On the Market (The Ballard Brothers of Darling Bay Book 1)

by Rachael Herron

“Then meet me there.” Risking it, he turned to walk back to his car.

  “What did you say on the diary cam?”

  Over his shoulder, he said, “I’ll tell you over dinner!”

  He heard her balcony door close, and all he could do was hope she’d follow.

  At the treehouse, it looked as if the crew had left—all their cars were gone, and the trailer parked to the right of the old garden was dark. The wind sighed in the oak trees, but everything else was quiet.

  He waited, leaning against his car.

  Three minutes behind him, her rental car crunched gravel as it came up the dirt driveway.

  The wind caught strands of her ponytail, throwing them in her eyes. “It’s cold out here.” She pushed her hair back.

  “Then we go inside. We’ll get some pizza in you, and then you’ll feel better.”

  “Feelings are stupid,” she said lightly. “But we can try it.”

  Liam led the way inside, his heart clattering in his chest. He was nervous. It was silly, and he felt fourteen years old and stupid, but he liked it. “Where do you want to eat? Dining room? Kitchen? Up in the treehouse’s treehouse?”

  She shook her head. “Too cold. I feel like I have a chill in my bones. In the parlor? Is that okay?”

  “Of course it is.”

  In the parlor, he put the pizza box on the long, low table in front of the dark green sofa they’d sat on before, the one she loved. “Here we go.”

  She sat, her movements stiff.

  Liam took off his jacket. “Want to wear this?”

  “Come on.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “The cameras aren’t on. You don’t have to try to be amazing.”

  “Try? It just comes natural.” He draped the jacket around her shoulders. “Just wear it for a minute. You’ll warm up.” He opened the pizza box. “This’ll help, too.”

  She took a slice.

  He did the same.

  God, this was awkward. What the hell had he been thinking? He should have just eaten at home, alone, while Timbo spent the night as his sleep-over. He could have had three beers on the couch and fallen asleep to the sound of the news.

  Felicia used her slice to point at the pink mantelpiece. “I wonder if the fireplace works.”

  “The inspection came back clear on it, but I’d get a sweep out here to check it before you light a fire.”

  “I’ve always wanted to live in a house with a real fireplace.”

  “As opposed to…”

  “The gas kind. Like I have in my condo. It seems like cheating.” She pulled an olive off her slice and popped it in her mouth. “I wish we could light it right now.”

  “We’ll just pretend it’s burning.”

  “Pretend.” Her voice was dull. “Sure.”

  “You don’t like pretend? Seems to me like lots of folks prefer it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Liam pushed the six pack closer to her and chose one of the two IPAs for himself. “My whole business, sometimes. People tell themselves what they want to buy, where they want to live, but really what they’re talking about is who they want to pretend they are. They think with a bigger house, they’ll be more important. Or with a better kitchen, they think they’ll be a better cook. But it’s all just pretend. They walk into their new houses the exact same people who locked the door behind them at the last house.”

  Felicia chose a bottle of the dark beer. “So we both deal in lies.”

  She was distractingly beautiful. She had no makeup on, her lips chewed clean of lipstick. Her hair was caught back in that ponytail, strands of it hanging loose. She was wearing what looked like black yoga pants and his jacket, and to him, she looked perfect.

  What had she just said? Lies.

  That wasn’t it, not exactly. Liam took a sip of his beer as he thought. “Maybe we both deal in hope. Fantasies. The people who watch your shows hope that they can someday have lives like the ones they see. And the people I work with who move from house to house are hoping that they’ll find what they’re looking for.”

  “That’s a nice way of putting it. I guess that a lot of people who watch our shows just want to escape their own lives and dream of something different.”

  They chewed their way through two slices of pizza each. The silence wasn’t exactly companionable, but it wasn’t as awkward as it felt at the start.

  As they picked up their third sizes, Liam said, “Your girl Anna grilled me today after you left.”

  “She’s good at that. I trained her myself. The diary cam?”

  “She asked me what my biggest fear was.”

  “Oooh, that’s one of my favorites. What did you say?”

  “That’s the problem. I was too truthful. I don’t want it to be aired in the show.” Liam felt a tightness in his chest.

  “Let’s talk about it.” She sounded like she was speaking from a script. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

  “And I don’t want you to look at the footage.”

  “What, are you a serial killer? Because if it you are, we should pay you even more than we already are. You’d kill in the ratings.” She paused. “Get it?”

  “Come on.” He thought about taking another bite of pizza, but his stomach was suddenly tense.

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “It’s not. It’s just really personal.”

  Her eyes lit up, as if he’d said something that pleased her. Perfect. The more embarrassed he was, the more money her show would make? No. That wasn’t right. “Come on, how would you feel?”

  “What?” She carefully placed her slice back on the paper plate.

  “You tell me yours.” Liam was suddenly sure this was the right thing to say. “Your biggest fear.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A pause. “I think I already did.”

  Liam shook his head. He wasn’t going to let her off that easily. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”

  She heaved a long sigh and slid off the couch to the rug. She dropped backward dramatically and stared at the ceiling. “That whole…”

  “Yeah?”

  Felicia turned her head and looked at him. “No.”

