by Maisey Yates
And then he’d told her to watch what she said, because someday, she might be cleaning his floors.
Karma was, in fact, a bigger bitch than she was.
“Can you call a screaming match a conversation?” she asked, feeling subdued.
“I don’t know. Maybe confrontation?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you remember it?” he asked.
“Of course I do. It wasn’t every day I went toe–to-toe with a guy twice my size with half the school looking on.”
“No. Because most people never stood up to you.”
She shook her head. “No. They didn’t. So, what made you do it?” she asked. It was suddenly imperative to know what made someone change the way things worked. What the last straw was.
Weird that she was asking with herself cast as the bully. But she wanted to know. Because she’d hit a wall a year ago with her husband. The enough-is-enough point. She wanted to know what had made Mac reach that point with her.
“I had a whole lot of opportunity to feel like I was beneath the people around me. I was reminded of it whenever people invited friends over and I wasn’t included. Or when I was and I couldn’t reciprocate because there was no way I could have anyone over to my house. Only Lucas ever came, and that’s just because he was worse off than I was. My whole life was a reminder of how far beneath you I was, and I wasn’t going to listen to you tell me about what I already knew.”
She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “I’m sorry I did that,” she said. “To everyone, not just you.”
“You live and learn.”
“Yeah. You do.” She looked down at her food. “So, is that why you hired me? A little revenge to go with your dinner?”
“There’s a lame joke in there somewhere about what dishes are best served cold, but I’m going to skip it. And yeah, a little bit, I’m not going to lie.”
“Fair enough.”
“But I’m still going to pay you. I’m still going to let you stay here. Until you decide you’ve had enough.”
“Of what?”
“Of slumming it with the peasants. I’m not trying to be cruel here, Lucy, but work is hard. Most people wouldn’t do it if they had the choice, and you’ve proven that by not doing it when you had the choice. I can’t imagine, with other options open, you’d choose to stay here.”
“Okay, and how do you think I’ll go back to not needing work? How is it you think I’ll magically slide back into my old tax bracket?”
He just looked at her, blue eyes locked with hers. “You’ll go back to your husband.”
“You think so?”
“I do. Because in the end, whatever was going on between you two, I doubt it’s worth giving up all that to come and clean all this,” he said, sweeping his hand over his surroundings.
She put her hands flat on the table. “Yeah, of course. Money is awesome, right?” she said, feeling a little bubble of hysteria forming in her chest. “I mean… why would you ever leave money? What the hell could be more important than the money? Why would you need to be treated like a human being with thoughts and emotions when you could have all the money? Screw love and affection. Who needs it when you have Prada?” She picked up her fork and pushed on the tines with her forefinger. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll probably go back. Because it was so great to live with a man who was always telling me what an empty-headed bimbo I was. I mean, it wasn’t ideal, sure, but we had money. And money wins in the end, right? Not strength. Not anything else.”
“Lucy…”
She stood up. “I would like nothing more than to quit. And to storm out of here with my dignity and my scruples and to not give you the satisfaction of ever, ever seeing me scrub your damned floors. But I can’t. We both know it. At least, I hope now we both know it. This isn’t a game, Mac. I’m not playing at self-respect and independence. I need it. I can’t go back to not having it.”
She pushed her chair back and walked out of the room, her hands shaking, her breath coming in short, harsh gasps. She’d never yelled at Daniel like that. Not once. Even when she’d told him she wanted a divorce she hadn’t said that much. She’d learned not to give him any of her emotions. She’d been tired of having it used against her. Tired of having all of her vulnerable spots exposed and wounded.
But she hadn’t been able to hold it back with Mac. Because she couldn’t stand the thought of him believing what everyone else did.
You’ll have to go back to him. Her mother had said, wringing her hands.
You’ll come back on your hands and knees. A promise from Daniel.
No. She wouldn’t. She was better than that. Stronger than that. No one else thought so. Hell, she wasn’t even sure if it was true. But she had to keep going. No matter what.
She couldn’t go back to being Lucy Ryan, queen bitch of Silver Creek High, and she didn’t want to go back to that, anyway. She couldn’t go back to being Lucy Carter, Daniel Carter’s wife. His trophy in public, his verbal punching bag in private.
That meant she had to find something else to be. And since she wasn’t getting help from anyone, she would have to do it herself.
***
Days later and Mac still felt like a total ass. Which he was. He hadn’t been able to resist taking a dig at her, and when he’d done it, he’d unearthed a whole bunch of stuff he was sure they both would have rather had stayed buried.
Yeah, he admitted, he’d assumed that the deal with her husband had been something petty, like him slashing her shoe allowance, but that was only because he’d envisioned adult Lucy as being the same as seventeen-year-old Lucy.
But he’d miscalculated. She was different. She was older. Sadder. Tougher. Not in that way she’d been as a teenager. Not tough like she’d pretended to be, walking down the halls of the high school, insulated by family money and reputation. This was something deep. Something solid.
