The Giving Heart

by Toni Blake

  “Then I’m just smarter than them. Or I can see something in you they can’t.”

  “Oh?” she challenged. Both of them still held their plates and forks, but the half-eaten pumpkin pie lay all but forgotten.

  “That anger I once asked you about,” he said. “You’re so sure I came here running from something—but Lila, honey, I think maybe that was the proverbial pot calling the kettle black.”

  Lila just looked at him. He’d used the endearment tenderly—with compassion. Why could he see it, her anger? She’d truly thought she hid it well. Or at least masked it behind an entirely different kind of anger—about the land and the inn. Given that, Beck should be the last person able to see that something else haunted her.

  She hadn’t told anyone. No one at all.

  Well, except Whitney. Who hadn’t believed her, and had then even blamed her.

  Maybe that was part of what had kept her quiet about it all at Thanksgiving, too. What if her parents didn’t believe her? What if Meg didn’t believe her? What if Meg thought it was her fault—thought she hadn’t done enough to stop it? What if Meg thought she still wasn’t doing enough to fix it?

  And so maybe...maybe she could tell him. If he pulled a Whitney and turned it back on her—well, that would be all she’d need to send him packing and conclude he was the same jerk she’d assumed in the beginning. And maybe that would even be a good thing in a weird, backward sort of way since it would end the guilt she felt being nice to him—guilt about Meg, and newer guilt about Suzanne, and an even newer guilt that had something to do with...selfishness, the selfish indulgence of being with him. Oh, what a tangled web she wove—and she hadn’t even been doing anything deceitful, or technically wrong.

  In fact, ever since she’d really started trying to do some good in the world, it had pretty much backfired in her face. When she’d tried to watch the inn and be a good sister to Meg, Beck and his stupid bulldozer had come along. Before that, when she’d tried to do a meaningful job that helped people, Simon Alexis had ruined that, and so much more.

  All right—here went nothing.

  “Do you know who Simon Alexis is?”

  Beck squinted, tilted his head slightly. “Mega-rich guy in Chicago? Does a lot of philanthropic stuff?”

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Well, until a few weeks ago, he was my boss. Then he lured me to his house, held me down, and tried to force himself on me. And after I got away—he fired me.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FROM WHERE LILA SAT, Beck’s eyes appeared to blaze with rage. “He what? Oh my God, honey—are you okay? Did you press charges? Where is he now? Behind bars, I hope—and if not, he might wish he was if I ever get hold of him.”

  His reaction almost overwhelmed her—a rush of emotion came whooshing over her like a gust of wintry northern Michigan wind. She wanted to answer all his questions—even though the answers were kind of awful. She wanted to hug him—for caring, and even if he couldn’t really beat Simon up for her, she kind of liked the sentiment. But mostly, she just wanted to express her profound gratitude.

  “Thank you, Beck—so, so much,” she said, setting her pie aside on the coffee table and spontaneously reaching for Miss Kitty, who was innocently padding past on the floor. She drew the docile cat up into her lap and hugged her close without quite knowing why.

  Beck looked bewildered. “For what?”

  “For believing me,” she said simply. And then, like a breath she’d been holding for a very long time, a bunch of words came flooding out of her. “The only person I told didn’t believe me. Because everyone thinks he’s so wonderful. I thought he was wonderful, too. Really wonderful. But he’s not. And no one wants to know that. No one wants to find out that a man who helps so many people in so many ways is just a great big Harvey Weinstein underneath it all. And that’s why she didn’t believe me.”

  “Who?”

  “Whitney. My best friend. She works for him, too. Got me the job, in fact. And I know she just couldn’t quite believe he could do something like that, but I couldn’t believe it, either. Part of me still can’t. Part of me still wants to find some way to explain it all away and turn him back into the man I thought he was.

  “But at the same time, she’s my best friend. And when I went to her after it happened, totally freaked out, she accused me of exaggerating the whole thing. Or it being my fault. She threw both of those at me. I couldn’t believe she’d do that to me. It was—and still is—awful.

