Chapter Twenty-Six
A last-minute call from Alberto a week later had Tyler scrambling. The Italian was still rooting for him to get the consulting job and figured the best way to help make that happen was a do-over meet and greet with the board, which was how Tyler had ended up outside Helene Carlyle’s penthouse for an informal pre-wedding dinner with a guest list that just happened to include several key members of the Ferranti Hotel Group board who’d crossed the Atlantic to attend Carlo’s wedding.
One knock and the door opened wide, revealing Helene and Alberto holding hands and looking like they’d been together for years and settled into that kind of bonded happiness he only ever saw on TV or when he’d go over to Frankie’s house as a kid and see Mr. and Mrs. Hartigan interact.
“Finally, you’re here,” Alberto said with a wide grin.
“Alberto, darling, your mother was asking for you right before the doorbell buzzed; do you mind checking in on her?” Helene asked.
“Of course.” He gave Helene a knowing look.
Spidey sense tingling, he felt his gaze follow Alberto through the large living room until he stopped next to a tiny woman who had to be eighty draped in black lace and another woman who he’d know in a zero-visibility snowstorm let alone a semi-crowded Harbor City cocktail party. His pulse kicked it into high gear and every sense went on alert. Everly. She was here. He couldn’t look away. She was wearing a familiar black sheath dress. He knew the feel of that dress, knew how it looked crumpled into a ball on his bedroom floor next to her sky-high heels and scraps of lace she called panties—if she was even wearing any that day. The memory immediately had him wondering what was under that dress tonight.
That was bad enough. What was worse was the unraveling of the tension wrapped around him like invisible barbed wire as soon as he saw her. The disappearance, for the first time in five days, of the biting tightness that had worked its way down to his bones was as much of a relief as it was a shock.
“Don’t feel bad; it happens to us all,” Helene said, the sincerity in her voice genuine.
Ignoring the urge to rush over to Everly, Tyler turned his attention back to his host. “What’s that?”
“Falling in love.”
What the— “Why does everyone keep saying that?”
“Because you have no poker face when it comes to Everly.” Triumph lingered in every cultured syllable.
The pieces fell into place. The board members were there—along with Hudson, Felicia, Sawyer, Clover, and an unsmiling Irena and Carlo who, judging by their body language, were having about as much fun at the dinner in their honor as Tyler was—but his gaze kept going back to Everly, who hadn’t stopped glaring at him since he spotted her. “So this was a setup.”
“Did you really expect anything else?”
Well, he shouldn’t have, but his instincts had been all fucked up since the first time that Ms. 3B decided to stomp-walk across his ceiling. Not that he’d admit that. “Alberto said this was a chance to redeem myself after the gala and that the entire board would be here.”
Helene shrugged. “It is and they are.”
He scanned the room, confirming that Alberto was mixing and mingling among all the board members, stopping occasionally to make eye contact with Tyler and wave. That was where his attention needed to be. Not on the woman across the room who was sipping a glass of champagne and gesturing wildly with her hands while she talked with the old lady in lace. It was where his attention would be.
Mind made up, he mentally promised not to pay her any attention—and immediately found himself watching her again. Pull your head out of your ass, Jacobson. “I don’t like being manipulated.”
“Who does?” Helene asked. “But a schemer like yourself should understand that eventually the tables are going to get turned on you. Take a lesson from a kindred spirit—love is too valuable to throw away. If you’re lucky enough to find it, you fight for it.”
Everly must have felt his gaze because she glanced over at him and gave him the kind of glare that didn’t need words to say “fuck you” and then returned to her conversation with the woman who had to be Alberto’s mother. A kick in the balls with one of her pointy-toed shoes would have felt better.
“She doesn’t want me here.”
Helene made a noise that if it would have come from another woman he would have called it a snort. “Good thing it’s not her home, then.”
With that, Helene wandered off toward her sons and their significant others. Alberto was already there. Seeing the group of them laughing and chatting away made Tyler’s stomach burn with the bittersweet knowledge that that could have been him with Everly. If he had different priorities or she’d been a different woman, they could be like the other couples—happy. Instead, they were on opposite sides of the room. It wasn’t right. He should say something, anything, to smooth this over. Before he got a chance, though, Helene announced dinner was served. Not surprisingly, he found himself sitting next to Everly. It was now or never and even though he didn’t have a plan, he jumped on it anyway.
Lowering his voice so only she could hear, he said, “I just want to apologize.”
She shook out her linen napkin and draped it over her lap without looking at him. “I just want it to never get below sixty degrees.”
Okay. That went over about as well as the idea of no second breakfast to a hobbit. Still, he hadn’t gotten this far in life by giving in when things got tough. “I shouldn’t have said what I said, the way I said it, at the gala. I’m sorry.”
