by Linda Seed
“Your brother built his own bike?” she said. “Aren’t you guys … you know …” It seemed indelicate to say it.
“Rich?” Liam filled in the blank for her.
“Well … yes.”
“We are. But my parents never believed in spoiling us. I remember having to work like hell for my two dollar a week allowance when I was in third grade. Still, Ryan could have bought a bike. He built one himself because he wanted to.”
“And how old was he then?”
Liam considered it. “About ten.”
“That’s a big project for a kid that age,” Aria said.
“Yeah, well.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “My uncle Redmond helped him with it.”
There was something there—something in the way he’d said his uncle’s name.
“Did your uncle do things with you, too?”
“He …” Liam cleared his throat. “Yeah. He did.”
Aria knew she’d hit a particularly sensitive spot, and she knew that if she pressed him on it, he’d likely change the subject. It’s what she would do. Instead, she simply kept working quietly beside him.
“My uncle died a few years ago,” he said finally.
“Yeah. I remember reading about that,” she told him. Redmond Delaney’s death had been news because of his vast wealth. It had hit the financial magazines and websites, not that Aria made a habit of reading those. She remembered the headlines, though—including those saying Redmond had left most of his fortune to a son nobody had known about.
“What was he like?” she asked.
“Redmond?” Liam shrugged. “He was just … Redmond.” He let out a low laugh, as though in response to a private joke. “He was quiet. Strong. Kind. Tough as hell. Simple. At least, we thought he was.”
She proceeded carefully. “I seem to remember something about the will. How some things came out that were … unexpected.”
He glanced at her as he continued to work on the yurt. “Unexpected. Yeah, I guess you could say that.” He applied a thin layer of glue to a crumpled cigarette box and affixed it to a kind of sheet Aria had made out of plastic bags. “He slept in his childhood bedroom from the time he was born until the day he died. Except for a few years when he was off in Montana.” He shook his head. “Never had a wife. Never had a girlfriend that we knew about. I mean … did we think it was odd? Yeah, sometimes. I guess. But … if he’d been gay, he might not have been the kind of guy who felt comfortable saying it. We figured it was his own private business. Turned out he never had anyone because he was in love with a married woman he met out in Montana. So in love with her that he was never interested in anyone else.” He considered that for a moment. “Can you imagine being in that kind of love? The kind where you’d rather be alone for the rest of your life than settle for anyone else?”
“No. I can’t,” she said honestly. Sometimes she thought that any kind of love—even the kind that flamed out quickly and came to earth in a painful, devastating crash—was beyond her grasp.
“Well. It must have been something,” he said.
They worked side by side for a while longer, and she thought he’d said everything he intended to. Then, just when she’d thought he had closed down on her, he started to talk again.
“Finding out I had a cousin I never knew about—that was a hell of a thing. Hated his fuckin’ guts when I met him. You want to know what’s the most crazy-ass thing about it? I didn’t start to like him until he stole my girlfriend.” He shook his head as though he still couldn’t believe that particular development.
“He … what? How did that play out?” Aria asked.
“Ah …” He shrugged. “She’s better off with him. I mean, sincerely. They’re more right for each other than she and I ever were. I was kind of a mess. I had some things to work out.”
“And did you?” she said. “Work them out, I mean?”
He glanced at her. “Mostly. But it’s fair to say I’m still a work in progress.”
“Aren’t we all?” she muttered.
Liam stayed for about an hour before he had to get back to his own work wrangling cattle, or whatever it was he did on the ranch.
When he was gone, the barn seemed more empty than it had before he’d arrived. Before today, she would have said that having a visitor in her studio while she was working on a piece would be intrusive and distracting. But she’d found it surprisingly soothing to listen to his voice while she worked. And he’d helped her make significant progress.
She found herself missing him almost immediately, and missing him made her wonder if and when he might come back. And that made her scowl in dismay.
Damn it.
If he thought he could worm his way into her heart and mind … then he was right. It was working. And she couldn’t let him do it. There was too much at stake. She just couldn’t go there.
It would have been so much easier if he’d just come here to get her into bed again. She would either say yes or no, and either way, they could move on without any confusion or complications.
Instead, he’d come here and talked to her as though they were friends, as though they had a relationship that went beyond the physical. He’d told her true things and had made her get to know him a little. Which was going to make it that much harder to walk away.
She tried to get back to work, but she was too distracted, her mind too focused on Liam and the way his voice had sounded, the way he’d looked …
She gave up with a sigh and plopped down onto a folding chair at her worktable. Then she pulled out her cell phone, and in an impulsive move, called Daniel Reed.
“Reed,” he said.
“Hi, Daniel. It’s Aria.”
“Oh. Hey. If you’re ready to get started on that skylight, I can—”
“It’s not the skylight. It’s Liam.”
“Ah. Just … wait a minute.”
“For what?”
“For me to get in girl-talk mode.” She heard him rustling around on the other end of the line—scrubbing at his face, maybe, or finding a comfortable seat—and then he said, “Okay. Shoot.”
