’t care about flowery language, because there was nothing flowery or nice about what he told her next. If they’d been filming, half the footage would have been bleeped out, but Ronan had no other way to explain what it was like to have Da corner Liam and him in the fish shack, swinging at them harder than he’d ever swung before, and to know that, unlike all the other times Da had hit them, the only way they were going to get out of it was if one of them stopped him.

There was no easy way for Ro to tell her what it felt like when he punched the old man for the first time or what it sounded like when Da’s head hit the edge of the sink. And there sure as hell wasn’t an easy or pretty way to tell her how it felt when he thought he’d killed his own father.

The words puked out of him like bile, as if he’d been dry-heaving all these years and was finally able to get them out.

“Once we realized he was still breathing, we shoved his ass into one of the wheelbarrows and hauled him up to the lodge. I stitched him up as best I could, and the next morning I left.”

“Oh my God.” They’d stopped at the far edge of the dock, and while he looked out over the moonlit water, he could feel Hope watching him. “That’s why you don’t drink.”

“Yup. I didn’t come back here for a long time, either,” he said. “But even when I did, I couldn’t get myself to go inside that damn shack. Every time I got near it I just…”

He shook his head, but it didn’t clear anything away. “I couldn’t do it.”

“So you tore it down and rebuilt it.”

“That was all them, not me. Finn had been away on some kind of school trip when all that shit went down, and we never told him. Never thought we’d have to, but after Da died and we decided to reopen this place, Liam got it in his head that the old shack had to come down.”

“Thank God he did, but it must have been so awful for you,” she said. “After everything you’d been through, leaving your brothers here with Jimmy—that took courage.”

“Courage?” he choked. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life, leaving them here.”

“So why did you do it?” The way she looked at him, it was as if she already knew what his reply was going to be.

“Because,” he said, whispering as though it would make his answer easier, “I knew if I didn’t, then the next time it happened, I really was going to kill him.”

“Exactly.” Hope turned her face up to his and nodded. “And then what would have happened to you guys? Sure, you might have been able to plead self-defense, but you were nineteen years old, Ronan, which means you would have been tried as an adult, and while you sat in jail waiting for your trial to be over, your brothers would have been tossed in foster care and this place would have been sold off.”

“Yeah, maybe, but—”

“No, Ronan, there’s no but. No kid should have to live through what you three did; it’s horrendous, but at least you had one another. It’s what saved you—it’s what’s still saving you.”

In all the years since it had happened, leaving his brothers here was the thing that ate at him the most. Liam and Finn both said they’d have done the same thing, and maybe they would have, but it was Ronan’s job to look after them. He was the oldest. It was his responsibility to keep them safe, and he couldn’t do it, so regardless of what line of crap Hope was feeding him, he knew the truth. He’d taken the coward’s way out and left, just like Maggie had, and he’d never forgive himself for that.

They turned around and headed back toward the fire, its flames nothing but dwindling flickers now. JD immediately hopped up on the chair they’d been in earlier, but Ro didn’t care, because Hope had wrapped her arm around his waist as they stood at the edge of the pit. And when she looked up at him with that small smile, it actually took his breath away.

“Can I ask you one more question?”

“Why the hell not?” he laughed. “You already know all my secrets, so this one ought to be easy in comparison.”

She blushed a little, but when her hesitation lingered, Ronan nudged her.

“I’m just buggin’ you. Ask away.”

“It’s, uh, your dad,” she said. “What happened that made him join AA? It’s not like it’s an easy thing to get to a meeting out here.”

“Jessie happened.”

“What d’you mean?”

Finally, Ro mused, the beginning of the end.

“Jessie might not be very big, but she’s tough, and she started calling Da out on all his bullshit. He finally saw what he’d become and that was it—he stopped cold turkey. Found himself a couple different meeting places over in Port Hardy and went almost every day. When he couldn’t, he called his sponsor on the phone.”

Ro stared down into the dying flames and sighed. All the years of abuse, the pain, the destruction: All those emotions paled next to the pride he felt every time he thought about his da—big, loud Jimmy O’Donnell, the man who held Guinness up as the fifth food group—not only admitting he had a problem but doing something to fix it.

“He even sat the three of us down the first Christmas after he’d joined, and he begged our forgiveness.” Ro hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but it was too late to take back now.

“Oh,” Hope breathed. “That must have been horrible for all of you. Great, but horrible.”

“Yeah. Best and worst day of our lives up to that point.”

Neither of them said much for a while after, not until the barely there evening breeze made Hope shiver.

“Come on,” Ro said. “Let’s go in.”

After dousing what was left of the fire, they headed inside, just as Finn and Jessie were headed downstairs.

“Liam and Kate have already gone to their cabin,” Jessie said. “But because we didn’t get any work done tonight, you need to make sure you’re up bright and early tomorrow.”

Ro gave her a mock salute, then stood in the lobby with Hope, not sure what to do next. If he was smart, he’d go to bed, because tomorrow was going to be a long day. Sundays always were, with the new batch of guests arriving, but he didn’t want to go to bed. Not alone anyway.

Easing the front of her hair back from her face, he smiled down at her.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Quid pro quo,” she said, wagging her eyebrows at him. “Shoot.”

“Are you going to kiss me or what?”

The corners of her eyes crinkled as her smile widened. “Honestly, I was leaning more toward the ‘or what,’ but we can certainly start with a kiss.”

Did she just—

That was as far as the question got in his mind before she fisted her hands into the front of his T-shirt, pushed up on her toes, and kissed him.