This time Everly did turn and look at him. He expected to see heat, anger, hurt, anything. Instead her face was completely neutral.
“But you meant it. Every word, don’t try to act like you didn’t,” she said, her voice quiet, calm, and thick with her accent. “Us Riverside girls can smell bullshit from five miles away.”
…
Thank God Helene wasn’t serving steak or Everly would be tempted to use the serrated blade on Tyler’s thigh. He just wanted to apologize. What a load of crap. He wanted to make things look good in front of Alberto and the board members. That’s what men like him did. They sure didn’t cause a scene. So what if the bags under his eyes were getting bags and the scruff on his jaw looked more than a little scraggly, she still should have run over him in the parking garage when she’d had the chance.
“Everly—”
“Don’t.” Just the sound of her name on his lips had her wanting to give in. It was ridiculous. “We’re both adults here, and there’s no reason to make this messy, especially not here.”
Making nice with Irena was hard enough; she couldn’t play pretend on two fronts. The other woman had done the whole kissy-face, we’re-the-best-of-friends thing and she’d played along for Carlo’s sake. For whatever reason, he’d picked Irena to be his wife in name only and who was she to judge? It wasn’t like her love life was anything to brag about. Exhibits A–Z were sitting right beside her and making her nerves jittery and her body electric. In his dark-blue suit that set off his gorgeous though tired eyes and only made his already broad shoulders look even stronger, he didn’t even have the common courtesy to look like the scumbag he was—even with the edgy energy stringing him tight. It wasn’t fair to still want him after what he’d done, but she did, and it just pissed her off more than she already was.
“We need to talk.” He paused, his hand coming to rest on her knee under the table and sending a jolt of awareness through her. “Please.”
Not melting under his touch took all the energy she had at the moment so she could get out was a single word. “No.”
The vein in his temple throbbed, and his gaze grew heated. “That’s it, just no?”
The possessiveness in his voice made her thighs clench. Dammit. She was smarter than this. She knew what was at the end of this path. He only wanted to be with people who mattered. She was just fun. Like mother like daughter, except she wasn’t going to end up like her mom, devastated and broken, so she gathered the anger still burning in her veins.
“Yeah.” She plucked his hand off her knee and let her working-class, not-the-kind-of-person-who-matters accent deepen. “That’s it.”
Then she turned to Carlo’s nonna and switched to Italian, freezing out the man on her left—or at least doing her best to ignore his every movement that she seemed to catalog anyway. Why? Because life wasn’t fair, and her heart was still making a case for the schemer who would only break her heart again and again because no matter what, she’d never stop being Riverside through and through. It was who she was, and if he couldn’t accept that, then Kiki was right and he didn’t deserve her even if she was already in love with him. Happy endings were just BS.
…
After dinner, instead of turning left onto Marlowe Avenue, Tyler merged onto the bridge leading to the one place he always seemed to find his way back to no matter how hard he ran in the other direction—home. Traffic lightened up once he passed over the bridge and got off the parkway at exit nine. People were bundled up on the sidewalk on their way from the train station to the commuter parking lot. Farther on, he turned onto Brookside Avenue and drove past the shop windows with snow spray-painted on the windows and the couples strolling down the sidewalks to one of the many restaurants that punctuated groups of shops like commas in a sentence that didn’t end for blocks and blocks.
It wasn’t Harbor City’s famed shopping paradise with elaborate Christmas windows that went up right after Halloween, but it also wasn’t as dependent on appearances or the need to strive to be bigger and better and more astounding than the display next door. The library he’d hung out in as a kid was two blocks to his left, right past the middle school he’d attended. The house he’d lived in was four blocks in the other direction, and as he drove past it, he spared it only the briefest of glances. A new family lived there now. Hopefully a happier one where a kid getting a scholarship to a prep school across the harbor was cause for celebration instead of derision.
He drove past the park where he’d had his first beer in the shadow of the spiral slide and the high school where he’d lost his virginity while parked in the football stadium’s shadow. Three more blocks with a four-way stop sign on each corner and he pulled to a stop in front of Frankie and Finian Hartigan’s two-story bungalow. Their parents were a few blocks to the north. The other siblings were scattered around in a ten-block radius, all except Felicia, the ant scientist, who’d fallen for Sawyer’s younger brother Hudson and was the only Hartigan to ever leave Waterbury. They were all smart and outgoing, able to take on bigger things, and yet they’d stayed in this working-class township so close to Harbor City they could see its skyscrapers’ lights twinkle in the distance.
His phone vibrated in the car’s cupholder. He hit talk. “Yeah?”
“You gonna stay in your car like some weirdo stalker or come inside and have a beer?” Frankie asked.