“He … he tricked me into a goddamned date!” She hadn’t even realized that was what he’d done until she’d said it out loud. “He knew that if he asked me out, I’d say no, so he came to the studio and started talking and being all … all Liam … and that’s really not fair! How am I supposed to keep control of this situation if he’s going to trick me like that?”
“That bastard,” Daniel said, mock-serious.
“You’re not helping.”
“Sorry. I guess I’m a little confused about why it’s such a bad thing that you’re starting to like him. I mean, beyond the obvious thing about your taste …”
“Daniel.”
“Sorry. Again. But I’m serious. If you like him, and he likes you …”
She’d already chosen Daniel as the person she wanted to open up to about all of this, so she decided to tell him just one true thing, one bit of why a real relationship with Liam Delaney—or with anyone—would be a cataclysm.
“If we start to get to know each other—really know each other—then he’s going to find out some … things … about me that I’d rather not have anyone know. Because if he knows them, then things that are in the past won’t be in the past anymore. They’ll be here, now, and … I just can’t deal with that. Not now, and not ever.”
From Daniel’s silence, she guessed that he was taking a moment to adjust to this new information.
“The past is never really the past, Aria. Not when it’s affecting your present.”
“Very philosophical,” she said dryly.
“I mean it. Whatever the thing is that you don’t want people to know, it won’t go away just because people don’t know it.”
She felt the sting of tears in her eyes, and wiped at them with her fingers.
“Did you kill somebody?” he asked after a while.
“What? No!”
“Then I think there’s a chance he c
an handle whatever it is,” Daniel said.
“It’s not about what he can handle. It’s about what I can.”
“All right. Then, can you handle pushing away a guy you might have something good with if you could just get past your baggage and let it happen?”
She pressed her lips into a hard line and didn’t answer him.
“It’s something to think about,” he said.
Chapter Nineteen
Liam hadn’t meant to say all that stuff about Redmond. In fact, he found that the less he thought about Redmond, the easier life was. But he’d started talking, and it had just come out.
The fact was, he was still raw with grief, and the more he could push it down and think about other things, the easier it was to get through every day, doing his job and living his life.
During the first year or so after Redmond had died, Liam had sometimes sneaked into his uncle’s room just to sit, to feel the essence of the man in the space where he’d lived for so long.
But Sandra had finally packed up Redmond’s room, giving some of his things to Drew and putting the rest into boxes that were now stored in the garage.
After that, Liam had sometimes gone to visit with Redmond’s horse, Abby, when he’d wanted to feel close to the man. But Abby, who’d been growing old, had passed on about a year before. Now, the only place he could go was the cemetery.
He hadn’t been up to the cemetery in a while, but talking to Aria about Redmond had stirred something up in him again. He waited until he had to go into town on an errand—that way, he wouldn’t have to explain himself—and drove up to the graveyard at the top of Bridge Street, with its headstones and stone benches amid groves of trees, quiet except for the rustle of the breeze through the leaves.
Liam was pretty sure he was the only one in the family who still came up here. It wasn’t that the others didn’t care, or didn’t miss Redmond. But they’d moved on. If they knew how he still felt, how the loss of his uncle still tore at him, then the others would wonder why he hadn’t gotten past the grief as easily as they had. After all, Redmond was his uncle. It wasn’t like losing a father.
Except for Liam, it was exactly like losing a father.
Liam had Orin, of course, and Orin had been a solid and reliable father, as steady as the earth itself. But Liam had always suspected that he was his father’s third favorite son. Orin never would have said as much, but Liam could feel it. Ryan was the kind, principled, salt-of-the-earth one. Colin was the smart one.
And Liam was the other one.
Hell, if Liam were to talk to a therapist about it—which he’d never done and would never do—he would probably find out that he’d adopted the role of the family’s hot-tempered lunkhead because it was the only part that hadn’t already been cast. And maybe it had seemed like the only way to get his father’s attention.
But it hadn’t worked—not really. Orin had been busy with the ranch and with his other children, and Liam had felt angry and left out.
Redmond must have spotted that, because he’d stepped in where Orin had left off. Redmond had spent time with Liam one on one when Orin either hadn’t had the time or the interest. There had been camping trips, fishing. Redmond had been the one who’d taught Liam to ride.
Redmond had been the one who’d showed up when Liam was in high school and had needed a ride home from a party because he was too drunk to drive and didn’t want his parents to know.
Redmond was the one who’d talked to the other kid’s parents when Liam had gotten into yet another fight.
Redmond had been the one who had shown up to all of Liam’s football games. Orin had come to a lot of them, too. But Redmond had come to every one.
Liam settled in on a small granite bench next to Redmond’s grave. The weather was cool, with a light wind ruffling his hair. He pulled his jacket around him.
This cemetery wasn’t like others, with their strict rules about what could and could not be displayed on the graves. Here, families created informal shrines for their loved ones, with framed photos, mementos, handwritten letters, and other symbols of love and loss adorning the grave sites.
