Right now, they’re wishing for another kiss, and I desperately want to grant that.
But the wedge of guilt pushes against my skin. Guilt reminds me, too, that I need to laser in on the Valentina estate, not on my ex, not on his eyes, not on his lips. Kissing him again would be a mistake. A beautiful and dreadful mistake. He’s the ultimate distraction, and I need to stay the course.
So I return to the discovery we made in the mirror. “About the letter. I was thinking—”
“What about you, Presley?”
“What about me?” I’m not sure what he’s getting at. We’re talking about the letter, aren’t we?
“Do you regret men . . . or jobs?” There’s a stripped-bare quality to Hunter’s voice, like he’s opening himself up, especially since he’s leaning on the “men” side of the question. He’s not asking about the letter at all.
I’m not ready to excavate my heart for someone who broke it. “I’ve had jobs that didn’t pan out, and I suppose I do regret that. And since I’m not with anyone, I suppose it could seem like I regret some relationships. But I think you can learn from everyone. So I choose to have no regrets.”
My answer is clinical, matter-of-fact. There’s not a shred of vulnerability in it, so my heart remains safe in its steel cage.
Wait. Make that titanium. I need extra strength with this man.
“Did you ever marry?” he asks, pressing on like the decade that’s passed between us is the eighth summit he intends to crest.
“You don’t mince words.”
“Just trying to get to know you again,” he says, his eyes not wavering from mine.
My heart throws itself against the titanium walls, desperate to break free.
I try to center myself so I don’t backslide into the temptation of him.
Picture the bull’s-eye.
Pull back the arrow.
Don’t allow distraction.
He’s simply behaving like a friend, like he said he wanted to do. “Almost, but no. I was engaged, but it turned out my fiancé enjoyed the company of not just me, but hookers too. So suffice it to say, we didn’t make it down the aisle.” Before he can respond or peel off another question, I grab the mic, tossing the topic back at him. We should be decoding a letter, but apparently we’re dissecting our romantic pasts. Maybe this must be done first. “And what about you? Were you ever married? Engaged?”
A voice in my head is praying fervently. Please say no, please say no.
He shakes his head. “Neither. I haven’t met anyone I wanted to commit to.”
“But you’ve dated lots of models and actresses.”
Tilting his head, he drums his fingers against the table. “Ah, the plot thickens. You won’t watch my show, but you’ve tracked my romantic entanglements.”
“That’s the part you glom onto? That I haven’t watched your show?”
“And you glom onto the fact that I’ve dated some actresses?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it’s true.” He shrugs, leans back, smiles. “But it was never serious. So who cares? In the last ten years, there’s been no one who’s registered as more than a blip.” He spreads his arms across the back of the booth effortlessly, a man in repose. His eyes roam my face shamelessly before he finishes in a low, deliberate tone, “And before you ask, you were so much more than a blip.”
I shouldn’t care that I was more than a blip to him. But I do care. I care too much. “I wasn’t going to ask that.” The words spill out in a mad dash, as if the speed of my delivery can cover up the lie. Because I love what he just said.
He frowns. “You weren’t going to ask, and you don’t even watch my show. That breaks my heart.”
“You’re one to talk about heartbreak,” I fire back. “We had that magical Valentine’s Day trip and then you took off a few days later.”
He stretches a hand across the table and grabs mine, holding it tightly. “It broke my heart too.”
His voice. Those words. They weave through me, slinking past reason, sliding around logic.
So I do the illogical thing. I open up. “Watching you in any form hurt far too much,” I say, and the confession rubs my throat raw, but it also loosens something inside me. Some of the hurt I’ve harbored.
“You didn’t want to be reminded of us?” He’s so gentle, his voice so tender, and it surprises me. He wasn’t callous before per se. He was simply . . . younger. Perhaps less sensitive. This older, more mature Hunter seems to possess a sensitivity, a thoughtfulness that the younger one didn’t have. “That’s how I felt for a long time too,” he continues. “I didn’t want to be reminded of you. I didn’t have many reminders when I was far away, but the thing is . . . I couldn’t escape you, Presley. You were here,” he says, tapping his temple. “Do you remember the note I wrote you? The one about how I’d think of you when I woke up?”
If he only knew how much I remember it. I know every word by heart. “Maybe. It sounds vaguely familiar,” I fib.
“I thought of you constantly. Leaving you was hard. Forgetting you was harder.”
I bite the inside of my lip so I don’t speak, so I don’t say, What’s hardest is sitting still when I want to throw myself into your arms.
“But look at all the benefits,” I say with as much cheer as I can muster. “Your dreams came true.”
His expression saddens. “Not all of them.” He squeezes my hand, and I’m not going to be able to maintain an ounce of resolve if he keeps touching me.
Deliberately, I draw back my hand, reaching for my phone and clicking on the picture I took earlier. “Should we tell Corinne and Joseph about what we found? This letter isn’t for us, and that keeps gnawing at me.”
