She frowned. “I’m serious. We can’t just meet up and…nail.”
He wanted to wrap his arms around her, but this was New York, the city that never slept. Three in the morning meant nothing for anonymity there. “I vote for meeting and nailing with increased frequency. And also reckless abandon.” Ironic he should throw out reckless when he worried about touching her in public in the middle of the night, but that was what his life had become.
“Will you be simultaneously nailing anyone else at the same time?”
“I’d really rather just nail you,” he said, keeping his voice light, though the question irked him. How could he possibly think of anyone else? And did she really think he was that guy?
She exhaled, then seemed to take a measured breath. “Lovely. But that brings me to my point. How is this not a relationship?”
It was his turn to sigh. “Why does it need a label?”
She frowned. “It just…does. I don’t want to go there again. It starts with sex at the lodge, and then it’s sex here, and at some point, we’ll go out in public and resurrect those old headlines, and when it ends, I’ll be a laughingstock all over again.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t touch her. “So you’d rather me believe you drove all the way here to argue about a bill than have me think there’s more?”
“I don’t know. I just know I can’t…do this. I don’t trust myself. For God’s sake, you had a bet about whether you’d sleep with me—”
“Actually, it was about whether you’d still speak to me after spending forty-eight hours with me at the lodge.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I never did let you explain. So explain.”
He expected that achingly familiar angst to hit in the chest like it always did when he was put on the spot. And it should have, because he’d never really needed anyone to understand like he needed her right then, but the spiraling didn’t happen.
For once, he wanted to put himself out there, and especially to erase any lingering hurt or doubts following that stupid bet. “Sawyer and Crosby were always the outgoing ones out of all of my brothers. I was ‘the quiet one.’ Ethan was somewhere in the middle. When I was a kid, I was stupidly shy, to the point where I once literally tried to fake a case of Ebola rather than give an oral report in front of my English class in middle school. It didn’t work, and I wound up grabbing the recycling bin and bolting for the door in the middle of said report. Fortunately, I made it into the hallway before my lunch made a repeat appearance. The teacher gave me a passing grade on the assignment out of pity and because I cleaned out the bin for the janitor.”
She winced. “Wow. That’s extreme.”
“Says the news reporter who loves cameras.” He went on. “It got better as I got older, of course. But I’m still an idiot when I actually try to flirt with someone, and I usually end up saying something so awkward or horrible, I either make her cry or suspect I’m a serial killer. Once I admitted to Sawyer that you were hot, he bet me I couldn’t actually attempt flirting with you and not scare you off. I meant what I said before. I needed coffee with you, not sex.”
“Flattering as that is,” she said dryly, “I chased you down, so one way or another, I guess you won your bet.”
“Could you forget the bet?”
“I’d love to forget the bet,” he said.
“And what about us? Are you saying you want a relationship?”
“No,” he said. “I can’t say that.”
She tensed. “And I can’t be your fuck buddy until someone less infamous comes along.”
His heart tumbled and flailed and unceremoniously splatted on the dirty pavement. “Claire.”
She shook her head. “I won’t say I’m not confused or conflicted, but unless you tell me you want this to go somewhere, there’s nothing to figure out.”
“I can’t. I mean, I can’t begin to explain the sheer randomness of going viral over a wet T-shirt, but I can tell you the utter bullshit of some people calling nonstop and setting up service calls just to have one of us show up and either be Hot HVAC Guy or not, but in either case wasting our time and resources. The calls are so ridiculous the office can’t keep up, and the real customers get lost in the fray. It’s not just my life that gets fucked up, although that’s bad enough. It’s affecting other people. It’s affecting a business that’s been around for generations.”
She sighed, and the shakiness of it broke his heart. “Okay,” she said. “I get it. I mean, I really do. But some things are worth a chance. It’s hard to know what things, when you’re in a situation like this where you have to take a small chance to see if the big one is worth it, but sometimes even the smallest chance is too much. Especially when you have as much at stake as you do.”