Liam thought that if it helped people feel better, it was probably good. But that wasn’t his style, so he didn’t bring anything when he came here. He wasn’t religious, and he wasn’t under the illusion that Redmond could somehow see the flowers or the letters from the great beyond.
Redmond was just gone.
A set of wind chimes hanging from a nearby tree tinkled in the breeze, and Liam found the sound unbearably eerie and sad. He found himself getting teary-eyed, as he always did, and he wiped his face with his hands.
“Damn it, Redmond.”
It wasn’t okay that he’d died, and it wasn’t okay that Liam was left behind feeling stuck with his grief, feeling so incapable of moving forward with his life.
When Drew McCray had shown up, having been named in the will, Liam had been seething with anger and jealousy. Mostly because he had felt like Redmond’s son, and the thought of someone else stepping forward to claim that status had been too much to take on top of the pain of loss.
As it had turned out, Liam and Drew had a certain amount in common. Both of them had been cut down by grief—Liam over a man he’d been close to, Drew over the father he’d never known and never would know. Both of them had reacted with anger. Both of them had shut down, unable to move on.
But lately, Drew had moved on, all right—with Liam’s ex. Hell, good for him. If that was what it took to break out of the cycle of anger and self-defeating behavior, then so be it.
At least one of them had gotten out.
Sometimes, Liam felt like he was ready to move on, too. Meeting Aria had made him think maybe he was ready to go forward—if not with her, then with someone.
He needed to stop being the angry Delaney and find a way to just be himself.
He sat there on the bench, alone in the cemetery except for the occasional squirrel scampering up a tree, and wondered what Redmond would do. But then he rejected that thought.
Redmond had failed to acknowledge his only son because he hadn’t wanted to rock anybody’s boat. Probably not the best role model to look to for guidance on self-improvement.
“Okay,” Liam said, wiping away the last of his tears and standing up from the bench. “Okay.”
He walked out of the cemetery, gravel crunching under his feet, to go back to the ranch and just get on with it.
Chapter Twenty
Christmas was only a few weeks away, and Aria had no one to shop for. Usually, that kind of thing didn’t bother her, but this year, in the wake of her dinner at the festively decorated Delaney house, she wished she could enjoy some of the trappings of the holiday the way other people did.
She couldn’t just randomly buy gifts for any of the adults surrounding her—Gen or Liam, or maybe Daniel—without making them feel obligated to reciprocate, and that was an awkwardness she just didn’t want to deal with.
But kids? That was another story. You could always buy Christmas gifts for kids, and nobody thought it was weird, or felt obligated, or wondered about your motives.
She’d been out walking on Main Street late on a Wednesday morning, enjoying the cool ocean air and the relative dearth of tourists, when she’d come across a toy store and had gotten the idea.
If she bought something for Breanna’s kids, Lucas and Michael, it might lift her spirits nicely, and she wouldn’t have to tell anyone that it was her only chance to participate in a holiday ritual other people took for granted. She could just say it was a thank you for the family’s hospitality.
She went into the store, exchanged polite greetings with the shopkeeper, and began browsing through the board games and kites and skateboards. She was just looking at a Lego set when she heard a voice behind her.
“I’m surprised to see you here.”
The voice alone was enough to send an electric tingle of warmth down her spine.
She turned, and there he was, t
hat sexy grin on his face, that long, tall body looking out of place amid the brightly colored toys.
“Liam.” She put down the Lego set and turned to him.
“Who are you shopping for?” he asked, nodding toward the box she’d just replaced on the shelf.
“Michael and Lucas. Kids and Christmas, you know … I just thought it would be fun.” She felt a little self-conscious, as though her explanation were transparent and he’d be able to see how pathetically lonely she was.
“Same here,” he said. “Plus, I wanted to pick up something for Ryan and Gen’s baby.”
“You’re Christmas shopping for a baby who hasn’t been born yet?” That was unexpectedly sweet, coming from a guy like Liam. She found herself charmed—even though she didn’t particularly want to be charmed.
“Yeah, well.” He looked at his feet, and that was charming, too, damn it—she could see the child he’d once been, shy and self-conscious and all boy.
“Since you’re here, you can give me some insight. What do your nephews like?”
They talked about that for a while. Michael liked arts and crafts, building, projects, that kind of thing. Lucas liked superheroes, particularly Spider-Man and the Hulk.
He told her that he didn’t know what you were supposed to buy for a not-yet newborn, he just knew that he wanted to get something to show his enthusiasm for being an uncle again.
With Aria’s help, he settled on a newborn-approved stuffed rabbit with legs that made a crinkling sound and ears that doubled as teethers.
Aria found an art set for Michael and a couple of action figures for Lucas, and they both paid for their purchases before emerging onto Main Street with their shopping bags in hand.
“Lunch?” he said.
Aria was surprised by the one word, seemingly coming out of nowhere. “I … what?”
“It’s almost noon,” he said. “I’m starving. You want to get some lunch?”
She’d vowed that she was not going to date him. Would lunch be a date, or would it just be lunch? A date would be planned in advance, wouldn’t it? Did the fact that this was so impromptu exempt it from potential date status?