“Right, but they hired you to catalog the house, and this was in the house. They didn’t ask you to give them a play-by-play on every item, did they?”
“No, just a report at the end. But Edward and Greta wrote the letter for their children, and Corinne and Joseph are their grandchildren. It’s probably been there for ages. You saw how much dust covered the box. How would you feel if someone else found a note for you from your father?”
His jaw ticks with seeming irritation. “I wouldn’t like that. But then again, my dad gave a letter directly to me. He didn’t hide it away in some sort of scavenger hunt.”
I notice the shift in Hunter, but press on, brandishing the image of the letter on the phone screen. “But what if the Valentina family has been looking for this? Is it right for us to keep it from them?”
“If they were looking, they didn’t look that hard. It took us less than one day to find it.”
“Does that mean we should play the scavenger hunt game?”
“Consider this. What if the letter leads to nothing? Wouldn’t it be better if we found that out before they do? What if ‘research before the search’ leads us to zip?”
He has a point, and I nod. “So we don’t get their hopes up, you’re saying?”
“Exactly. What if it’s a dead end? We should see where it leads first, because it might lead to nothing. A letter from beyond is a powerful thing. I should know.”
“Do you still carry it with you? The letter from your dad?”
He’s quiet for a moment, his brow furrowed like he’s deep in thought. “I do. Do you want to know what it says?”
I flinch in surprise. I wasn’t expecting him to say that. He always kept the letter closely guarded. “You don’t have to. I know it was private.”
“It was,” he says, scrubbing a hand across his jaw as the waitress streaks by with an order for another table. “At the time, I wanted to keep it for myself because it felt entirely personal. As if it were the only way I could connect with him after he was gone.”
“And now?”
“Now, enough time has passed. But more than that, I’ve done what he wanted me to do.”
“Is that what the letter was? His rules for living or something?”
“I believe so. He gave it to me a
few months before he died.” He smiles, but it brims with sadness. “That’s the other reason I kept it. It felt intentional. Not like he planned to die on a jump, but intentional in the sense that he definitely meant to pass on these life lessons to me. Does that make sense?”
“It makes perfect sense.” Something else does now too. Hunter wrote notes to me when we were together, slipping them in my purse or whatever book I was reading. It’s as if he was trying to give me pieces of himself for when he was gone. He was always going to go. I knew that then. I know it now.
But I didn’t want to accept it. Back then, I was so caught up in us that I couldn’t be objective or rational about those final days. Now, with the vantage point of time, I can see he was doing what his father did for him—leaving words for those he might leave behind.
“He was giving you his wisdom,” I add.
“Exactly. But then, he was always like that. Always passing on little lessons, writing down life advice. He’d done so much, been to so many places, and he wanted to share his experiences. And honestly, his last letter to me was one of the biggest motivations in my work.”
I swallow a lump in my throat. “What did he tell you to do?”
He reaches into his back pocket, takes out his wallet, and fishes around. “Since we’re on a letter kick,” he says with a smile, but it’s the kind of smile that covers up something hard. He unfolds the note, spreads it open, and turns it around. The writing is blocky and slanted.
He slides it in front of me, and it feels a little like he’s baring a part of his soul.
What’s more terrifying is how much I want to see it.
To see him.
16
Presley
Quietly, I read the words from his father.
* * *
Dear Hunter,
* * *
When I graduated from an all boys’ school, they asked us to write down our hopes and dreams for our children. I was eighteen then, and barely more than a child myself. Yet I already knew what I wanted for the family I’d have. Maybe because I was young. Maybe because I was idealistic. Even so, what I most wanted hasn’t changed when it comes to you.
* * *
What I want is for you to live big. To live your best life. To take every great chance that comes your way.
* * *
You might wonder why I want that. Why am I telling you this?
* * *
Because I see a piece of myself in you. You have the same fire. The same intensity. You’re so much like me. Perhaps that’s why the dreams I had then align with you today. They are still the dreams I have for the man you’ve become.
* * *
Remember this—there are some chances that only pass your way once, and you have to grab them. You have to seize them, clutch them, and hold them tenaciously with all your might.
* * *
That’s what we’re put here to do. To take those tremendous leaps into the wild unknown.
* * *
I love you, and I hope you take all the chances that matter.
* * *
Love,
Dad
* * *
Tears swim in my throat. Looking up from the paper, I’m not sure I can speak. I meet his gaze. His eyes are a little glossy too, a little distant. “Do you still miss him?” I ask quietly.
His head tilts back and forth. “Yes and no. It’s been so long. You learn to live with the missing so that it doesn’t really feel like missing anymore. It becomes part of what’s normal for you. But there are other times when I wish I could talk to him. Pretty recently, I’ve desperately wished I could sit across the table from him and ask him to sort out the mess in my head.”
“What happened? What was the mess?”
He shrugs it off. “Just something related to a jump.”
“The one where your chute didn’t open till the end?”
