Chapter Twenty-Six

Shane

I walked Fiona back to the store, my arm around her shoulders. I felt like I was walking on air. Or sunshine. Or whatever element of nature that signaled intense happiness.

I’d finally told a woman that I loved her, and she loved me back. It was the best fucking feeling in the world, closely followed by the powerful orgasm I’d emptied into her not half an hour ago.

It felt like I was finally making progress on removing all those nails from the coffin of our relationship. Maybe we could turn it into a bed, after all.

As good as I was feeling, I knew that there was still something big I needed to get done today.

I gave Fiona a chaste kiss on the lips when I said goodbye to her at the store, but it quickly became deeper and hungrier, despite our very recent, very intense orgasms. We were interrupted by someone catcalling, and we broke apart.

Fiona looked vaguely startled but laughed when she saw Drew starting to clap on the other side of the window.

She rolled her eyes and gave a slight bow before flipping him the bird. I grinned. She was something, my girl. I fucking loved her so damn much that my heart had been physically hurting with the need to finally tell her.

Fiona rose onto her tiptoes and gave me a quick kiss on my cheek, smiling shyly as she so often did after we made love. “I’ll see you later?”

“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away,” I told her, then followed her example and gave Drew a quick bow before I made my way back to my truck.

It felt like I was leaving a part of myself behind with Fiona but I couldn’t exactly spend the day glued to her side at work. Besides, I had more nails to deal with. Little by little, I needed to prove to Fiona how serious I was, and how much I loved her.

My next stop was going to be significantly less fun than my first. But I had to man up and get through it.

Back in Houston, I was known to be somewhat of a ballbuster and ruthless in my pursuit of what I thought was best for the company but no one could accuse me of unethical behavior. My father, on the other hand, couldn’t be accused of being ethical.

He’d screwed over so many people in so many different ways that my head had been spinning with it for months. I’d spent at least one weekend in my life draining bottle after bottle of scotch as I did some soul-searching about who I really was if I came from stock like that.

My mother was my saving grace, I believed, but it had still been a bitter pill to swallow. I had been trying for years to right my father’s wrongs. One by one, the dodgy contracts that my father entered into reached the end of their lifespans, and I had been switching them back to American suppliers. I started a multitude of trusts for the families of all those injured on duty for the company, and I made sure that those employees my father fucked out of their pensions were placed back on payroll.

Guilt over the things that he had done often ate at me, especially when I saw the effects of them firsthand. I was often confronted with it in Houston but I had never imagined that it spread all the way to Connecticut.

I was on a never-ending path of redemption for the Perkins’ family name, and today, it led straight to Randy Hall’s doorstep.

I took a deep breath and knocked, waiting for Fiona’s father to open the door. To my mind, it was even odds if he was going to slam it in my face or let me in.

Fiona hadn’t mentioned anything to me about his feelings about our relationship but I knew that she had spoken to him about it. I could tell from the way that she wasn’t so stressed anymore, and how her lips no longer pressed into a thin line every time I mentioned the company.

But it didn’t mean that Randy had fully forgiven me. Sins of the father and all.

The door swung open, and he hesitated, then stepped back to allow me inside. “Shane, what brings you here?”

He craned his neck, as though looking for Fiona behind me. “She’s not here. She doesn’t know that I am, either.”

“Ah.” He closed the door behind me and gave my hand a quick shake before leading me to the kitchen. “You’ve come to talk, man to man, then.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“I can respect that. I told you to call me Randy, son. Would you like a beer before we sit down?” He was a lot more relaxed than he had been the first time we met but there were still shadows in his eyes and a tightening around his jaw that wasn’t there when he was with Fiona.

I accepted the beer he held out and popped the top off, sinking into a stool at his kitchen counter that he gestured me toward.

Randy took a long sip of his beer, as if he was bracing himself, then sank onto his own stool. “I assume you’re here to talk to me about Fiona.”

“That would be a reasonable assumption but not directly. Not really. I’m here to talk to you about my father.”

Randy’s eyes widened in surprise, and he sucked in a pained breath. There it was, proof once again of how badly my father had hurt so many people.

Randy finally spoke, after draining half his bottle of beer. “We don’t have to talk about your daddy, Shane. You’re not him. I understand that now.”

“I’m not,” I agreed. “But I do carry his name, and I’d like for it not to carry the legacy of pain and anger the way that it does now.”

“Fair point,” Randy said, then nodded at me to continue.

I took Fiona’s earlier advice and started from the beginning. “When I was a kid, I looked up to my father as a boy does. Even though he was hardly ever around, I was proud to have him as my dad, and I defended his absence when it came between my childhood friends. My mother taught me to fish, as you know, and my friends’ fathers taught me how to play ball and all those other things.”

Randy was listening intently, his beer now forgotten. My mouth had gone dry, so I took a quick swig of mine before continuing.

