Chapter 20

Margot

“You sure you want to stay here all by yourself?” Nat asked, and twirled a strand of purple hair around her finger. “I mean, it’s not exactly dangerous with the alarm, but still. You’d be all alone.”

“And so?”

“Just that it’s creepy, boss. What if there’s a ghost or some shit?” Nat shivered and rubbed her arms.

“You’ve been watching too much Supernatural, Nat.”

She raised a finger and waggled it at me. “One can never watch too much Supernatural, boss. It’s not physically possible.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Seriously, I’m going to buy you the box set or something because that shit is lit as all hell. Ha, excuse the pun.” Nat trundled to the door and shouldered her bag.

I opened up for her and let her out into the Chicago night. “Be safe, Nat.”

“You be safe,” she said, and looked back at me, the light from one of the lampposts catching the lavender hue of her hair. “You’re the one who’s about to have a ghostly experience.”

I managed not to roll my eyes at her as she walked off, whistling under her breath.

Man, she made bad coffee, but she sure was a character. Nat kept me smiling most days, that was for sure, that or tugging my hair out because she’d scheduled the wrong client in on the wrong day or time slot.

I shut the door and locked it, double-checked it wouldn’t open, then walked back through to my office. I had a panic button on the wall in there, so if anything happened, I could hit it right away. I wasn’t worried, though. I’d spent nights here alone before, poring over the books and mulling over how to make things better. Right.

I sat down in my office chair and rested my wrists on the desk. God, I’d had to get Ben’s help to pull the desk back into position after Cain had moved it. I hadn’t had the willpower to speak to him today.

Watching him interact with people, especially women who came in to get art etched onto their bodies, had almost killed me.

“It’s not about him,” I whispered. “Or what he wants to know.” How about what he deserved to know? I’d slept with him. I was his friend, his business partner. He’d had the decency not to pry before but—

I cut off the line of thought and opened my bottom desk drawer instead. I shifted papers aside and my fingertips brushed the leather surface of the photo album I’d stowed there six months ago when I’d officially taken over my dad’s shop.

I lifted it out and placed it on my desk, then opened it.

Tears bit at the corners of my eyes. “Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, asshole,” I muttered, then opened the album.

It was the first time I’d gone through it since he’d passed. The first picture, oh god, was of me and him. My dad so much younger, wearing a pair of shorts that would’ve been unacceptably short by today’s fashion standards, his blond hair tufted up comically atop his head. I was in his arms, no more than two years old, and grinning. We looked similar. He’d been the more masculine version of me, in a way, with minor differences.

The tears came quick and fast, and I batted them away. “I’m doing my best, Daddy,” I whispered. “I promise, I’ll make this work. No matter what it takes. I’ll look after Mom and I’ll look after Jemma-Kate. Everyone will love this place.”

I turned the page, and there he was with me when I was eight. He held a tattoo gun in the image and spoke to me as I admired the pictures in the book. I’d been fascinated with them, growing up, from the colorful skulls with snakes protruding from their mouths, to the angels in stunning detail, wings of feathers colored white or even black.

But my favorites had always been the cartoon characters. Dad had often let me watch, if the customer had been OK with it, and it was then my passion for art had truly arisen.

He’d had his rules, though. No tattoos until I was eighteen. I’d respected it, and the first tattoo I’d gotten had been from Cain.

I turned the page.

Two pictures came next. One of Dad and Mom, linked arm in arm, then one below it of Cain, younger, still muscly but not as filled out and not as tattooed, standing next to Dad. Dad had his arm around Cain’s shoulder and wore a grin that screamed pride. Cain didn’t smile, but he looked up at my dad and there was something there, something in his expression that said it all.

“Fuck,” I whispered. “Oh fuck.” My mom was totally right. Cain was technically a part of this family. Sure, he’d left halfway through our final year, and yeah, we’d hardly spoken, but he’d kept in contact with my father through it all.

I balled my hands into fists and pressed them to my eyes. “What do I do?” I whispered. “What do I do about this? About the business? And about how I feel—about—him? I don’t want to feel anything again. I don’t want to hurt again.” This was the weakest I’d been. I despised it. “Just give me a sign. Please, Dad, if you’re up there, if you’re listening—”

A crash sounded from the front of the store, and I jerked out of my chair, my arms falling to my sides. Adrenaline rushed through me, pumping my heart at a rate that surely wasn’t healthy.

Nat’s chatter about ghosts flashed through my mind, and I managed a dull snort.

“Hello?” I called out, and walked to the wall, placed my thumb against the panic button. “Who’s out there?”

No answer.

“Hello? You’ve got five seconds until I push this panic button.”

“Ow, Jesus Christ.” The muffled voice came from the front, from what sounded like outside, in the street.