He cocks his head. “You know about that?”
“Truly mentioned it. She saw it on the news. I’ll confess my heart raced a little faster when I heard.”
His lips twitch in a grin. “Yeah?”
I laugh. “That makes you happy?” I swat his shoulder from across the table. “That your near-death experience affected me? Well, it did. So there.”
His cocky grin returns in full force. “You’re glad I’m alive. Admit it.”
I huff like it’s no big deal. “Sure, fine. I’ll admit it. You’re useful—you know, to help me shift any heavy objects I encounter as we go through the estate.”
“One should always be prepared for heavy objects.”
“That’ll be the name of your memoir.”
“I’m starting it tonight.”
“Tell me what happened with the jump though. How bad was it? Were you seriously injured?”
“My knee wailed like a banshee for the first couple days. But the docs examined me and said it was fine, and I guess I’m a lucky bastard. It hurt a few times in pickup games, but it hasn’t hurt one bit since then.” He raps his knuckles on the table. “Knock on wood.”
“You are a lucky bastard. Maybe that should be the name of your memoir.” I circle my finger, signaling a return to where we left off. “What did you do when you couldn’t talk to your dad?”
“I talked to Vikas Winters.”
“Is he like a surrogate father?”
He laughs, shaking his head. “No one could replace my dad. But I have to admit, I have turned to Vik from time to time. Once, when I ran into some trouble with my show and had to decide whether I wanted to renew it, I reached out to him. He was helpful and gave some good advice. I asked him about another matter recently too, not the jump, something else. He was a little harder to decipher on that one. So I kept turning to this letter from my dad, looking for answers between the lines.”
That brings us back to the start of the conversation. “Does that make you want to follow up on Edward and Greta’s letter more, or hand it over to the family? Since you’ve received one yourself?”
“Actually, both. I know what it’s like, so I want to make sure it matters before we tell them. If we turn it over, I don’t want it to be a letter from the grave that rips them apart, you know?”
I hadn’t thought of that, but he makes another valid argument, assuaging the doubts I’ve had since finding the letter. “True. I have to agree with you there. But if we follow this where it leads, we have to agree on something. We have to be careful which parts of the process we film, and when we shoot, and that we won’t share the footage if what we find is going to hurt the family. Deal?”
He extends a hand to shake. “Deal. I don’t want to hurt anyone either. Let’s see where this takes us. Speaking of, where do you think that will be, Miss Smarty Pants? ‘Five-mile stone’? That’s the key, right? The clue centers on some sort of milestone.”
I smile, a little cocky, a little coy. “Yes, and no. It’s a milestone, but it’s also a mile . . . stone.” I give the words the space between them they deserve.
“What does that mean?” He waggles his fingers. “Give me a hint.”
I’m about to tip him off when the waitress arrives with our food, at the precise moment Hunter’s belly growls loudly.
I can’t help but laugh as we thank the waitress. “You’re such an eater. You always loved your food.”
He pats his flat belly. “I’m a bear. I have to store it up for my next expedition.”
“Where is your next one?”
“One of my favorite places. I’ll be heading into the Utah desert and rappelling down some cliffs.” He says it as casually as someone else would say, I’m making a new PowerPoint presentation on best practices. Then he returns to the issue of the clue and the hint I gave him. “Mile . . . stone. That’s your hint?”
I dig into the salad, smiling delightedly, savoring the taste. “It’s like with the monkey’s shoe,” I prompt. “You put the shoe into the box. You used the monkey in a different way. So put the details in the letter together in a different way. What
if milestone meant something else?” I say the words again with the significant pause in place. “Five-mile . . . stone.”
His brow furrows as he seems to move through the options. “Mile marker?”
My smile is immediate. “Stones were used as mile markers back in Old New York. The place we’re looking for must be near the five-mile marker.”
“And what part of New York is that?”
“Lenox Hill. Named for the hill that stood at what became Seventieth and Park, which was located at right about the five-mile stone of Old New York.”
“And if there’s a home there in Lenox Hill . . . and you go up the stairs. That’s where you find something near and dear to . . .” He chuckles loudly, the kind of satisfied sound that means he figured out exactly where the letter points. Then, asking if he’s right, he whispers, “That’s where the clue leads us?”
Smiling, I tap his nose. “Bingo. It’s in Lenox Hill.”
“Is it open now?”
“No. And you have to make an appointment. I think that’s what the ‘research before you search’ means. I’ll call first thing in the morning. Actually,” I say, grabbing my phone, “let me shoot over an email tonight.”
He’s adamant when he says, “We’re going there before we go to the house again.”
“Obviously.” I laugh, rolling my eyes as I find a contact for the place we’d like to go then fire off a quick email, listing my credentials. I show him the note.
“If it were me, I’d let you in right now. But first,” he says, pointing to his burger, “this is a solid B-plus.”
P.S. It’s Always Been You: A Second Chance Romance Page 11