  “So...to answer your question, no, I’m really not okay. And yes, I’m not even a nice enough person to have come here only to give Meg some time away. I came because I lost my job, and I lost my friend, and I lost my dignity. And no place is better for making you feel far away from the rest of the world than Summer Island.”

  In one sense, she felt sick. To go back there in her heart and mind—back to Simon’s house, back to the utter shock and revulsion of it all. But another part of her felt free—free in a way she didn’t even know existed until that moment. Because up until that night at Simon’s house, she’d never felt particularly trapped in life. But what happened there had trapped her, caged her, leaving her helpless and alone. She’d been pushing it away ever since her arrival here—but it had stayed the whole time, lurking just beneath her skin. And now she’d finally spilled the ugly truth and someone believed her.

  No, not just someone.

  Beck. Beck believed her.

  Now he simply looked at her, his eyes welling with an understanding she’d ached to feel for what seemed like an eternity despite it having been only a few weeks.

  “I’m just so relieved you believe me,” she whispered, still vaguely aware of holding the cat, running fingers through her calico fur, some nervous form of comfort seeking.

  “Of course I believe you,” he said softly. “There’d be no reason to lie about something like that. I’m just sorry your friend didn’t see it that way.”

  She glanced past him then, her eyes fixing blankly on frosted panes in the window, not really seeing them, instead seeing... Simon. Not conventionally handsome, but charismatic as hell. Not particularly suave, but just charming and boyish enough that she’d never seen it coming. Any of it.

  “On top of everything else, he’s married. With kids,” she added, her voice sounding tired and sad even to her own ears. “He was...everything I admired in a person. He used his money for good—so much good. The Alexis Foundation helps the homeless in Chicago, aids child advocacy, aids people recovering from natural disasters, helps get fresh water for people in Africa—and more. You name it, Simon supported it. And it was so fulfilling to be a part of that, to do work that actually put all the pieces in place to ensure needed money got into the right hands. It’s...maybe the best thing I ever did. It helped me feel somehow like I was making up for a misspent youth. And so...there are no words to adequately describe my shock and horror to discover that underneath the philanthropist hid a monster.”

  At the other end of the couch, Beck asked gently, “What exactly happened, Lila? I mean, if you want to talk about it. If you don’t, I understand.”

  She drew in her breath, her chest constricting. The details were...hard. She still wondered if she’d...made mistakes, done something wrong, been naive or careless. If she could have, should have, somehow done more to stop it. But the compassion in Beck’s warm gaze made her think—know—he’d assure her she did nothing wrong. Which, deep down, she understood. But there were so many shades of gray that it could be hard to see the black and white of it—and maybe she needed some help with that. Or maybe she simply needed to get it off her chest.

  “The week before Thanksgiving,” she began, “there was a company happy hour after work one night. And it was...so normal, you know? Nothing weird or unusual. Simon is a gregarious man, the kind who feels free to throw an arm around your shoulder when he’s
telling a story, or to wink at you when he says something witty. Harmless stuff—I thought. And...if I’m being totally honest, it had the ability to make you feel special.” Just having someone so revered and generous laugh at her jokes and pay attention to her was like having a dazzling light shining down on her—she’d felt a little awed just to be in Simon’s orbit. “He was such a force in the world, and I admired him so much.”

  She stopped, bit her lip, remembering that kind of innocence. Which was a nicer word than foolishness. She felt both—and a million other emotions—to her core.

  “Girls like me are...taught to just...be nice, get along, be people pleasers,” she tried to explain. She didn’t know if a guy, in a guy’s skin, who’d lived a guy’s life, could ever really, truly understand the slightly different lens through which most women viewed the world. “And we want to see the best in men, and anyone really—and so we expect other people to be thinking the same rational, normal way we are. So...even when Simon asked me to follow him to his house so he could give me some contracts he’d printed out in his home office because he wasn’t going to be at work the next day, I never dreamed...”

