by Ally Blake
“Except for the black eye.”
“Hmm?”
“I remember now. You had a black eye. That day. It was so unlike you it was why I’d found the courage to go up to you in the first place. I was a sucker for a lost cause.”
He tried again to imagine her. A girl with a heart big enough to put aside the horrors she was dealing with to check on him. While his friends—too distracted by all the end-of-high-school excitement—hadn’t noticed a thing.
“I slept in the local park after the bottle incident,” he said, his voice sounding far away to his own ears. “The noises you hear outside your window as a kid are nothing compared to being up close and personal.”
Harper said nothing. She simply turned in his arms until she leaned flush against him. One hand sliding over his shoulder, the other gathering his hand and holding it to her chest.
“The next day Gray took one look at me and dragged me back to his folks’ place. They offered me a room in the house, but I couldn’t take it. I’d been trapped for so long, I feared I’d wake in the middle of the night and smash a window to get out. So they gave me the pool house—a room of windows and light—for as long as I wanted it.”
“The pool house,” she murmured. “It always sounded so decadent.”
Her voice reverberated through his chest.
“It was the Chadwicks’ pool house. Of course it was decadent.”
Her eyes lifted to his. Maybe it was the moonlight playing tricks, but there was no wall up now. Only so much tenderness his breath stuck in his throat.
Her voice was husky as she said, “No wonder you’re so enamoured of them.”
“The Chadwicks are the reason I’m here today. All three of them. They are the reason I came back here, to the edge of the world. Without them...who knows what might have become of me?”
Harper’s dark eyes flickered between his. “For so long I’ve dreamed of telling you off for how you treated me. Mostly because you left before I had the chance.”
Her voice cracked on the words “you left”. And no wonder. Her mother had left. Her father had left. How many times could that happen to a person and they still forged on? Only she’d more than forged on, she’d flourished. She’d shown them all.
“And now?” he asked.
“I’ve always believed my life took a turn that day. A turn on a misunderstanding, as it turns out. Does that make my entire life a sham?”
He reached up and unhooked a strand of golden hair from her eyelashes. “It makes you human.”
“Who knew?” Harper said, her voice husky, her eyes darkening. There was a softness about her he’d not seen before. A yielding.
And Cormac knew in that moment that he was in deep, deep trouble.
He’d told Gray nothing would happen between him and Harper because he’d believed it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Now he knew nothing could happen between them because he might never get over it.
For Cormac was a man who held on to those who’d marked him in some way, taking on the cuts and bruises along with the laughter and light. For they had all helped forge the man he’d become.
He knew if he let Harper in, she’d carve him to pieces. And when she left she’d take whatever pieces of him she wanted.
“Thank-you for telling me,” he said, his voice rough.
She nodded.
“It’s late. We should get word to Lola and Gray, let them know we’re okay. Then I should get you home.”
At mention of Lola, he felt the shift. All but saw the wall slide back down between them.
“Right,” she said, gently pressing away. “Let’s do that.”
Once completely free of him, she ran a hand over her dress, fixed her hair, until everything was perfectly in place once more. Then strode around the car and hopped inside.
His phone buzzed. A quick check of the message had him frowning. “Dammit.”
“What’s wrong?”
He leapt into the driver’s seat without opening the door, and had the engine ticking over in a second. He looked over his shoulder as he made a quick turn and took off back down the dirt path.
“Mind if we make a quick stop? The alarm has gone off at my place.”
“Your place?”
“My house. My home.”
“So you really did move out of the pool house, then? I thought you were kidding.”
The snark was back. Though it was half-hearted. As if she couldn’t quite tap into it any more. As if things had shifted too far towards something intimate. Something real.
Cormac carefully navigated the rutted path as they made their way back towards the coastal road. And felt a sense of inevitability fall over him at the thought of taking her home.
CHAPTER NINE
HARPER FELT AS if her life had been shaken like a snow globe. As the flakes settled, everything looked different.
Her father had always been fickle. When he fell short it was a disappointment, but not a shock.
Cormac had been her constant. A shining light in her topsy-turvy world. So much so she’d built him into something unrealistic. A person without fault. Without pain. Without troubles of his own.
And the first time he’d faltered she’d cracked.
Only Cormac hadn’t faltered; he’d been trying to protect her even as he’d lived inside his own pain.
What if she’d known? What if she’d taken another step towards him, rather than walking away? Might something have been forged from that moment, rather than being broken?
So deep inside her own head was she, Harper paid no attention to where Cormac was taking her until the car rumbled to a stop.
“Back in a sec,” he said as he hopped out of the car to meet a security guard before the men headed inside.
Harper slid numbly out of the car, gaze dancing over a gorgeous big liquid amber tree—tyre swing and all—in the pristine front yard. Front porch. Gabled roof. Big, neat suburban home.