He blinked. Clearly too much blood still lingered in the bottom half of his body, because he wasn’t sure he heard her right. “Are you saying you want a relationship?”
“I’m saying I’ve been engaged twice before, and I’ve never felt loved the way you make me feel loved. Maybe that’s just your thing, and maybe I’m just falling for the wrong guy all over again.” She stared at him, beautiful and blue-eyed. His.
God, why couldn’t she be his?
“Claire.”
Whatever else he was going to say was forgotten when someone screamed. Alarmed, he glanced in the direction of the noise in time to see a cab pulling away from what looked like a group of teenagers. Three in the damned morning. This was the shit he couldn’t get away from.
He froze, hoping the shrieking had nothing to do with him, but the last few weeks had taught him better. “It’s Hot HVAC Guy,” one drawled, a bit drunkenly for someone who looked under age. He thought he recognized her as a neighbor, but made such a habit of late of avoiding people outside of work that he wasn’t sure.
The girl’s companions managed a chorus of shrieks that sounded like something out of one of those campy horror flicks. It ended abruptly when the first girl held out an arm. “Oh, look. Sssshhhhhhh. I think Hot HVAC Guy has a girlfriend,” she announced.
By this point, Liam would normally be locked in his apartment, but he wasn’t going to abandon Claire. Not on these terms.
“Say it’s not true,” one of the other girls said, clutching her heart. “Tell us you aren’t taken.”
Claire, who wore a stunned look and hadn’t really moved since the debacle began, shifted her gaze to him. He was so struck by her that he almost said yes, he was taken, but then one of the girls said, “Hey, isn’t that the Runaway Bride?”
All the color fled from her face.
“No, she’s no one,” he said quickly, the lie tearing through him. He hadn’t denied who he was, but he hadn’t confessed it, either. Maybe this would just go away. “I just held the door, and she hasn’t walked fast, much less run. Sleep it off, ladies.”
“Will you sleep it off with us?” one of the girls slurred.
He shuddered and prayed they were all over eighteen, even though he had no intention of taking them up on the offer. “No,” he said firmly.
“I still think that’s the Runaway Bride,” a girl said. She held up her phone. “I mean, she’s literally on the news every day.”
Teenaged girls watched the news? He was stunned. He also recognized the phone-positioning move from a thousand before it, so turned his back, blocking his face as well as Claire’s from any pending photos.
Claire, who looked inexplicably hurt. “No one,” she said. “I guess that answers that. I should just give this all up and find a deserted island to inhabit.” She shivered and added, “Somewhere warm.”
He winced. “It was either say you were no one or make them twice as curious about who you are.”
“I understand, Liam. More than anyone else, I do.” She hesitated. “I hope you get your life back, but we both know that won’t happen with me.” With that, she turned away from him and headed down the steps, then down the street. He noticed her truck a block and a half away, and he stoo
d there until she’d disappeared inside and the tail lights glowed and the headlights illuminated the car in front of her. He wanted to run up to his apartment and call her and say anything to make her stay, but they’d both been handed proof of why she shouldn’t, so he just watched her go, knowing there wasn’t a damned honest thing he could say or do to stop her.
So he didn’t.
Chapter Eighteen
Liam barely looked up when his mother handed him a package the next morning. He figured it was something work-related, at least until she didn’t keep walking.
“What?” he asked.
“I thought you’d want to see, and frankly, I wondered how I’d done.”
Confused, he picked up the package and lifted the lid. Tissue paper billowed out. Inside…the stockings. How had he forgotten about those? One by one he unfolded them. His mother’s repairs were flawless. Somehow she’d maintained the original integrity while making them like new again.
“She’s going to love these,” he said. “I’ll get them in the mail this afternoon.”
His mother hesitated. “There’s something you should see. I’m not sure if it’s important or not.” She pulled a clear plastic bag out of her purse and handed it to him.