  She thought back, still shaken by the eye-opening experience. “Some people say women ask for it. That if they go someplace alone like that with a man—even a man they trust implicitly—that they’re asking for it, that they have to know what’s going on and what his intentions are. But I didn’t—I swear I didn’t.” He’d been her boss, her mentor. A guy she’d thought was making the world a better place. “And I assumed his wife and teenage sons were at home.

  “Except when I got there, they weren’t. When I asked about them, Simon told me they’d left early on the family Thanksgiving trip. And even then, I suspected nothing.” She shook her head, feeling foolish again—and a little breathless, her heart beating too hard against her rib cage. She’d been caught up in the lavishness of the house—a palatial estate she’d driven past before but never been invited to. She’d been taking it in, trying to wrap her head around the lush surroundings, marveling that the man she worked with every day really lived this way. Her head had been in such a different place than Simon’s.

  “The next thing I knew,” she told Beck, her voice coming out strained as her body suffered the memory, “he was starting to kiss me, with no warning. It was...so completely jarring I could barely process what was happening. Like—was it just some fond, friendly, I’ll-see-you-after-the-holiday kiss? That sounds crazy, I know. But when you’re in that situation, your head is spinning, trying to find some logical rationale that isn’t...awful. Some way to keep him the man you admire, not one who is...the total opposite.

  “But when it became totally clear to me that it was more than a friendly kiss, I pushed him away and said, ‘Simon, what are you doing?’ I couldn’t even look him in the eye for some reason—I remember dropping my glance to the floor. Even then, it was difficult to...to challenge him, question him. I didn’t want to have to call him on it—I didn’t want to be in that position at all. And maybe that’s hard to understand, but—this was my boss, and a very powerful man. I suddenly felt like David up against Goliath, like we’d always been David and Goliath but I’d just never realized it until that moment, and that powerful people hold all the cards and can crush you if they think you’ve challenged them. Or crossed them. Or denied them something.

  “Anyway, he said to me, ‘I’m kissing you.’ Like that was normal, like we were dating or something. And...even then, I still wanted to absolve him somehow and not accept the truth. I told myself maybe he’d just had too much to drink, or that he’d taken some kind of medicine that was having an adverse affect on him. Stupid, I know.”

  “Not stupid,” Beck said, voice low. “Nothing about you is stupid, Lila.”

  She pulled her gaze to his. To those warm, brown, consoling eyes. And she silently thanked him with her own. Then pressed her lips together tight, going back into that awful moment to try to finish the story.

  “I...” She stopped, shook her head. “I just so desperately wanted to make it all less terrible than it was, keep him on the pedestal I’d placed him on. Because...when you put someone on a pedestal that high and they fall off, it’s...it’s world altering. It changes the way you see...everything.”

  She swallowed back a lump of emotion and forced herself to continue. “I was so scared, and so caught off guard by it—I remember staring at the floor, at different things in the room, anything but his face because I suddenly found him so intimidating and I just couldn’t believe it was happening. I said something like, ‘Simon, this isn’t right.’ And what I wanted to do was call him a cheater and a bastard, but I felt like I was tottering in such a precarious position—still somehow hoping I could just wish it away and turn things back to normal.

  “But then he started acting as if I were the one not doing what I was supposed to. He said, ‘You know we’ve been fighting a mutual attraction since we first met. It’s been growing a long time and we both want this to happen.’ He said I wouldn’t have come to his house if I didn’t want it. He said, ‘Don’t worry—it’ll be our little secret.’

  “I remember saying, ‘No, Simon, no.’ Maybe not as forcefully as I wanted to. And maybe I wish I’d come up with more words to say, something more concrete.” She shook her head, remembering.

  And Beck said softly, “‘No’ is pretty concrete.”