Harper was halfway up the path when the security guy came back out. He smiled, tipped his hat and jogged back to his little white hatchback, but not before slowing to have a quick look over Cormac’s far cooler wheels.
“Hello?” Harper called as she stepped through the open front door.
“Back here.”
Harper followed Cormac’s disembodied voice up a wide hall boasting pale wood floors, and warm, creamy walls. She spied couches and rugs in living spaces, a tidy open-plan office. Fireplaces everywhere. And in a media room a wall of movie posters—art deco takes on Vertigo, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder.
The house was both elegant and comfortable. But what stood out most of all was the sheer scope for just one man.
It was not a house for a bachelor. It was a house for a family.
Still unbalanced from earlier, and now even more so at having to place this piece into the Cormac puzzle, Harper found the man in question turning lights on in a large chef’s kitchen.
“No burglar?” she asked.
He glanced up, his expression unreadable as he watched her walk towards him. “Just a dog who can open fridge doors.” Then he held up a carton of orange juice, the drink dripping from a hole in the corner.
Harper saw movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to find Novak lying on a big, soft doggy bed, looking guilty.
“Who’s a clever girl?” Harper said on a laugh.
Taking it as an invitation, Novak slunk up to her, leaned gently against her leg and looked up at her for a pat. As Harper looked down into the dog’s liquid eyes, she felt herself fall in love, just a little bit.
When she looked up to find Cormac standing still as a statue, watching her, brow furrowed, eyes dark and consuming, she didn’t steel her heart against the sight of him nearly quickly enough.
“So this little piece of suburbia is really yours?” she
asked.
“I bought it for my mum, actually.”
“She lives here with you?”
“No,” he said with a wry smile. “She’s only been here once. The day I planned to surprise her with the place. Before I had the chance, she told me she was getting remarried. To a guy I’d never even met. She was standing about where you are, right now.”
Harper took a step sideways. “Yet you kept it.”
“I’d bought it for her.” The words were simple, the sentiment anything but.
Cormac Wharton was no cardboard cut-out to drool over. He was far deeper than she’d given him credit for. He was a man who put great stead in his place in the world. His purpose. His tribe.
His family.
No wonder he’d found the Chadwicks so compelling—with their big smiles and warm hugs.
After the craziness of their childhood, no wonder Lola had too.
“Did you tell her?” Harper asked, very much needing a distraction. “Did you end up telling your mum what you’d done?”
Cormac shook his head. “Didn’t seem right to burden her. Not when the point had been to gift her her freedom. I wonder though if she’d have taken it anyway. If one of the reasons she’s been away so long is that she looks at me and sees him.”
Him. His father.
Harper’s father had been imperfect. But he’d tried to make their lives fun and bright and joyful. Tried to love them enough that the rest didn’t matter.
While, from what Harper could glean, Cormac’s father had hit his mother until Cormac was big enough to take the brunt. And he’d taken it, refusing to leave until he could convince his mother to do the same.
Yet under the kitchen down lights Cormac couldn’t hide the shadows in his eyes. The regret, the hurt, the sliver of uncertainty that maybe his mother was right.
“You want to know why I had such a crush on you in high school?” The words spilled out of her before she even felt them forming. “It wasn’t because you were cute, though you were that. It wasn’t because you were popular, though I never heard anyone say a bad word about you. It was because you were kind. To everyone from the groundskeeper to the principal.”
Always quick with a joke, with a smile and a way to lighten the mood, Cormac didn’t budge. So Harper did, taking a step his way.
“At my house we’d have chocolate cake for dinner one night, nothing at all the next. The place could have been filled with balloons and streamers and glitter all over the floor when Dad was in a good mood, or deathly quiet if he was having one of his ‘dark days’. Never knowing what I’d come home to, high school for me was a torrent of quiet tension. Except when I saw you.”
A muscle ticked at the edge of his jaw. And Harper kept walking towards the kitchen.
“You have a way of making people feel calm, Cormac. Feel safe. Feel as if it’s all going to be okay. There is no possible way your mother looks at you and sees anyone but you.”
She turned the corner of the bench on her last word, only to stop at the sight of the devastation on the kitchen floor. “Wow, that dog of yours doesn’t do things by halves.”
Cormac blinked at her. Then laughed. Then ran a hand over his face. Then let out a little growl. Sexiest five seconds of Harper’s entire life.
He watched her then, across the kitchen, for a heartbeat. And another. Before he breathed out hard. And asked, “Are you thirsty? Hungry?”
Harper was both. At least, she told herself that was the gnawing feeling in her belly. That big, empty hole that hadn’t been there a week ago.
“I could eat.”
“Then go,” he said, angling his chin towards the front room. “Sit. Put on a movie. I’ll finish cleaning then I’ll whip something up.” He didn’t reiterate his plans to drop her home after.
Then again, neither did she.
“You cook? More than your famous ham sandwiches you once tried to tempt me with?”
