by Jill Cooper
Jax laughs with bitterness and sits on the edge of his desk. “Are you ever going to stop fixing all our problems?”
“If it’s Rex…if I’m right, he is my problem. Has been for a long time.”
His eyes sadden as he puts his hand on my shoulder. I feel his support and love stronger than ever. “I’ll have your back. Just be careful, Lara. Be careful.”
Chapter Eight
Donovan cooks us a gourmet meal. Lemon risotto and seared scallops with a side of wedge salad covered in crispy bacon and smooth blue cheese. He knows the way to my heart and this is it. We eat by the window and the view of the city takes my breath away. Everything shimmers in the moonlight glowing on the harbor, but my mind won’t rest.
It spins, out of control. I watch him take a bite, the way his hair falls over his forehead, just begging me to stroke it back, the crease line that deepens around his mouth while he chews his food with that trademark Donovan thoughtfulness. When he gazes up at me, he grabs his napkin and gives me a playful smile.
My heart aches. No…it’s as if my soul aches.
“Something on your mind, Lar?”
I shake my head but gaze out at the water. Where do I start? Do I tell him I suspect that tomorrow I’m having breakfast with Rex—my supposed dead uncle? Or do I start with Jax’s suspicions? If Jax is wrong, how do I explain why Jax is so suspicious of Donovan? We’re about to become family and once they had been friends. Once my step-dad had pushed me to date Donovan.
Now, suddenly everything is so different.
I stab at my salad. A river of blue cheese dressing runs down the wedge of iceberg lettuce as I slowly munch on it. I let the acidic flavor take over my senses. At least that’s something good I can focus on. Life had been going so great, but now I’m afraid I’m one train derailment away from my life ending up in the pits.
Donovan reaches across the table and takes my hand. “You can tell me whatever it is. Did something happen at the meeting today? Is that what you don’t want to talk about?”
I soak in his eyes and see everything I’ve always seen. Kindness, compassion, love. My walls come tumbling down and I trust him just as I always have. “They tried to appoint me to take Delilah’s place, temporarily.”
His eyes darken and he pulls his hand back. He straightens the collar of his shirt and the air between us cools. “You didn’t want that, did you?”
Did I? I know he didn’t.
Shaking my head, I lift my wine glass to my lips and take a slow, deliberate sip. “No, I didn’t, but I was willing to. Until Delilah’s lawyer showed up. She appointed someone to take her place. No one has heard of him, but now he’s our boss. I’m supposed to have breakfast with him tomorrow, so he can pick my brain.”
As if my mind hasn’t been picked enough.
“If Delilah trusted him, maybe that means you can trust him too.” Donovan smiles, but his eyes don’t crinkle. Is he holding something back? Or is he as uneasy about this as I am? It’s hard to guess someone’s motivations when you can’t jump backwards and forwards in time to double check everything all the time.
“Had you seen her recently?” I keep my voice level and rub my arms for warmth. I pick my fork back up and peer over at Donovan casually. Or at least I try to appear casual.
Don frowns and scrunches his eyebrows severely. “Just as much as you have.” He gathers up our plates and takes them into the kitchen.
When he leaves, my heart sinks. It's unlike him to leave a room in the middle of a conversation. That’s something the old Lara would have done.
Not Donovan.
I swallow some white wine before I follow him into the kitchen. The dishwasher is humming and Donovan fills the sink with soapy water. My heart is in my throat and the growing dread in my gut consumes me. “Does the name Cameron Kincaid mean anything to you?”
His hand that grips the sponge pauses. “No. Should it?”
I bite my lip and study his back as he hunches over the sink. For someone who supposedly has nothing to hide, he is sure acting as if he does. “Don’t give me a reason to doubt you, Don.”
He straightens up as he puts the plate in the drip-dry rack. “For some reason you think I know him, but I don’t. What has you so suspicious? You know me.”
Leaning forward, I turn the faucet off and as I stretch across him, I get a strong whiff of his aftershave. It slays me that—for whatever reason—Donovan would turn to deceit and lies. “Level with me.” My eyes fall into his and I see they are flecked with fear.