  And wow—whoa. “Oh. You’re right. It is.” All this time, she’d felt as if she should have done more to regain control of the situation. She’d worried she’d been too quiet, too meek amid her shock and confusion. But she had said no. She’d said no. More than once.

  “He laughed,” she remembered darkly, “in a mean, nasty sort of way, and called me a tease and a flirt. He kept insisting on things that weren’t true, and said, ‘Quit being a tease, Lila,’ and then he pressed me down onto the couch, and pinned me there.”

  “When he kissed me that time, there was no more pedestal and no more confusion—I was trying to push him off me, and I couldn’t. His hands were on my arms and his mouth was on mine and he was stronger than me and I couldn’t budge him. And that—that—” She stopped, chest tight, struggling to breathe normally. “That was when I got really scared. Like panicky scared. And I guess it drew up some sort of strength I didn’t know I had, because I shoved him as hard as I could and finally managed to push him back. But...” She’d dropped her gaze again, this time to the forgotten pie plate still in Beck’s grip, because it would be hard to look anyone in the eye and say what came next.

  Being under Simon that way, her skirt yanked up, an unmistakable hardness jammed between her legs over her underwear, had been the single worst sensation of Lila’s thirty-five years. Even now, in this moment, she suffered the urge to curl up into a protective little ball and try to shut it out. But instead she went on.

  “So I did what had to be done. I dug my fingernails into his face and I scratched—hard.”

  “Good girl,” Beck murmured, appearing duly drawn into the intensity of it.

  “He drew back just enough for me to knee him in the groin. And that sent him to the floor, so I grabbed my purse and ran out of the house shaking like a leaf.”

  “Thank God.”

  She gave a little nod of agreement—then added the kicker. “Of course, I could barely drive, was a wreck the whole night, and I tried to call Whitney but got her voice mail. I seriously considered calling in sick the next day. But since I knew he was going out of town to join his family and wouldn’t be at the office, I pulled myself together and went—mainly thinking it would be the quickest, easiest way to talk to Whitney about it.

  “So imagine my surprise when I was met at the front door by the HR director who had all my personal belongings in a box and told me I’d been terminated, effective immediately.”

  Beck’s jaw dropped. “Oh. Hell.”

  She swallowed back painful memories: the
deflating injustice of it, along with the embarrassment of having her co-workers observe it all from a distance. “I asked why. She said insubordination. I said, ‘Did he mention the part where he attacked me?’ And she said, ‘I’m not supposed to discuss this with you, but according to Simon, it was the other way around.’

  “I just looked at her, looked her in the eye. And I could see she didn’t know where the truth lay, but that she didn’t know what to do about it any more than I did. Then she told me he was offering me a generous severance package so long as I signed a non-disclosure agreement. I read it, my heart beating like crazy in my ears the whole time, and I was so upset I could barely grasp the words. But I grasped enough to know that while it purported to be about business, it was written in such a way that he was clearly buying my silence on what had happened.

  “And... I’m ashamed to say I signed it.” Heat filled her cheeks. “Because I was put on the spot, caught completely off guard. And I felt helpless. And I have rent to pay. And I knew no one would believe me anyway. And Whitney proved that when I promptly ignored the non-disclosure and told her everything later that day.”

  Lila had met Whitney after work for a drink. “I launched into what happened just assuming, you know, that she’d commiserate with me, be outraged for me, be shocked and appalled with me. But instead...she asked me questions.” Lila could still hear her ex-best friend’s voice. Lila, are you sure you’re remembering it right? How much did you have to drink before going over there? Her heart hurt reliving that sobering moment when she’d understood Whitney wasn’t going to be there for her.

  “And then that turned into defending him.” That just doesn’t sound like Simon to me. He couldn’t have done that—that’s not who he is.

  “And then into accusing me. Of trying to harm him.” Why would you say such horrible things, Lila? I thought I knew you!

  I thought I knew you, too. Both women had ended up crying, and Whitney had actually gone stalking out of the downtown bar—leaving Lila to pay the bill while she was busy falling apart.