Tyler looked toward the house where Frankie stood in the open front door. “Is it good beer?”
“It’s free beer; is there a better kind?”
Ten minutes later and he and Frankie—Finian was on duty at the firehouse—were sitting out on the deck as close as possible to the fire pit in a failed attempt to stay warm as the pre-winter night gave them a preview of what was ahead in the next few months.
“Tell me again why we’re out here instead of inside where it’s warm?” Tyler asked, already halfway done with his first beer.
Frankie grinned at him, a little bit of that Hartigan crazy sparkling in his eyes. “Because we’re men and we’re tough.”
The number of dumb plans he’d agreed to when they were teenagers because of that line were too numerous to count, and also some of his favorite memories. “There is something wrong with you.”
“Nothing I can’t live with.” Frankie sipped his beer and looked out at the yard. “So what has you on our side of the bridge twice in one month?”
Shit. He must look rough if Frankie was asking him in dude code if he was all right. “Just got in the car and ended up here.”
Silence punctuated by the snap and crackle of the burning wood in the pit filled the night air. There were too many streetlights around to see any stars in the sky, but they both stared upward anyway. Looking at each other would just be too weird.
“You should have brought your girl along,” Frankie said, breaking the silence. “She makes you more fun.”
He took a swallow of beer that suddenly tasted like sawdust and chalk. “She’s not my girl.”
“Dumped your ass already?”
“Pretty much.” He downed the rest of his beer.
“That sucks, man,” Frankie said, and handed him another.
No “I’m sorry.” No “what happened.” Just acknowledgment and moving on. It was exactly the reaction he’d expected from one of his oldest friends who knew without being told that Tyler didn’t want to talk about it. Not that Frankie was the kind to push for details anyway—at least not of the bad-news variety. He’d always kept his life simple and easy. Tyler kind of envied him for that—especially when his own self-made complications fucked up his world.
“Why didn’t you ever leave?” The question just sort of popped out before Tyler had a chance to consider how to phrase it.
Frankie snorted. “Why would I?”
“Because you could,” he said, still staring at the invisible stars. “Despite the show you put on for people, you’re smart. You could make more money. You could be more than just some guy from Waterbury.”
“See, that’s your problem.” Frankie twisted in his chair to face him, his jaw tight and his shoulders tense. “You’re the only one I know who worries about that shit. I like being from Waterbury, where people make eye contact with you when you pass them on the street. The town is filled with people who work hard for what they’ve got and they appreciate it. I’m a blue-collar guy, and I don’t need to pretend I’m anything else.”
Tyler’s spine snapped straight and he turned on his friend. Pretend? He didn’t need to pretend. He needed to forget—to make others forget. “Are you saying that I do?”
“Fuck yeah,” Frankie said, not giving an inch.
“I have my reasons for wanting to leave this place behind.” The two main ones being the people who contributed to his gene pool.
“Yeah, I know. Your parents were shit.” The other man took a long swig of beer. “We all knew it, but there wasn’t a thing we could do about it short of kidnapping you and hiding you in our basement—an option Finian and I brought up with our dad.”
“I bet he had an answer for that.”
“Sure did.” Frankie looked him dead in the eye. “Where do you think the invite to apply for a scholarship for that fancy-ass prep school came from? One of the guys in his firehouse was married to a woman whose sister taught at that place.”
“He did that?” That sucked the shitty attitude right out of Tyler, and he sank back against the knockoff Adirondack deck chair. “I had no idea.”
“There’s a lot you don’t have a fucking clue about.” Frankie was on a roll and he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and got right in Tyler’s face. “Remember that first Thanksgiving you spent with the Carlyles?”
“Yeah.”
“That happened because my mom spotted Helene Carlyle heading out of your house with your mom watching her go from the window, a half-empty vodka bottle in her hand. Well, Ma all but grabbed Mrs. Carlyle and forced her into our kitchen. It was a madhouse, what with all of us trying to get out of there in time to catch the bus to school, but that woman stuck it out and listened to Ma explain about your parents and tell her that you were different. That you could really be something if you could just get away from the bastards who birthed you. Of course, she used nicer language than that, but that was the gist.”
It was like someone had turned out all the city lights, and the stars started appearing one by one in the night sky. “So that’s how I ended up spending so many holidays and vacations with them.”
“Yeah, and when you couldn’t be with them, you were at our house adding to the bedlam there,” Frankie snarled, sitting in his chair and turning his face back to the sky. “That’s the blue-collar community that you find so horrible. We watch out for one another here in Waterbury. It may not always be visible and we may not always brag about it or hold fancy parties to raise money for things, but we make good things happen. You wanna know why I stayed? Because I want to contribute to that, but you’ve been trying to put as much distance between you and where you grew up for so long that you can’t even see all the good stuff. And every time you try to hide who you are and where you came from you’re telling us—and Everly—to fuck off.”