He doesn’t want to have this conversation, but he has no choice.
It has to come out. All of it. No matter what ‘it’ is.
“I’ve heard the name. I met him, sure. At an event, but it wasn’t a big conspiracy, Lar.” Donovan turns around and leans against the counter. He fidgets with the green tea towel in his hand, as if, somehow, it’s going to give him the strength to move on. “Six months ago, we met. He was friendly. Seemed nice.”
“And that’s it?” My heart lifts with hope, but my stomach claws with grief. He’s lying. I know it.
Donovan wipes his hands before he takes mine. “Look, you’ve been through a lot since last night. It’s no wonder your mind is spinning. If you’re looking for a smoking gun, a bad guy, you’re not going to find it in me.” He nuzzles my cheek and gives me a kiss.
I should trust him, but I can’t let it go. He’d seen Delilah last week; why not bring it up? Why not mention it?
“Didn’t you see Delilah last week? Didn’t you meet her outside of Rewind?” My stomach sinks just to have to ask those questions. I don’t want to rip us apart. I don’t.
But I need to know.
For an all-too-brief moment, Donovan’s eyes narrow. When they open back up and a relaxed smile spreads across his face. “Who told you that?”
My eyes moisten, but I don’t give into the rush of pain welling in my chest. “Why didn’t you just tell me? She died yesterday and you had seen her…was she okay? Did she call you?”
Donovan sighs and gazes away. “It wasn’t like that, okay?”
“Then what was it like?”
He blinks and I feel like he’s drifting further away. He’s pulling away from shore and I’m left standing on the beach, longing for the truth—for him. “I didn’t want you to find out, all right? Let’s just leave it at that.”
Donovan moves past me and I grab his hand. “You can’t just walk away. We can’t leave it like this. I thought we learned our lesson about secrets.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be a secret.” Donovan squeezes his eyes and sighs. The worry lines on his face increase tenfold. He’s struggling with something. Struggling. “Lara, I love you. I love you. So please…” His lips quiver, “Please. Let this go.”
He’s in so much pain, but I need to know. I do. I grab his face in my hands and I kiss him. Everything that’s building in me, in him, I want to let it all go, but I can’t. “Tell me.” My lips linger against his cheek and he holds me as closely as he ever has. My eyes flicker to his face. “Then tell me. I’ll forgive whatever it is.”
“After you hear what I have to say,” Donovan takes a shaky breath, “you won’t.”
And just like that, my life implodes one more time.
****
We move to the living room and Donovan rotates the cup of coffee in his hand. Behind us, the flickering embers in the fireplace dance. “My first investment went bad. Real bad. I lost everything.”
He’d made a fortune. I can’t believe what he’s saying. I open my mouth to speak, but Donovan holds up a hand to stop me. “Let me finish. If you interrupt, I might never get it out. I’ll chicken out and….” Donovan clears his throat, but he won’t look at me. The grief in his profile crumbles his handsome features.
“This woman came to me. She said she could fix it for me. Give me information on a trade that would make my money back. Plus two hundred percent. She even gave me the money I needed to make the deal. All I had to do was make an introduc
tion between Delilah and…Cameron Kincaid.”
Donovan takes a moment to sip his coffee, but I can’t process what he’d just said. He had taken money and a trade deal from a stranger? A stranger? Just like that, with no questions?
“I was eager. I didn’t want to come home and tell you I lost everything. You’d have had to drop out of school, we’d lose our small apartment. Everything. So, I went along with it. And when I made that first million, things were good. I made the introduction, and when she came along with more offers, I took them.”
He had made all his money based on inside information obtained from a time traveler. The deck of cards that is my life, crumbles. I can’t keep the anger or disappointment out of my voice. “How could you be so stupid?”