  “What?”

  “I told you already. If you didn’t hear then, I don’t need to repeat it.”

  “Your biggest fear is that you can’t handle real feelings?” That was nothing. Everyone felt that way.

  She didn’t answer— she just kept her eyes on his.

  He shifted his weight on the sofa, wanting to lie on the floor next to her but feeling it might scare her. “What about nuclear war? What about plague? Or locusts? Or a plague of locusts?”

  “Those are just things to worry about in the middle of the night. I can’t do anything about them. Feelings are something I should be able to do something about.”

  “I wish feelings worked that way.” His didn’t, anyway. They were messy. Part of being human.

  “Will you tell me what you said in the diary? Please?”

  “You’ll take it out? If I tell you?”

  For a long moment, Felicia was silent. Her eyes stayed on his, and he felt a hollow in the middle of his abdomen, an emptiness that food couldn’t fill.

  Finally, she turned onto her side so that she faced him and propped her head on her hand. “Okay, I’ll keep it out.”

  “Really?”

  “If you tell me what you said. Then yes. Natasha won’t see it.”

  Oh, god.

  But why the hell not? After all, he’d pretended he’d been speaking to her when he said it. “I have this dumb fear about people leaving me. That they won’t think I’m lovable enough to stay.”

  “Go on.”

  He grimaced. “Do I have to?”

  “Is this about the last girlfriend?”

  “Brandy? I suppose so, that’s why it came up, but that’s not what it’s about.”

  She stayed silent and kept her gaze on his. She nodded, and that was all he needed
to know, that she was with him.

  “Everyone knows our parents left, first my dad, then a few years later, my mom. But no one knows why. No one knows why our step-dad Bill kept us after my mom was gone. Except for me.”

  “What happened?”

  God help him. He wanted to tell her. “Before they split up, I heard my parents arguing. My dad thought they could make more money cooking if they went south, into the valley.”

  “He was a cook?”

  “Yeah, not like that. They cooked meth. One my first memories is my mother bundling us out of the house as fast as she could go, my dad screaming at her that it was safe. It didn’t blow up, but it could have.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “That’s not even the bad part. My mom wouldn’t go south with him because he said he’d only take Aidan.”

  He watched it register in her eyes. “Not you. Or Jake.”

  Liam nodded. “He left, and she got as clean as she could. Everyone thinks that Bill married my mom because he loved her, but that was never true, at least in the romantic sense. He’d been born gay, but that was a different time. He hadn’t come out yet, and they were good friends. The marriage helped both of them. She let him adopt us, and she was his beard for a while.”

  “But this is California.”

  He shrugged. “Darling Bay was a small town. It was different here in the eighties. It worked for them. Then she met a guy who got her hooked again.”

  “Oh, Liam.” She reached out and touched his wrist lightly.

  “My brothers were always outside, building something, falling off what they built, breaking limbs, making flying machines. I hung out with them sometimes, but I’d gotten pretty used to watching my parents, to making sure that they didn’t fall asleep and hurt themselves. So I was the kid with the book, reading somewhere close by. No one ever noticed me. That’s why I was the one lucky enough to be privy to the fight my mom and Bill had, right before she left. She wanted to take Jake with her. Just Jake.”

  “But…not Aidan? And I don’t get it. Why not you?”

  That was the question he’d been trying to answer his whole life. “Bill threatened to have her arrested for child abandonment if she left us behind, said that he’d have the courts give all of us to him permanently. She fled then, leaving all of us.”

  Felicia moved quickly, sitting up and crossing her legs. She leaned forward. “That’s awful.”

  “It was. I think it broke Bill’s heart in a lot of ways. He’d married her in order to help her. He loved her in his way. He got good and drunk for a while, until one night I pointed out that if he kept drinking that hard, he’d lose all three of us, too.” The memory came back then, the image as clear as if it had happened last week. Bill, sitting in that small yellow kitchen, his eyes red with both tears and anger. What about you, boy? How the hell do two parents just forget about a kid like you? Bill had hugged him tightly and sent him to bed. “He told me I mattered, too. The next morning, he was sober and he stayed that way till the day he died.”

  “It sounds like you made a difference to him. Like he loved you.”

  “Yeah.” Liam twisted a cheese packet. “He did love us. All of us. So hell. I don’t know what my damn problem is.”

  “Well, Bill died, which is a kind of abandonment, right? Your dad didn’t choose you, and your mom didn’t choose you, either. Those were the two people who were supposed to choose you the hardest. Sounds pretty obvious to me. When Brandy left, it must have felt just like that.”

  A thick knot rose in Liam’s throat, but it wasn’t about Brandy. It was about the way Felicia was listening to him. “Sure.”

  “What actually happened to your parents?”

  “My mom went back to my dad, and while they were sleeping, their lab exploded. The firefighters said they wouldn’t have felt a thing.” One of Liam’s most shameful memories was hearing the fire captain say that to him, and wishing that maybe they’d felt it a little. Maybe just a tiny little bit.

  “Holy shit. I’m so sorry.”

