by Inara Scott
“Yes,” she said.
“I have to tell you, it isn’t going to end well for you.” The girl had the audacity to look bored. Portia reminded herself that she was a lady and did not show her anger. “Laugh if you want, but I’m telling you this for your own benefit.”
“I’m not sure why my relationship with Garrett is any of your business, Portia.”
“He’s my grandson,” she snapped. “Of course it’s my business.”
Kaia inclined her head. “Well, thank you for the information. Shall we return to the gallery?”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I never said that. Why wouldn’t I believe you?” She turned her back deliberately to Portia, bringing water to her cheeks once again. “In fact, I have no doubt you are absolutely correct. My relationship with Garrett is doomed. Perhaps tonight will be our very last night together.”
“Don’t be flip with me, girl,” Portia said, imagining hauling her by her shoulder and dumping her headfirst in the fountain. “Every one of Garrett’s dates dreams of marrying him. You, obviously, think you’re going to be his Cinderella. Life doesn’t work that way.”
“Portia,” Kaia’s face was dewy with moisture, her eyes strangely bright. “I have little doubt that I am nothing more to Garrett than any of his other casual flings. Have no fear on that score.”
Portia stepped forward. The girl was mocking her. She had to be mocking her. “You aren’t like all those other women, Kaia. Those other women had breeding. They had education. Skills. Garrett’s mother was just like you, you know. She was beautiful. She had a way with people. She also had no more sense than a rabbit.”
Kaia froze at the first mention of Victoria. Portia realized with satisfaction that Garrett had probably never mentioned his mother to the girl before. Good. That would only emphasize how little she understood him.
“You probably don’t know about her, but perhaps you should. She never had a bit of sense—all she ever wanted to do was listen to music and draw. She got pregnant with Garrett when she was sixteen. I tried to take care of her and keep her from becoming a laughingstock, but she wanted nothing to do with me. She left home, following her good-for-nothing boyfriend and his band. She went to Chicago and became a junkie. God only knows what she did with Garrett. I believe they lived in a shelter for a while. When he was eight she almost killed him and his brother in a car accident because she was high. That’s when she gave the boys to me. That’s why Garrett’s never going to marry you, Kaia. He knows what a mess women like you are. He’d never do that to himself and he’d certainly never do that to his children.”
Somewhere during Portia’s speech the color had left Kaia’s face. To her credit, she did not flinch, but only said, “I am not Garrett’s mother.”
“Maybe,” Portia said. “But how does Garrett know that? He only brought you to the Manor because he felt sorry for you. Don’t fool yourself that it’s something else. When he gets married it will be to a decent girl. Someone he can depend on. Someone he can trust.”
Kaia recoiled at her words.
Sensing she had struck home, Portia pressed on. “You’re nothing better than a street person like his mother.”
“I don’t have to defend myself to you.” Kaia brushed against her as she headed back inside.
“Of course you don’t,” Portia said to Kaia’s back, a smile curving her lips. Oh, the look on the girl’s face was priceless. Fear, anger, and devastation wrapped in one pretty picture. Portia relaxed with pleasure for the first time that night. “Of course you don’t.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Garrett waited for the elevator to reach the top floor of Tanforth Tower before he spoke. A powerful heat was raging through him, burning with its intensity. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Kaia all night, the wanting and the need driving higher every time she touched another man, every time she smiled, every time she laughed.
She had been to parties like that before. She had laughed with men like that before. She knew how to stroke their egos, how to make them feel like kings. Tonight, she was the woman from the Avalon, the one who had teased him with her confidence and her air of knowing.
What kind of life had she really led? How high up had she lived, and how had she come so far down, to end up homeless, living at Good Samaritan?
She was upset now, her body vibrating with some restrained emotion. She’d stumbled several times since they’d left the gallery, in the parking garage, and on the way up to the penthouse. He’d taken her hand to steady her and found it icy cold. He wondered what she thought he would do tonight. He wondered if her husband had abused her. It sickened him to think about it, but then he remembered that he wasn’t even sure if she had a husband, and the heat and the fury started all over again.
“I’d say you have one last chance to come clean, Kaia, but that seems absurd at this point. It isn’t as though your past really matters to me any more anyway.” He smiled when she flinched at his direct attack. He steered her out of the elevator. He could feel the tension in her body, the resistance building with every step she took.
He opened the front door and took off his jacket, throwing it down on the back of the sofa before unbuttoning his shirt, slowly and methodically. The windows reflected the lights of the city below, casting a rosy glow around them.
He reached around and turned on the overhead lights. The last thing he wanted right now was a soft and romantic mood. “After all, we were clear with each other, weren’t we? No strings attached, right? You didn’t want a relationship and neither did I.”
She stared at him, her eyes huge, her shoulders thrown back. Like they had been the night he’d seen her in front of Good Sam, and the night she’d told off Portia.
She was so proud. Like a damn queen.
What did she have to be so proud of?
He shrugged out of his shirt and started to unbuckle his pants. “Because I was thinking, as we were driving home, that it was really silly for me to be so upset. It doesn’t matter to me what kind of stories you tell. We’re just having sex, after all. So you might as well take off your lovely dress, because I’d hate to rip it.”