Inside was a ring, two bands of silver twisted into a rope.
It was the ring Claire’s mother had bought for her. The one they’d thought had rolled into the fire.
“Where was this?”
“Inside Claire’s stocking. There was a small tear in the lining, and I guess it slipped inside.”
“Her mother got this for her before she died,” he said. “They thought it was gone.”
His mother beamed. “Then I imagine she’ll be happy to see it.”
“Yeah, she’ll be happy to see the ring. And the stockings. They look almost new. Thank you for putting so much work into them. I’ll have this overnighted to her.” He hesitated, not sure if she was still at the lodge or where else she might be. Maybe she’d stayed with the Christmas tree. Or maybe she’d gotten the hell away from everything that had anything to do with him.
“I think you should take them yourself,” his mother said. “Wouldn’t want that ring to get lost a second time. Especially something with that much meaning.”
He glanced up, finding her wearing a knowing smile.
“I’m not sure she wants to see me.”
“Do you really thinks she wants to be alone when she opens those?”
Liam swallowed. His throat was tight. Christmas was days away, and she’d be alone in that lodge with a lifetime of memories and a tree half-filled with broken ornaments. And regardless of where they weren’t going, that was unacceptable.
“She might not want to be alone, but she definitely won’t want to be with me.”
His mother smiled gently. “If you did this for her, I can’t imagine why not.”
Boy, did he have news for her. “First,” he said, “I outed her as the Runaway Bride in the place she went to escape being the Runaway Bride—”
His mother held up a hand. “She’s the Runaway Bride? The famous one?”
He cringed inwardly, feeling like he’d betrayed Claire all over again. “Yes. And I outed her. Then she heard me telling Sawyer what he could do with the bet he made me, and that I wasn’t sure if I won or lost but either way I couldn’t wait to get away from her.”
His mother’s brow furrowed. “What bet?”
“Whether or not she’d ever speak to me after I left there.”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
Liam rubbed his finger over the silky edge of Claire’s stocking. “Besides the fact that I said I couldn’t get away from her?”
“I can see how that might do it.”
“Yeah, me too. Only we actually hit it off to the point that we had to agree that whatever was happening between us could not happen outside of that lodge.” He caught his mother’s perplexed expression and explained, “Runway Bride meets Hot HVAC Guy. It’s a headline disaster waiting to happen.”
“Not if you think you two have something worth pursuing.”
“Well, we agreed we didn’t. Only I haven’t stopped thinking about her, and then she showed up at my apartment and hinted that it might be worth seeing where it went.”
“And?”
“And I said it wasn’t worth it. Which brings us to why I think she’d rather open these with anyone but me.”
His mom frowned. “Why would you say that if you’re still thinking about her?”
A mix of frustration and regret curled in his chest. “Because this stupid Hot HVAC Guy stuff has been crippling us. Our real customers are getting ticked off, and in some instances going other places. It’s actually hurting the business, and it’s going to kick up tenfold if I’m ever linked with her.”
“It’s a business, Liam. It might be the family business, but it never comes before family.”
He nodded. “Family comes first. Exactly my point, and exactly who suffers when the business does.”
His mother slid into the chair across from his. “The phone ringing off the hook is such a small thing. An inconvenient thing. We’ve all laughed at you—”
“Thanks, Mother.”
She didn’t hide her smile. “And we’ve all been annoyed and frustrated, but it’s small. This woman may present a challenge, but the fact that you’re still thinking about her proves she’s worth pursuing.” She put her hand on his arm. “I promise the rest of us will get through it. Your happiness means more to all of us than the number of times the phone rings, and maybe if word gets out that you’re dating the Runaway Bride, people just might stop thinking of us a dating service, if all of the Chase Brothers are spoken for.” She smiled again, patted his arm, and stood. “Take her the stockings yourself. If she’s not holding a chainsaw when you get there, tell her she’s worth it. You’ll be glad you did.”