“Don’t, okay?” Don’s chest puffs up. “I know what I did was wrong. I didn’t know I was trading in time travel...not at first. But yeah, it’s the only thing that made sense and then…”
“And then it was too late. What you did was illegal, Don.” I shouldn’t judge him. What I’d done was illegal too. I’d rewound time and saved my mother’s life. Changing the timeline was what had set this all in motion, and that’s my fault.
But Donovan was supposed to be smarter than I am. He said he hated time travel, so how could he?
“And Cameron knows. He’ll never let me out from under his grip now. He owns me.”
“He owns us,” my anger won’t let him off the hook that easily, “because now I know, and I can’t watch you go to jail, Don.”
Donovan sighs and closes his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“You put me in a bad position. The both of us. Delilah. My family.”
“I didn’t know! You think if I knew…”
“But you didn’t ask. You didn’t care. All you wanted was the money.” I stand up and stride over to the mantel. My eyes focus on a framed photo. We’re standing at the Charles River with such love in our eyes.
Our engagement photo.
I rip my eyes away. Now I can’t even stand to see it. Donovan has been living with this secret for years. And he never told me. Never.
“I needed the money,” Donovan gazes up from the sofa, “For you. For me. For us. When my mother was arrested, I lost everything. I couldn’t go back to square one, Lara. You deserved better.”
“I deserved?” I poke my finger at him. “Don’t make this about me. I grew up poor. I don’t need this penthouse. I don’t need the cars or the fancy clothes.” If he thinks I needed all this, how can he even know me?
What I need is him. Him. And he put that all at risk, for what? A few good trade deals? I want to spit at him. Slam my fists against him. How dare he put our future at risk like this? How dare he?
“But you deserve it. I wanted to take care of you, Lara. I wanted to give you the world.” Donovan approaches me, but I back up. I can barely stand to look at him, and in this moment, I don’t want him to touch me.
“Did Delilah find out?” I gaze at the rug and focus on Donovan’s shadow as it draws closer. He’s only inches away, but it may as well be the breadth of the ocean.
“Yeah, she wanted to meet. I told her I’d make it right. I’d come clean with you and I’d set up a meeting with her and the woman who was time traveling. She was supposed to meet with her last night.”
Last night.
Everything in my brain clicks. “So, this woman, this person who gave you all these sweet deals, she killed Delilah? You think she killed her? And you set it up?”
“I didn’t say that.” Donovan’s jaw is tense. Maybe he doesn’t say it, but he doesn’t not say it either. Delilah is dead and my future husband had set it all in motion whether he’d meant to or not.
My hands ball into fists. I’m so angry I see red, but beneath the seething rage, I know Donovan has a good heart. He wouldn’t have wanted harm to come to Delilah or anyone else, but still, that knowledge is overshadowed by the crashing wave of a storm coming right for us.
“Who is she?” My nostrils flair and my temper demands a response.
“I didn’t get her name.”
All of that and Donovan didn’t even think to get her name? I have never known him to be so impetuous. So stupid. This isn’t who Donovan James is. Recklessness is my thing, not his, and now it’s as if I’m staring into the face of a stranger.
Except it’s a stranger who I love.
“You should’ve known better. You should’ve found out.” Above all else, he should’ve told me.
Donovan licks his lips. “Maybe I didn’t want to know.”
Bingo.
I storm out of the room. Not because I want to, but because I need to. I don’t want to say something I’ll regret, and the words are there. Biting my tongue, I enter our bedroom and find my old tattered duffle bag in the walk-in closet. It’s stored on a high shelf where it has been since we moved into this giant loft of a place, six months or so ago.
A palace built on lies and time travel. The very things I sought to avoid.
Time travel, in any form, was the one thing Don had said he wanted to avoid.
I grabbed a few pairs of jeans and some old shirts. I don’t even want to look at the clothes Don’s showered me with. Right now, I just want my old tattered jean jacket and nothing more. It had gotten me through the worst and will sustain me now.
“Don’t tear us apart,” Donovan’s words echo in the room as he leans against the doorframe, “Everything we have…please…just don’t.”
“You think I want to?” The pain leaks out all around me. I ball up a t-shirt and throw it into my bag.