I stepped away from the panic button and toward the door, listening hard. My heart did a little flip and then a bigger one. I walked out of the office and toward the front, swallowing panic that had nothing to do with supernatural happenings.

The lights in the reception area of the shop were off, and I swam through the darkness toward the entrance. Outside, the lampposts cast circles of buttery yellow light on the sidewalk.

Cain stood in front of the glass door, holding what looked to be a collection of sticks—I couldn’t be one hundred percent on that, though. It was pretty dark. Him, however—I’d recognize those broad shoulders anywhere, the powerful stance, boots planted so firmly it was almost as if he didn’t walk, the earth simply moved beneath him and carried him along.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, because it was the first thing that sprang to mind and the last thing I needed.

“I’m here for you,” he replied. “Open up. Please.”

I chewed the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted blood. Let him in and then what?

“Margot, I didn’t come to fight with you. I came to apologize.”

“You? Apologize?”

“Stranger things have happened,” he replied, but with a tickle of humor in the back of his throat.

“Name one.”

“The Ugandan Knuckles meme,” he replied.

“Huh?”

“Never mind, just trust me when I say it’s weird as shit and totally inappropriate, much like this attempt at an apology. Ah, Christ, don’t make me spell it out for you,” he said, shifting the sticks in his hand. “Margot, I’m not leaving until you open the door. I’ll wait out here all night if I have to, and I’ll goddamn apologize the minute you leave.”

“Are you going to threaten to break the glass again?” I asked, even though my mind was already made up.

“No,” he said.

I fretted over it for a second, then clicked the lock and drew the door inward for him. He stepped inside and imposed that cologne on me, that musky man smell that had driven me crazy again and again.

How many times had I fantasized over Cain over the past few weeks? Almost every night, and it helped he was the first man who’d brought me to orgasm during sex. But none of that mattered when we couldn’t agree on hardly anything else.

Cain shut the door and looked down at me in the dark. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“Let’s talk.”

“Only if you promise not to move my desk again. It took two people to move it back.” It was a feeble attempt to lighten the mood, and it didn’t work for shit. I spun on my heel and walked back to the office, my breath hitching as if he’d touched me.

Cain entered behind me and shut the door with a soft click. “I brought these for you,” he said, and proffered what weren’t actually sticks at all, but short, cut branches of a cherry blossom tree. Pink flowers crept along the branches in clusters, little buds opened to the world. “They’re your favorite, yeah?”

“Yes,” I said, and took them from him. “I—where did you get these? There aren’t that many places that sell these.”

“Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.”

“Cain, you didn’t cut them down from somewhere did you? Tell me you weren’t in some park a half an hour ago hacking at tree branches.”

“I repeat my previous statement.”

I laughed. It was tight and a little forced, but I put the branches on my desk, next to the photo album. Shit! The album!

“Feeling nostalgic?” Cain asked. He circled the desk and stopped beside me, looked down at the picture of him and my father in the shop. He fell silent and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

“He would’ve been happy you came back, Cain,” I said, softly.

“Maybe.” He lifted the album and studied the picture, then turned the page and found another one of me and my sister, Kiera, before she got pregnant, before she’d run off and left everyone else with her responsibilities instead of taking ownership of them. “Look at you,” he said, and traced my face. I was sixteen in the image. “I remember this day. I remember taking this picture. I remember your sister was being a total prick about you borrowing her blouse or some shit.”

“It was a pair of jeans,” I said, and shook my head. “Not that it matters. I think this is one of the last happy moments I had with my sister before she changed.”

“Change,” he muttered. “Did she really change? Does anyone really change?”

“I think so,” I replied. “You’re not the same person you used to be, Cain. You’re—” But I didn’t have the words to express it. He wasn’t the surly teenager who’d abandoned his high-school career. He wasn’t the young man who’d teased me one minute then invaded my fantasies the next.

“I’m what?” He asked and put down the album. His fingertips lingered on the photo, then lifted and closed the book, the leather cover shutting out the memories, but only for a second.

“I don’t actually know what you are.” And that was the damn truth.

“Ditto.”

“What? What are you talking about? You know exactly who I am,” I replied, another lie forced from between my lips—anything to keep a mental distance from him. His body was so close, so hot. Concentrating was an ongoing war between brain and sensory receptors. “I’m the same, boring chick who stays in her comfort zone, right? Wasn’t that what you said?”

“I’ve never said that about you, and you damn well know it. Margot, you’re as closed as that fucking album right now, and I want to prop you open and figure out what’s inside. You’ve been holding back with me these past weeks, and it’s about fucking time you tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t have to—”

“No, you don’t have to tell me anything, but I can tell whatever it is eats you up inside on a daily basis, and I can’t stand to see you like that,” he said, and took my hand, squeezed ever so gently. How could a man this big be this gentle?