“You’re angry,” she said. “You’re not touching me when you’re like this.”
He shrugged. “I’m not angry. I just realized I’ve been an idiot for the past ten days. Sleeping on that uncomfortable futon. Buying coffee like a lovesick teenager. All for a woman who won’t even tell me that she can’t drive a damn car!” He realized his voice had risen to low roar, but he couldn’t seem to control it.
“So that’s it?” Kaia put her hands on her hips. “Good. If we’re really going to have it out, let’s start with this: I’d like to know why I’m supposed to tell you all my secrets. Really, Garrett, I’m interested to know. Because the last time I checked, you hadn’t told me a thing about yourself. You think I’m hiding something? How about you? Where’s your mother? Did you live in a shelter when you were a child? When you took me to Good Sam, were you thinking about that? Were you ever going to tell me about it—about her?”
Garrett’s skin washed cold. “My mother? Who’s been talking to you about my mother?”
Kaia waved her hand. “Take a wild guess.”
Only one person could have shared such intimate information with her. Black dots appeared in front of his eyes. What motivation—what possible motivation could Portia have had for telling Kaia about his mother?
“We don’t talk about her,” Garrett said.
“Of course not,” Kaia mocked. “We don’t talk about anything.”
“My mother,” Garrett bit out tightly, “was a drug addict. I haven’t seen or communicated with her since I was eight.”
“Did you live in a shelter?”
“A few times. When she got kicked out of her apartment and was between boyfriends.” He still remembered the feeling of panic. Of never knowing where you’d be from night to night. Boyfriend’s couch. Front seat of the car. Cot in a shelter. Old woman next to you who laughe
d and talked to herself while she ate. Boy in the next room who kept crying.
The noise. Always the noise.
“What happened to her?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. She sends me a birthday card every year, and I believe she lives in Miami. That’s all I know.”
“Wait—are you telling me your mother lives here, in Miami, and you haven’t seen her since you were a child?” Kaia sounded astonished.
“I assume she lives here. That’s what it says on the return address.”
“And she writes to you every year?”
“Every year,” he said grimly.
“Why haven’t you seen her?”
“Because I have no desire to see her. She dumped Max and me off with Portia and disappeared. I waited around for a couple of years and heard nothing from her. Life went on. I adjusted. Sue me if I wasn’t interested in welcoming her back with open arms when she finally got her life together.”
He didn’t know why he was telling her all this, but the flood of words, words he’d never spoken to anyone before, had broken through some invisible gate and were impossible to stop.
“Does she want to see you?”
He turned away from her. Somewhere in the midst of her questions his anger with Kaia had faded to a slow, throbbing heat, and now all he could think of was the myriad of ways he could throttle his grandmother. “I have no idea. I don’t read her letters.”
“Never? Not once?”
“Well, once,” he admitted. “I read the first one. She sent it when I turned eighteen. She said she wanted to see me. I figured she just wanted to get some money out of me now that I was old enough to access my trust fund. I never responded.”
Kaia stared at him. She was quiet so long he found himself growing strangely uncomfortable. He made a point of walking to the kitchen and getting a beer out of the fridge, opening it, and going to the balcony. He stepped outside and let the warm air surround his naked torso.
He wished it would rain. He needed a good rainstorm right about now.
“Now I understand,” Kaia said, her voice finally sounding behind him. “She hurt you and you closed yourself off. Your mother made an enormous mistake and you decided to become Garrett the Island. It’s almost too bad you had to live with your millionaire grandmother. The story would have worked better if you’d had to live on the streets. Picked yourself up by your bootstraps and all that.”
Garrett spun around, amazed that she had turned the attack on him. “I’m not asking for pity, Kaia. I never asked for anyone’s pity.”
“Of course not. And you don’t want anyone’s love, either, is that right?”
“Give it a rest, will you? There’s no mystery to my life. I don’t happen to have a lot of faith in human nature, or any fairy tale love business. I’m not sure why I should.”
“Because you’ve been surrounded by love your entire life,” Kaia shot back. “You’re just too damn busy feeling sorry for yourself to see it.”
“Surrounded by love?” Garrett stared at her. “Are you nuts? My teenage mother was in rehab when I was eight, and my grandmother has all the sensitivity and kindness of a tarantula. I’m sorry, but I don’t see the love. I see a bunch of messed up people who had kids and didn’t have the foggiest idea what to do with them.”
“I guess I have a different perspective. Because I see a mother who loved her children enough to give them up. And that’s about the hardest thing that a person could ever have to do.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She brushed aside his low protest. “She raised you for eight years. If she really didn’t care about you, why didn’t she give you up from the start? You think she wasn’t terrified to be on her own, pregnant and drug-addicted? I’ve lived on the streets, Garrett. It isn’t a fun place to be. It’s terrifying. It would be even worse with a child.”
“She left me with Portia,” he said with disgust. “What kind of parent abandons their child to be raised by someone like that?”
“A brave person. Someone who knows they can’t do it by themselves. She walked away from her children so she could give them a better life. In my book that’s a pretty amazing act of love.”