A stone wall that she’d put up inside of herself, shoring up her defenses so she couldn’t be hurt.
He knew all about that.
He didn’t want to relate to her. Didn’t want to find common ground with the society princess. But there it was. Common ground, whether he liked it or not.
Of course, they wouldn’t have a chance to explore that common ground, not with the way she was avoiding him. She was serving up dinners—simple dinners at that—and ducking out to do the laundry or some other chore, then cleaning up and taking her own meal back to her room.
Which was fine. Her prerogative. He was hardly going to force someone who worked for him to join him for dinner. That would just be sad.
But still, he sort of wished she would. And it had everything to do with the fact that he was a little lonely for human companionship since Lucas and Carly were engaged and involved in their own life together now, and not so much in his. And it had nothing to do with the fact that Lucy Carter smelled like honeysuckle and had a bite like a tart apple.
No. It had nothing to do with that.
Lucy’s little blue car pulled into the driveway and up to the house, and Mac watched her park. Watched her movements a little more closely than a non-creepy person who signed a woman’s paychecks should, he realized.
But the realization didn’t stop him from watching.
She got out and went to the trunk, pulling a couple of paper bags out and shutting it before heading up toward the house.
“Can I get those for you?”
She stopped. “These?” She looked down at the two bags. “I kind of have them already.” She turned away from him again and started up the steps to the front porch. He followed at a quick pace and beat her to the door, pushing it open for her.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked.
“I’m trying a roast. I went and bought vegetables. I assume one could easily find beef around here
.”
“Yeah. One might,” he said dryly. He had some of the most highly sought after beef in the country. And that wasn’t a euphemism.
“Anyway, I thought I might make an apple pie too. I have a cookbook—how hard could it be?”
“Hard,” he said. “Had you ever cooked before last week?”
“Not once.”
That explained the hit-or-miss nature of the food that had ended up on his plate. She’d more or less done a decent job, but his previous housekeeper had kept the house up and provided him with fresh-baked bread for every meal, homemade pies and cakes, real mashed potatoes with an ungodly amount of butter and meat roasted to perfection.
Americanized tostadas, spaghetti with sauce from a jar and hot dogs weren’t quite in the same league, though he’d said nothing. Not even when he’d crunched his way through that pasta.
He wasn’t sure why he was preserving her ego. Why he felt the importance of letting her have this. He really wasn’t sure at all. It would be more fun to simply ignore the fact that she was hurting, that she was human, and take a certain amount of petty glee in her circumstances.
But he found he wasn’t as big of a bastard as he’d previously believed.
“Well, you’re doing all right,” he said, crossing the living room and following her into the kitchen.
“Effusive praise coming from one such as yourself,” she said, her tone stiff.
“Effusive praise?”
She set the bags on the counter. “Yeah. I feel honored that I did ‘all right’ for you.”
“Fine, your cooking is the best I’ve ever had,” he said. “I can’t remember any of the dinners I ate before yours. All that other spaghetti meant nothing to me, baby.”
She rolled her eyes. “Please tell me you don’t actually say that to women.”
“Why? Something your ex might say?”
He didn’t know what in the hell had possessed him to ask that. He was perfectly content to let her have her secrets. More than. He didn’t care what had happened to her, didn’t care what would happen to her. He was doing his slightly self-indulgent good deed by letting her stay here and work for him.
She laughed, but it wasn’t a fun, light sound. It was brittle. Bitter. “Oh, no. Not even… no. That would require actually caring what I thought about him. It would require him having some idea of what I felt. Or at least wanting to preserve my feelings. He didn’t want to do that.”
“He didn’t?” He was still asking. Why was he still asking?
“No. It’s impossible to control a woman who thinks she’s important. You have to remind her that she isn’t, any way you can. And then she starts to believe that… that without you, she won’t last. She won’t have anything. So that, no matter what you do, she won’t leave. And those men never have to explain it when they eat other… spaghetti.”
He felt like someone had reached into his chest and clenched their fist tight around whatever organs they could grab. “That’s not… that’s not what real men do, Lucy.”
“It’s what plenty of them do, though. And not just men—women too. My mother is exhibit A. She told me to leave and not to come back without my wedding ring on. Like without Daniel I’m not even a whole person.” She looked down, then back up, the pain in her eyes raw, too real. Too hard to ignore. “I worry that they’re right sometimes. I was with him for so long, and I don’t really know what I’m doing on my own.”
He looked at Lucy, really looked at her. At the lines that bracketed her mouth, the shadows under her eyes, the sadness in them that made the deep brown color look flat. Haunted.
How had he missed it before? How had he missed just how much she’d changed?
“You’re doing just fine,” he said. “I’ll be back in for dinner.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay.” He turned around and walked away. And he still couldn’t breathe.