Cain swept the papers on my desk back, then perched his ass on it and turned me in his arms and held me between his legs. He searched my face as if the answers would spring from my skin.

“I was engaged,” I said. It was like I’d coughed up a hair ball. It flew from me and hit him right in the face.

Cain blinked. “When? Why didn’t I hear about this?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I heard you had a boyfriend, but fiancé? I had no idea.”

“He was—Steven, I have to get used to saying his goddamn name. Steven was an asshole, basically. Can we leave it at that?”

Cain tilted his head to one side.

“I guess not,” I said, and shook my head ruefully. “I thought Steven was the one for me, or I’d never have said yes. He worked in the shop with me, kinda helped me run things for a while before my dad fell ill.”

“When was this?”

“Two years ago,” I said. “I know it’s pretty pathetic that it still bugs me. It’s not that I’m not over him. It’s that I’m not ready to believe that all of that stuff, the feelings, the trust, that it could be real with anyone. Unless it’s a different type of love, like with Mom or Jemma.”

Cain tucked my hair behind my ear. “Talk to me,” he said. “What happened?”

“OK, so things were great. I was pretty damn happy. We’d spent a couple months planning our wedding, and we were getting closer to the date, so obviously things got a little frenetic and I wasn’t really paying attention to him. Or rather to what he was doing. My dad approached me—” I choked up, then swallowed, forced that goddamn lump down. I had to finish this now I’d started. “Dad told me that he didn’t trust Steven, that something was up because the business was losing money, basically.”

“Oh fuck,” Cain said, softly. His shoulders hardened, the muscles bunching beneath the cotton of his shirt. “Where is he? Where is the asshole?”

I pressed a finger to his lips. “I’m not done,” I said, then brushed my thumb over his Cupid’s bow. “I fought with my dad over it, and I’ve got to say that was the worst moment in my life, even worse than what followed, because it was Dad. It was like I’d broken trust with him by not believing what he had to say and jumping to conclusions.” Breathe. You can finish this. “But the suspicion was planted for me, so I started checking things out. Checking our finances, in particular. And yeah, that’s when I found out he was stealing from us—it was minor at first, then more and more, larger and larger amounts. The reason my dad had come to me was because your father, Cain, noticed that something was going on, and he wasn’t happy about it.”

“So what did you do?” he asked, and it sounded as if his vocal chords had been winched tight.

“I waited for the right moment. I mean, this was my dad’s business, and I didn’t want my personal issues to get in the way of the truth. I had to act, so I bided my time, and then one night, Steven told me he was working late at the shop. God, I still remember the moment I opened the front door. It felt… wrong. And the smell—”

“Smell!”

“I’m not telling this right, ugh. When I walked into the shop, I smelled flowers, way too sweet, like the worst perfume in the fucking world,” I said, and clenched my fists. “The reception area was empty and so were the rooms with our chairs and guns, but the office door was closed and there was a sliver of light beneath it, between the wood and floor, so I went over to it and placed my hand on the knob.” I ground my teeth. Fuck, fuck, I had to relax. “That asshole was in here talking to her, telling her that he’d taken enough for them to open a competing parlor, that no one would ever know, and as soon as he’d made the transfer, he’d break it off with me.”

“Who?” Cain asked.

“Kelly Hayes,” I replied. I rushed on to the next part. “I confronted them, told Steven that it was over, told Kelly that I’d fucking destroy her if she set foot in my father’s shop again. We got Steven arrested. Kelly went on to rope some other sucker into giving her enough money to open her own parlor in competition with Dad’s. Yeah, and that was it. The man I’d loved with everything stole from me, cheated on me, tried to help the woman I’d thought was my friend open a business in competition with ours.” I shrugged. Strangely, it didn’t hurt as much as it had before.

It wasn’t so much losing the love, it was that my eyes had been forced open by Steven and his lies. The truth had become plain: trust no one, work hard.

“Jesus Christ,” Cain said. “I’ll fucking kill him.”

“No,” I replied, and took his head in both hands. “He’s not worth the time. It’s two years in the past, and I’ve been through worse since then. Losing Dad erased all the other pain and replaced it.”

“I don’t want you to be in pain,” he grunted, and rested those massive palms on my hips. “I don’t want anything for you but happiness, Margot.”

“Why?” I asked. The memories had lifted, and Cain had replaced them, sitting there on the edge of my desk, larger than life. Larger than my past.

Stillness filled my office, bounced off the red-painted walls, the pictures of tattoos in their wooden frames, the executive chair, and the plant in the corner.

“I can’t tell you,” he said, at last. “I’ll show you.”