“She should have come back.” He clenched his fist around the neck of his beer bottle. “There was no reason for her to dump us and run. It isn’t like we were hard to find.”
“Did you ever ask her why she did it? Did you ever give her a chance to explain?”
Garrett opened his mouth, but no words came.
Kaia sailed on into the silence. “Now, let’s talk for a minute about your grandmother. I’m not going to tell you she’s the sweetest, gentlest person in the world. She’s tough and maybe even downright mean. Yet she took you in. She did everything in her power to make you a success. You may not agree with her definition of success, but you’ve also never had to go hungry. Maybe Portia’s been trying to give you a little bit of security. Maybe that’s the only way she knows how to show you that she loves you.”
“I think that’s enough,” Garrett said, slicing his hand to indicate they were finished. Bile rose in his throat at the casual way Kaia dismissed years of resentment and hurt. To hear her talk, one would think he was no better than a petulant child. “I’m not listening to you dissect my family. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course I don’t,” Kaia said. “We don’t talk about Portia, or the elusive Max, who I’ve never met, or your job, or even Lexi, who had the misfortune to be exposed to me for a weekend. You keep a tighter lid on your life than anyone I’ve ever met. I could be completely wrong about your mother. Maybe she’s a terrible person. Maybe she couldn’t wait to get rid of you. Maybe she’s been sending you cards all these years because she’s hoping to get a little of your money. All I’m saying is you better not stand there and judge me for not telling you everything about my past when yours isn’t exactly an open book.”
He pounced on her admission. “So you admit that you lied to me?”
She stuck out her chin defiantly. “Maybe I did. Maybe I am hiding something from you. Maybe it’s something big. Maybe I’m lying about who I am—or even what I am. Can you really blame me?”
Garrett shook his head. “I can’t believe this all somehow became my fault. You lied, so it’s my fault.”
Kaia joined him out on the balcony, the light from his apartment turning her silver dress into a halo. “I didn’t say it was your fault,” she said, her voice quiet. Resigned. “I was stupid and naïve. I thought we could pretend like we didn’t have pasts. You didn’t share yours, I didn’t share mine.” She sighed. “I thought we were even.”
“There was a big difference there, Kaia. I’m a damn fixture in this city. You can find out about me by looking on the Internet or picking up a newspaper. You met my best friend, my grandmother, and my niece. I may not have told you the whole truth, but I never lied to you.”
She didn’t respond. Garrett threw back his beer and took a long drink. This wasn’t going like he had planned. He was supposed to be having sex right now. Hard, hot, meaningless sex. He was not supposed to be having his psyche dissected by someone who refused to come clean about why she had a fake driver’s license. He was not supposed to be feeling guilty about something, and he definitely wasn’t supposed to have this sick, dark feeling in the pit of his stomach at the sound of resignation in Kaia’s voice.
“I suppose there really isn’t any hope for us, is there?” She was so quiet he had to strain to hear her.
He shook his head. “Hope for what? I told you from the beginning, I don’t do relationships and I can’t stomach lies. Just tell me, Kaia, what’s the real story? Are you a runaway princess from some tiny country in Eastern Europe I won’t be able to pronounce? An illegal alien? A plain old alien?” He smiled at that. “We had something good. Let’s forget all this nonsense and get back to where we were.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s not possible. I think you know that.”
<
br /> The sick feeling grew, turning into something akin to panic. “Jesus, Kaia,” he said choking a little with disgust. “I thought you were different but you’re just like the rest of them. Just like every other woman.”
“Like every other woman,” Kaia repeated softly. She gave a sad laugh and looked out over the balcony. Her long hair obscured her face. “Do you know what it means to be human, Garrett?”
“Why the hell are you asking me that?”
“Because I think I’m figuring it out.”
He barked a short laugh. “Okay, you tell me. What does it mean to be human?”
“When people come to the flower shop, you know what they want to say to each other? Two things: I’m sorry, and I love you. That’s it. They say it different ways and with different words, but it comes down to the same thing each time. So I think that’s what it means to be human. I think it means taking chances and risking getting hurt. I think it means loving and forgiving.”
Garrett tensed, feeling like somehow, with those simple words, she had slapped him across the face. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
She sighed. “Nothing. I’ve just realized that right now, I’m a lot more human than you are.”
She leaned forward and kissed him, gently and sweetly on the lips, leaving behind a trace of a tear on his cheek. “Good-bye, Garrett. I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m sorry for everything.”
Then, with all the regal beauty he’d ever seen in her, she turned and walked away.
§
“Need a cab, Miss?”
Kaia nodded, fighting back the ocean of tears she knew would come as soon as she let down her guard. The valet at the front door of the Tanforth Tower spoke into a phone at his podium, and a few minutes later a yellow car pulled up. She gave the driver the address to Rachel’s Roses and collapsed into the sagging cloth seat. The driver was playing loud music with a sitar and a woman singing in a high-pitched voice. Kaia opened her window and focused on keeping herself together.
It took a second to notice the imp, grinning at her from the footwell of the car, behind the front seat. “Psst, Faerie! Nice dress!”