  “Anyway.” He took a breath. “I never told my brothers I heard them say that. Aidan doesn’t know our mom didn’t want him, and Jake doesn’t know our dad would have left him behind. And neither of them need to know I’d have been chosen by no one. They’re loyal to a fault. It would hurt them too much.”

  “Loyalty’s a wonderful trait.”

  The knot in his throat eased. “Yeah. Anyway, I guess that’s why we’re all so involved with at-risk youth. The money that we’re making from the show, all of it, will go into finally opening Ballard Youth, an after-school program that we’ve been trying to make happen for years.”

  Felicia nodded. “That’s why you have Timbo.”

  “His mom chose meth over him, too.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “Normal people, non-addicts, don’t.” He picked up his beer and slid off the sofa so that they were both sitting on the rug. “What were your parents like?”

  Felicia hugged her bent legs. “Dad was MIA from the start, and my mom worked her ass off till she died of a heart attack at forty-eight.”

  “I’m sorry.” The words were so inadequate.

  “Me, too. She was the hardest worker I ever met. She held down at least two and sometimes three jobs at a time. She made sure we never lost the house, and she made sure I had whatever I ridiculously thought I needed as a teenager. The newest jeans jacket, the stupid shoes. I thought I deserved those things because I was a latchkey kid from age five.”

  “My mom was always home, and then when she was gone, Bill was there. I always envied latchkey kids their freedom. We didn’t even lock the door.” He paused. “Still don’t, now that I think about it.”

  “You don’t lock your door?”

  “It’s Darling Bay.”

  She tugged at a silver chain around her neck, pulling it out of her shirt. “See this? My house key from then.”

  “Literally? The same key from when you were a kid?”

  “The exact same one. I always wear it. Look, my mom had a word stamped on there in tiny letters.”

  He looked. Sure enough, in tiny all-caps, was the word HOME.

  “She wanted to make sure I knew it wasn’t just a house. That she worked so hard so we could have a home.” Felicia’s posture changed as her shoulders rolled forward. She dropped the key back into her shirt, and she got smaller. “It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized I might have been a latchkey kid because I wanted those expensive things—clothes and shoes and a bike and a computer—because my mom wanted to make me happy.”

  “That’s not—” Liam wanted to reach for her, to unwrap her from the unhappy ball she’d become, but he had a feeling if he touched her, she’d snap.

  “It’s fine. I’m fine. That’s where I got my love of television. She’d call me from whatever job she was at to make sure I was home. She didn’t like me having people over, and she wasn’t comfortable with me going to friends’ houses, so I was alone. Just me and whatever sitcom or soap opera I was most into at the time. I fell in love with every hero on TV. Kind of the same way I fall in love with the stars on reality TV, too.” She didn’t feel stupid for saying it. He was listening to her. When was the last time someone had really done that, had listened so intently to her?

  “So television is your family.”

  Felicia’s mouth became a perfect O. “Oh, my god.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  He was right. Holy crap. It wasn’t just that she liked television because she’d watched so much of it as a kid. It was that television actually felt like family.

  That was why she was loyal to it, why she was so loyal to her job. That’s why she’d been able to forgo relationships and romantic vacations—she was involved with TV at work, and television shows at home. “That’s the most succinct way of putting it I’ve ever heard. It kind of makes me feel…”

  “Better, knowing that?”

  “No. Like a complete loser, for never re
ally seeing that before.” At the moment, she had seventeen programs saved on her iPad. Those weren’t for work, or for research. They were comfort viewing.

  “You’re not a loser.”

  Television was her addiction. Her drug. “Oh, my god, that is sad.”

  “Felicia—”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She would think about it later, when she was safely alone. She would figure out what to do with this new information. “If that’s okay.”

  “Anything you want is okay.”

  That felt nice to hear. She smiled at him.

  He didn’t smile back. He just looked at her.

  The air got thicker, warmer. Her chest heated.

  “Thanks,” Felicia managed.

  Liam blinked, long and slow, keeping his eyes shut for half a second too long, opening them just as slowly. “You’re welcome. But I can’t remember for what. I lost track of the conversation.”

  Yeah, so did she. She wasn’t thinking about the show, not anymore.

  All she was thinking about was him kissing her again, like he had on her balcony.

  Him kissing her hard.

  And then, as if he could hear her wishing, he did.

  He moved fast with a low growl that sent a shiver through her. Their mouths fit—she hadn’t remembered that wrong. He kissed her hard and she kissed him back, and when his tongue stroked hers she couldn’t keep from groaning. He tasted like hops and pineapple and she felt like she would never get enough of him. His mouth trailed down her neck, and she turned, impatient to have his lips against hers.

  She twisted sideways, and then he was above her, his length pressed against hers. His knee went between hers, and she arched her hips upward, moving against his leg.

  His eyes were darker blue now. “We should probably—”

  “Mmm?” She could think of several things they should do. But she was not going to sleep with Liam on a rug that was a hundred years old.

  But maybe on a sofa that was about the same age? That would be okay.

  Liam pulled back and looked at her, as if trying to gauge exactly what she needed.

  She wriggled sideways, out from under him, and then stood. He stood with her. He dropped his mouth to her neck again, pushing aside the errant strands, kissing his way up to her ear. “I want you,” he said.