“It wasn’t until I was older that I started hearing the stories. For a while, I refused to believe them but then they started coming more and more often. Slowly but surely, my friends started pulling away from me.”

Deep breath, Shane. It was a painful part of my past but I had to revisit it if I wanted Randy to understand who I was and how I had become that person.

“Eventually, I built a wall around myself and focused on learning everything I could about the business. My father hired a man, Bart, to groom me for the job I would someday take over from him. He didn’t even bother doing that himself.”

Shit, I hated sharing. But I pushed on. Randy was still listening, nodding occasionally, but he didn’t interrupt me. I had a feeling that sharing was something he was used to.

“Once I took over, Bart and I started discovering everything my father had done during his tenure. The dodgy procurement processes were only the tip of the iceberg. I’m not proud of the way I dealt with it for a while. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors of my playboy ways.”

Randy nodded.

“You need to know that I’m not that guy anymore. I’ve been trying to right my father’s wrongs for a long time but I’ve never felt it as personally as I have since meeting Fiona. That’s why I started the foundation. I don’t think I was fully alive before I met her. I want you to know that I love her. Deeply.” I held my breath as I waited for him to respond to my confession.

His eyes softened. “I know. It’s written all over your face.”

“You’re okay with that?” I asked disbelievingly.

“I am. You’re not like your father, contrary to what I might have believed the first time we met. I know you’ll be good for my daughter. She talks about you like you’re damn near a saint these days. She told me about how you saved her life out on the boat. For that, you’ll have my eternal gratitude.”

I didn’t have the first idea how to answer to that. My tongue was glued to the top of my mouth, so I took a deep drink from my bottle.

“I’m no saint.” It was the first thing that popped into my head.

Randy smirked. “I’ve no delusions that you are. No one is.”

His easy comment relaxed me some, reminding me of the actual reason for my visit, righting the wrongs the Perkins family had perpetrated against this man and his family. It didn’t hurt that I’d had the opportunity to explain myself to my girl’s father, either.

I cleared my throat and dug into my pocket, pulling out a check I’d written in the truck before I mustered the courage to knock on his door.

I stood, handing the check to Randy.

He accepted what he undoubtedly perceived as a piece of paper and then blanched when he unfolded it. For a second, I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack or something, and I panicked.

Then he straightened his shoulders and pushed the check toward me. “I can’t accept this.”

“I went through your contract with my father personally, and together with interest for late payment in terms of that very contract, you are owed a million dollars by Perkins Enterprises.” I had gone over every inch of the contract with a fine-toothed comb to find a way to give him more than that, but there was nothing, and I knew that he wouldn’t accept charity.

Randy gaped at me. “A million dollars? It’s too much.”

“It’s not, I assure you. It’s what you stood to make from your last contract with my father. Consider it a late payment. Please. You worked for that money, even if it was decades ago. It’s yours.” I wasn’t above begging if that was what it took.

Randy stood and walked over to me on legs that seemed wobbly. He crushed me into a hug. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

I was unfamiliar with fatherly hugs, but I was pretty sure I was in the middle of one, and it was kind of awesome. I completely understood why Fiona and Drew spent so much time with him, and why they loved him so deeply.

“You got space for one more?” Drew’s voice sounded from the doorway behind me.

Randy laughed, releasing me. “Always.”

Drew patted him on the back. “You ready to go fishing, old man?”

“Who’s an old man?” Randy huffed, draining his beer.

“Yeah, yeah.” Drew bantered with Randy so comfortably, it was like they did it all the time. He turned to me. “So, what’re you doing here? Asking for Fiona’s hand in marriage already?”

What. The. Fuck?

Drew eyes crinkled, and he doubled over with laughter at the expression on my face. He was wiping tears from his eyes when he straightened up. “I’m messing with you, man. Relax.”

So, I did. Drew was like a brother to Fiona, and if I wanted our relationship to last, I was going to have to forge a relationship with him, too.

“What if that’s exactly why I’m here?” I asked.

Drew stopped laughing abruptly. And now it was his turn to look shaken.

Randy chuckled. “Enough, boys. Shane here came over to straighten up a few things.”

Drew let out a low whistle. “Your balls must be the size of cantaloupes. I’ll have to remember to ask Fiona—”

“Do not finish that sentence,” Randy warned, his good-natured grin fading fast.

“That’s my cue, I think,” I said. “Is your shift over?”

“Yup,” Drew answered. “Before you ask the next question, Fiona’s isn’t yet.”

“Gotcha, thanks. Bye, Drew.”

“Cheers, dude,” he called.

Randy walked me out, pausing when we reached my truck. “Be good to her, okay?”

“I give you my word that I will. I love her unconditionally.”

I said my goodbyes, finally feeling like I was onto something in life.