Chapter Forty-Eight

Reid

The ride is short and loud, which allows me time to get inside my own head when I’d rather be in Carrie’s. I’m thinking about family, both hers and mine. They’ve brought us together in ways that Carrie doesn’t even know and I’m hoping like hell that I’m right and my siblings will help ensure my father doesn’t tear us apart. Cat and Carrie really are alike in many ways, most especially in how unlike our fathers they are. I need Carrie to know that while my father might be the patriarch of the Maxwell clan, it’s Cat who’s at our core, leading the way to change. Ironically, and not in my favor, it’s Cat who would call me the most like my father, which makes my strategy today a dangerous one.

Once we’re on the ground, I help Carrie out of the chopper, lifting her off the ramp and setting her on the tarmac, but I don’t let her go. I don’t want to let her go. Wind gushes, and her long brown hair blows into her face. I brush it away, barely recognizing the tenderness in the act as within my capacity, but like Cat in different ways, Carrie’s changing me and I’m not sure that’s good for her. My past is still my past. What I learned from that is still what I learned. And yet, I can’t turn back. That means I need to protect Carrie. I will protect her.

“Talk to me,” Carrie says, her hands settling on my face. “What are you thinking right this minute?”

“That you should run away, and yet if you try, I’ll just come after you.”

One of the airport staff chooses that moment to step to our side. “We have paperwork for you to fill out, sir, just inside.”

I kiss Carrie and lace the fingers of one hand with hers. “More later,” I promise, both dreading and looking forward to the moment I clear the air with her to every extent possible.

Once we’re inside the terminal, I release Carrie to sign the necessary paperwork. I’m just turning to reach for her when she grabs my hand, and the intimacy and comfort level this action suggests in her and between us, washes over me as unfamiliar but not unwelcome. I want her to be comfortable with me. I want her to be in this with me. “Everything okay?” she asks, and the concern in her eyes says that she’s not talking about the document or the airport attendant.

“You’re going to be in my bed tonight,” I say. “So yes, everything’s fucking fabulous.” I kiss her hand and start to walk, but she tugs against me and steps in front of me.

“Is there something I need to know right now?”

“Everything is fucking fabulous,” I repeat, avoiding a direct answer, or a lie, to slide my arm around her and set us back in motion. And I am fucking fabulous and I’ll stay that way as long as she doesn’t turn the war between our fathers into a war between us. I sense her desire to push me for more, but she already knows me well enough to know now isn’t the time to push. I’ve never let anyone close enough to read me that well, to know me that well. But then, she doesn’t know everything about me. She doesn’t know how easily she really can hate me and I don’t want her to know.

Exactly why when we settle into a hired car, I pull her close where I plan to keep her the rest of the night, my hand on her knee, our legs aligned. The car begins to move and I’m relieved when Carrie and I fall into a comfortable silence, both of us deep in our own thoughts; hers most likely trying to figure me out, while mine are all about what she knows, needs to know, and cannot know, at least through me.

We’re nearly to my sister’s place when the growling of her stomach erupts into the silence. “I didn’t come close to eating all of my food.” She laughs, a soft, sexy and yet somehow sweet sound that drags me out of the hell of my thoughts and into the moment with her. “I’m starving,” she announces. “In case you didn’t notice.”

“I did, in fact, notice,” I say, and remarkably, just this easily, I’m laughing as well. “They’ll be food at the party, but we can order food at my place where I want you right now.” My fingers flex on her knee and the driver manages to stop at our destination at that very moment. “But that will have to wait. We’re here.” I tap the driver’s seat. “I’ll text you before we come down.”

“Yes sir,” the man replies, and I open my door, exit, and help Carrie out as well.

“I’ve been to the bar inside this building,” she says, surveying our location. “It’s a hot legal spot. No wonder your sister, the crime writer, and her attorney husband live here.”

I open the door to the building for her. “Reese chose this location. He was here first.”

“Cat moved in with him then?” she ask as we cross the lobby.

Seeing an opportunity to show the divide between my father and the rest of us, I share with Carrie what I would no one else. “When Cat met Reese she was living in the apartment our mother left her. Reese’s mother moved into Cat’s place a few years back.”

She casts me a sideways look. “How do you feel about that?”

We stop at the elevators and I punch the call button. “According to my mother’s letter, she went there to get away from my father,” I say. “I don’t want any part of a place where she suffered. So how do I feel about Reese’s mother being there? Happy that Cat’s out of there and with someone that isn’t like my father.”

“I love the way she covers his cases when he’s at trial, like now actually. I’ve been reading about his recent murder trial in her column. I think I, like so many others, are looking for the inside scoop.” She meets my stare and asks, “Do you read her column?”

“Yes, but if you tell her that, she won’t believe you.”

The elevator doors open and we enter. I punch in our floor and the doors shut. Carrie steps in front of me, her hand on my chest. “I don’t know why you and Cat are broken, but if that’s why you’re on edge right now, I get it. If had to go to a party with my brother, I’d be just as tense as you are right now.”

“You know how Cat feels, Carrie. Because your brother and I are alike. I’m the ass in this equation.”

“Why?”

“Because it felt like the right thing to do.”

Her brow furrows. “I don’t understand.”

My jaw sets hard. “You don’t need to know that part of me. Ever. Because I’m not driving you toward hate, remember?”

“You’ve mistaken me for someone who wears rose-colored glasses. I know how hard you are. I also know that’s not all you are.”

She’s right. It’s not, but that doesn’t make what’s there good and right either. I turn her toward the door and pull her against me, my lips at her ear. “You’ve mistaken me for someone who deserves you,” I say. “I don’t, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not letting you go. That’s the kind of asshole I am. I’m also the asshole who’s going to cuff you to my bed and keep you there this weekend if you go home with me.”

“Cuffs will require negotiation in advance,” she says as the elevator halts and then opens.

“I’ll negotiate with my tongue.”

“While using it to talk,” she retorts without missing a beat and then tries to dart forward.

I hold onto her, but I walk us both into the hallway and pull her to me as we start down the long hall. “You aren’t going to ask what I want to trade for those cuffs?”

“Not until you’re naked and I’m holding the cuffs.”

“Those negotiation terms could work for me if you’re naked as well.”

And there it is. Exactly what I have to do to keep this woman: bare it all. She told me just last night she wants no secrets and lies between us, and the problem is that there will always be a secret between us.

If I don’t deal with that, it will destroy us. The hammer will not fall without me in control. I won’t let it.