“I reheat,” he said, poking a thumb at his freezer. “I’m pretty damn good at it too.”
With a smile and a nod she turned on her heel and moseyed back to the front room, where she turned on the TV and scrolled through his movie library till she found the one she was looking for.
She kicked off her shoes and tucked herself up on the couch, smiling as Cary Grant and Grace Kelly’s names appeared on the screen.
* * *
Cormac picked up the opening strains of To Catch a Thief within the first couple of bars. He smiled. The woman had taste.
His subconscious spoke up. Clearly. She had a crush on you, after all.
His foot moved and slipped slightly in a blob of cream. Crush magnet or not, he still had to clean his own damn kitchen.
His kitchen; not his mother’s. It was time he got used to that fact.
To the fact his mother had done exactly what he’d always hoped she could. To stand up for what she wanted. To turn her back on the past. To find a way to be happy.
He’d just never imagined it would mean turning her back on him.
A woman screamed in the front room—a woman in the movie, not Harper.
Harper. She’d been left by her mother, and her father. Both before she was even an adult herself. And, rather than giving in, she had chosen to fight for the right to forge a life for herself. A highly successful life, by the sound of it. All the while making sure Lola had the chance to do the same.
When had Cormac last fought for anything? Fair pay, yes. Workers’ rights, sure. But something real to him? Something personal?
He’d spent years priding himself on his contentment. But contentment was easy. It didn’t ask too much of a person. While Harper... Harper expected more.
Harper was real. As real a person as he’d ever known. And once upon a time she’d thought the same about him.
How does she see you now? How does she feel about you now? What does it matter? She’ll be gone in a few days, and you’ll be here. Always here...
His subconscious sure was chatty tonight.
Cormac motioned to Novak, who hustled over, panting happily, ears flicking up and down, between guilty and delighted. He reached out and gave her ear a quick rub. She blinked, one eye at a time.
“Have at it,” Cormac said.
Novak did as instructed, delicately lapping up the edible bits while Cormac cleaned up the rest. Then he let her out into the big back yard to do her nightly security check.
The soundtrack of the movie grew louder as he neared the front room. And there he found Harper, curled up on his couch, fast asleep.
Her cheek rested against the back of the couch, her hair tumbled over one cheek, her bare feet curled around one another.
He laughed under his breath at the way she white-knuckled the cushion cuddled to her chest. Tightly wound, even in sleep. As if the world might scatter into a zillion tiny little particles if she wasn’t there to hold it all together.
He found the remote and tuned the sound to low, then he slowly sat on the empty end of the couch nearest her head, draping his arm along the back of the couch.
The movement unsettling her, she woke. Eyes flickering open. Whole body stretching. Elegant, graceful, and beguiling.
When her eyes snagged on his they stuck. For a second or two, she was completely open, her eyes drinking him in, her face softening into a smile so true it made his heart twist.
“Hi,” she said, her voice husky and light.
“Hi.”
“What happened?”
“You fell asleep.”
“I did?”
“Mmm-hmm. I’d chastise you for daring to do so during one of the best movies ever made but I have the feeling you needed the rest.”
She shifted, pulling herself upright until her face was level with his. “How long was I out?”
“Not long.”
“I was dreaming.”
/>
“About?”
Her gaze roved over his face before landing back on his eyes. “I’d rather not say.”
She didn’t have to. It was written all over her face.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, looking around the room. “I know why you stayed, but what brought you back in the first place? Was it a girl?”
“No, Harper. I didn’t come back for a girl.”
“So, you’re not living here, alone in this big family house, because you’re pining for the one that got away?”
“And who do you imagine that might be?” he asked, voice soft, low.
Her lips snapped together, as if only just realising how much she was revealing. “I’m just trying to build a profile here.”
“A profile?”
“I meant picture.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Fine. It’s what I do. I research everyone in the room so I know what I’m up against.”
“And you’re planning to go up against me?”
The double entendre was not subtle. The waggling eyebrows made it even less so.
Harper managed a deadpan stare. “Do you wish things had worked out differently with Tara?”
“Did I not mention the four sons under five?”
He saw the smile hit her eyes first before it tugged at one corner of her lush mouth. Cormac’s gaze dropped to the tug. Stayed as Harper said, “Even so.”
He tugged on a curl, as if using it to lever himself forward. Her nostrils flared, but she didn’t back away.
“Harper, are you asking if I still have feelings for my high-school girlfriend?”
“I’m merely making conversation.”
“I’d not have pegged you for a fan of small talk.”
“Needs must.”
A slow smile spread across his face. “Interesting saying, that one. Needs must. Why is that that you need to know if I’m seeing anyone? Why must you know if there’s anyone I’m longing for? Only one reason I can think of.”
She licked her lips before asking, “And what’s that?”
“Because that crush of yours is still well and truly alive.”
She breathed out hard, her molten gaze dropping to his mouth.