Jesus. What in the hell did he say to that? Every possible response evaporated like so much nothing. How had he missed all of this? For a man who prided himself on always knowing what someone was going to do before they did it, this revelation had his brain buffering for signal. And in the darkness, he saw the one thing he’d always missed before. That he wasn’t running away from where he was from, he was running away from himself. He’d been a complete asshole who’d been fighting so hard to avoid becoming his bitter, paranoid, always-ready-to-screw-over-people-before-they-had-a-chance-to-screw-you-over parents that if he wasn’t careful, he’d end up being just like them anyway.
He drained his beer in one gulp and set it down on the deck next to his other empty soldier. “You’re right.”
“What?” Frankie turned and looked at him with a smug grin. “I must have gone temporarily deaf. Can you say that again?”
Tyler flipped him off. “Fuck off, you heard me.”
“Yeah, I did. So how about you tell me the real reason why you ended up parked outside my house like the world’s saddest multimillionaire dickhead in desperate need of a cleanup because man, you look fucking rough.”
“Everly.” Because she’d seen through it all right from the beginning.
“You mean the woman who’s not your girl even though you love her?”
“I don’t love her.” He just couldn’t figure her out when it appeared that she had his number. The first time they’d met most likely.
Frankie laughed. “Lie to yourself; don’t lie to me.”
Heat rushed through him along with the sneaking suspicion that he was full of shit. “I’m not.”
“Okay.” Frankie shrugged and nodded. “Then say it. Say, ‘I don’t love Everly Ribinski, the hottest girl who ever told me to fuck off and die.’”
“She didn’t say that.” Delay? Him? Never.
Frankie just shook his head. “Stop stalling.”
He wasn’t stalling; he was just stupefied. He wanted to say it. He needed to say it to get his know-it-all best friend off his ass but…he couldn’t. The words turned to ash on his tongue. There was only one reason for that. He loved her. Like a complete moron, he’d fooled around and fallen in love. Hell, he had probably already been halfway there when he’d decided the best idea in the world was to sit on a lounge chair in the parking garage and wait for his bitch queen of an upstairs neighbor to come home. And when she’d gone toe to toe with Irena at the gala, that hadn’t been her being unable to control her temper. That had been her defending him, something he had so little experience with—or so he thought—that he hadn’t been able to identify that feeling of gratitude so he’d freaked out and had pushed her away.
“Shit,” he said, ramming his fingers through his hair. “I’ve fucked it all up.”
Frankie just raised an eyebrow, so Tyler gave him the whole story from the parking spot coin flip to the gala blowup to the way Everly had cut him to the quick at dinner.
“Damn.” Frankie chuckled. “I like that woman. If she hadn’t already fallen for you, I would be shoving you out of the way to make my move.”
“Go for it.” Misery sunk like an anchor in his gut. “She told me to hit the road, wouldn’t even let me apologize tonight at dinner.”
“If I even believed for a millisecond that you meant that, I would. I might be the one who runs into burning buildings for a living, but you’re the true idiot,” Frankie said. “Everly is one of us and, unlike some douchebags, doesn’t need to try to hide it.”
“You got that from one poker night at your house?” Tyler wasn’t disagreeing, but that didn’t mean he was accepting it with grace, either.
“I’m a people person.” He shrugged. “Look, here’s what I’m telling you. Everly is a woman who wears her heart on her sleeve. If she wanted to put you on blast, she would have, and smoke would still be wafting from your charred-beyond-recognition ass because of the chewing out you got. But she didn’t. You want her, you gotta fight for her.”
Yeah, it was the kind of thing that made sense on paper, but how in the hell he was supposed to actually make it happen when she wouldn’t even talk to him was a whole other thing. “How?”
“You’re the fucking evil-genius plotter who’s in love with her—you go figure it out,” Frankie said, and gathered up their empty beers as he stood. “Just do it quick because if I have another one of these touchy-feely conversations anytime soon I might throw up.”
“Such a softie.” Tyler stood and walked back toward the house with Frankie.
“Trust me,” his friend said. “‘Soft’ is not the word the ladies use to describe me.”
Tyler may have been laughing again by the time he walked out to his car, but his brain was going at supersonic speeds. Frankie was wrong about the love thing—there was no way he’d fallen for the exact opposite of the kind of woman he needed in his life—but he wanted her, missed her, needed to be around her. Some might say that was the same thing, but he’d seen love up close and personal with his parents. They fought. They said I love you. They fought some more. That wasn’t what he needed in his life. But he did need Everly because he…well, because he did. So like the schemer he was, he spent the drive home going through options and prognosticating outcomes, because this was one plot that had to go according to plan.