Chapter Four
Lucy didn’t remember ever having to saw through a pie before. But that was essentially what she was doing with her pie. She was trying so hard. It wasn’t fair. She’d even accosted Sarah Larsen in the produce aisle, someone she’d vaguely remembered from high school as being wholesome and the kind of girl who probably watched Martha Stewart after school, and asked her for tips.
She made it through the final crust layer and used the pie server to get it onto Mac’s plate. The filling oozed out, and it looked good at least. Well, the crust looked good too; it was just more like a piece of wood in texture than it was a flaky pastry.
The plan was to scurry back to her own house and not join him for any portion of the meal, as she’d been doing for the past week. It was just more comfortable that way. There was something about him, a sexy something about him, and she really didn’t like that she noticed it.
Not to mention the fact that she had told him too much about her relationship with Daniel. And also Mac was most definitely in a position where he might enjoy hearing about all the junk that had happened to her since she’d left Silver Creek, and that was really quite off-putting.
Mainly, though, it was the sexy thing.
She walked over to the dining table and set the dessert in front of him. “Enjoy,” she said, handing him a fork, false smile firmly plastered on her face.
“Thanks,” he said. “Aren’t you going to join me?”
“Uh… no. I haven’t even had dinner yet, so I’ll probably just take my plate of pot roast out to the house.”
“Why don’t you sit and have pie?”
“I just said.”
“Did you?”
She nodded slowly. “Yes. I didn’t have dinner.”
“So what? It’s the perk of being an adult. Of being your own person. Eat the pie first.”
“It’s not how you’re supposed to do it.”
“So. What. Lucy Ryan… Carter. Whichever. You need to eat dessert first.”
She looked at Mac, at the slight quirk in his lips, the sparkle in his eyes, and a shiver ran through her, whispering along her veins like electricity over a wire. There was something irresistible about that look he was giving her. Something intense. That there was anything in his eyes at all, beyond boredom, or amusement, or disdain, made it all feel new. As if a man had never looked at her before.
And for a moment, she could almost believe it was true. Could almost feel the last eight years fall away. Could feel something warm and hopeful building in her chest.
“All right.” She turned on her heel and walked back into the kitchen, sawing herself another piece of pie and plopping it onto a plate. She was extremely skeptical of the pie’s viability, but she wasn’t going to show him that she was aware of her vulnerability. She wouldn’t be able to hide its existence, not once he took a bite, but looking scared of her own food just wouldn’t do.
She returned to the table and took a position in the chair at the very end corner of the table, as far from him as possible without sitting directly across from him. She’d been the foot of someone’s table for too long. She wasn’t going there again.
Mac was the first one to take a bit of the pie. His fork clunked against the ceramic plate when it finally broke through the crust, proving just how much force it had taken.
She winced, but watched him lift the bite to his lips. He put it in his mouth and chewed for a lot longer than anyone should have to chew a bit of pie.
He swallowed, and the motion looked labored. “See? Dessert first is good for you.”
“You aren’t having dessert first, you already had dinner. And you don’t sound very convincing.”
“I’ve never had piecrust done in quite this style,” he said, poking at the dessert on his plate with his fork.
“I’m sure it’s not that different,” she said, pushing her own fork through the crust and quickly shoveling
a small bite into her mouth.
Oh, Lord, it was chewy. So chewy she was having a hard time getting through it.
She swallowed. “Okay, yeah, that’s pretty bad. But the filling isn’t. Is fifty percent a passing grade?”
“Not so much.”
She peeled the top crust back from her piece and selected a cinnamon-and-sugar-covered apple from the center. She took a bite and smiled. “Actually, it’s really good without that rubber crust.”
Mac stood up and went to the counter, taking the pie plate and bringing it back to the table. He took his fork and pried off the entire top of it, leaving only the filling exposed and digging a forkful of apple from the center.
“You can’t do that!” she said.
“Yes, I can. I can eat the part I want, and you can eat dessert first. Pull your chair this way.”
“You’re lawless, Mac Denton.”
“Happily.”
She stood up and moved down to the chair that was just next to his and followed his lead, taking an apple-only bite. “Okay, this is better.”
“There are perks to being a little bit lawless.”
“Fine. Fine, there are perks.”
“Like not having to take the good with the bad. You just remove the bad.”
“Too bad life doesn’t actually work that way.”
“Are you getting philosophical over pie?”
She shrugged and took another bite. “Over pie filling, anyway.”
“You seem like you might be a little lawless yourself.”
She froze mid-chew. “Do I?”
“You left your husband, even though the decision was unpopular.”
She swallowed and looked back down at her plate. “Uh, yeah, unpopular to say the least. But that was a little bigger than just dealing with inedible pie crust. He was… Daniel Carter is a competent businessman, a respected boss and a beloved friend to many in our little circle. But the thing about Daniel is that he likes to be in control. He can hide that okay in other areas of his life, or apply it and use it to his advantage. In terms of being married to someone like that, though… I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