He looked at the stockings, remembering that moment in the attic when he saw just how much they meant to Claire. He couldn’t bring back her family, and he couldn’t take back sending her away, but there was one thing he was pretty sure he could get right.
To his mother, he said, “You’re right. Gather the troops. If it’s okay with you all, I have an idea for a Christmas none of us will forget.”
But first he had a phone call to make.
By that evening he’d scored an interview with People magazine.
There was no going back now.
And no wanting to.
…
Dry Mountain Lodge
Christmas Eve
Liam was fully prepared to see Claire to slam the door in his face, but she wasn’t even at the lodge when he pulled up. Briefly he worried she’d gone back to the city, or somewhere else entirely, but the door was unlocked and the fire glowing, so he knew she hadn’t gone far. Which meant they didn’t have much time.
But if anyone could pull this off quickly, they could.
Estelle, Kelsie, and Rue, all with breaks in their schedules due to the holiday, had spent the last two days scouring the city and for vintage ornaments and decorations. They’d filled the back of Ethan’s truck with their findings to the point the stash had been covered with a tarp and fitted with a ratchet strap. Liam’s truck was still at Monk’s. Sawyer’s truck was full of greenery. Apparently he’d met up with Crosby at a tree lot near Crosby’s house and bought the guy out of live boughs and wreaths, while Ethan and their dad had gone on some kind of nuts-and-berries hunt. Russell had immediately latched onto the idea of an old-fashioned Christmas, apparently having lived them throughout his childhood. Or so he claimed.
And it wouldn’t be Christmas without food, which was Alice Chase’s forte. She’d packed her SUV with enough food to feed an army, although the reality was they’d probably eat every bite. The traditional Chase family Christmas dinner included more than a dozen sides. Whether or not it was straight out of Claire’s childhood Christmases at the lodge, he had no idea, but no traditionalist could argue that every possible si
de had been served and not a soul would leave there hungry. Not even Stanley. A slice of banana cream pie would see to that.
When Liam stepped inside the lodge, his heart was in his throat. The mattress they’d slept on was gone, as were all the dust covers. The entire main room had been polished. Literally, because every surface gleamed. He had no idea how she’d reached all the beams and exposed wood at the top, but the woman was clearly thorough. The leather furniture gleamed softly and appeared to have been conditioned. He tested the cushion, grinning when it dipped under his fingertip. She hadn’t re-stuffed the sofa, but the rugs had been fluffed, the hearth scrubbed clean. The restoration was stunning.
“Looks different,” Ethan said.
“Looks like she was trying to erase me,” Liam muttered.
Ethan gave him a sideways look. “Or maybe she just cleans when she’s trying to get over someone.”
“If that’s the case,” Liam said, “judging by the extreme changes in here, she probably got over me a dozen times.”
“I doubt that.”
Easy for Ethan to say. He didn’t have his entire family there to witness…whatever this was. But they were there, and they had his back. As much as Claire had transformed the room, so had the Chase family. Fresh boughs burst from every available surface, save for the ones that posed a fire hazard, and an entire truckload of ornaments had been added to tree. Liam had hesitated only a moment before telling them to leave the broken ones. They, too, had a story.
He and Claire had a story.
Everyone in the family had a job, but Liam kept one for himself. Standing in front of that fireplace, the fire now roaring—Rue, it turned out, could stoke a fire as well as Claire could—there were only two things missing. One he could remedy.
He felt an odd sense of reverence as he unfolded the stockings his mom had restored, hanging them one by one at the far ends of the mantle, safely away from the fire, just like she said they’d done when she was a kid. He hesitated by the one with Claire’s name on it, his hand palming the package in his pocket, then gave up the fight and dropped it inside. Only afterward did he notice the room had gone silent. When he turned around and realized it wasn’t because they were all staring at him, the relief was short-lived.
The 48 Hour Hookup (Chase Brothers) Page 16