“The way you’re looking at me, I don’t know what you want.” Donovan bites his lips. His wounded puppy-dog eyes pull at me and beg me to stay, but I need to think. I can’t think here.
I can’t. Not with so many reminders of how we had gotten this money. The lush carpets, the soft sheets. The wedding of the year is coming up in week at a venue that required being on a three-year waiting list? He’d gotten all of it based on lies.
How will I do that? How? I want to marry him, but I don’t want this.
I sling the bag over my shoulder. My chin trembles in anger. “I’ll call you.”
When I stride past, Donovan grabs my arm. “What are you going to do? Are you going to…fix things?”
“If I could’ve traveled in time to save Delilah, I would’ve done it already,” I jerk myself and my bag away, “But don’t second-guess my desire to time travel again. Don’t,” snarling without meaning to, I back away, “All this time you’ve been critical of time travel and you were using it to build all of this.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have.”
“Really?” My voice begs for an affirmative answer, but when Don looks away, I know he isn’t sure and now I’m not sure about our future.
Not anymore. At least not tonight.
“I don’t need to be a kept woman, Don. I need a partner. An equal. I thought that was you.”
With his head down, hands shoved into the pockets of his trousers, Donovan looks so lost. I want to hug him. I want to tell him I’ll fix it all, but I don’t know how.
I need to think. Regroup. I need to make a plan and I can’t do it in this prison of luxury Donovan has erected around me.
With the sinking sadness of despair, I ride the elevator downstairs. The doorman smiles at me with a tip of his hat. “Shall I summon the car for you, Miss?”
“Not this time,” I stroll outside into the crisp Boston air, “This time I’d rather walk.”
Chapter Nine
Dad’s place is a safe haven. A quiet harbor in a mighty storm.
The apartment is cozy, but has a bedroom just for me; I just wasn’t expecting to need it so close to the wedding. I place my bag on the bed and pick up the old stuffed elephant I’ve kept there to keep the place cozy for me. My room at Mom’s is all pink, but here everything is a soft green.
Warm, comforting. Calm.
Everything Dad has always been for me. Mom would have nothi
ng but questions. A million probing questions and I’m not ready to handle that. Instead, I rest in Dad’s big bear hug. He kisses the top of my head and ruffles my hair.
“I can make you hot chocolate. Extra whipped cream, right?” His face is clean shaven and it’s taken years off his appearance–-as if he’s found the fountain of youth.
“Right.” I smile and as he walks off, I notice for the first time he’s dressed up. Not in a suit and tie, but in trousers and a button-up shirt. Was I interrupting something?
Following him through the sparsely decorated living room, my eyes fall on the cufflinks on the coffee table and a woman’s purse is partially hidden beneath a brown toss pillow on the sofa. “Dad, was Mom here?”
“Not Mom,” mugs clink in the kitchen, “That ship has sailed I’m afraid, kid.”
“But,” my voice trails off like a wisp, “did you have…company, before I got here?”
Through the divider in the kitchen, I can see Dad as he puts the kettle on. “I’ll tell you all about that if you tell me what brings you by.”
So, he did have a date? I cringe. “Sorry, Dad. I guess I should’ve called ahead.” I sit on the sofa and the toss pillow falls over, revealing the black purse with a white gem right in the center. It must’ve been a pretty fancy dinner.
Dad sits beside me and puts his arm on the back of the sofa. His fingers stroke mine. “You never have to call ahead. Nothing is ever more important than you. Besides, it was just dinner.”
“That’s why her purse is still here and you’re not wearing your cufflinks?”
He smirks. “Since when did you become Sherlock Holmes?”
“Well,” I grin, “I’m like an amateur sleuth at this point. Or I was,” I raise my brows and sink into the sofa, “Right now, I couldn’t time travel one second into the future.”
Dad crosses his arms and studies me. “I’m sure Delilah’s death struck you hard. No matter what happened, it’s not your responsibility to fix the world. Some problems just aren’t ours.”
