“You say the sweetest things.” I fake batted my eyelids.
“I’m just getting started, baby.”
We drove in relative silence. I surreptitiously studied his profile as he concentrated on the road. His strong jaw and slight stubble made me lose focus and start fantasising about what it felt like to kiss him. To stroke his rough cheek and feel those soft plump lips on mine. I watched as he turned the wheel, flexing the muscles in his arms and gripping tightly with his long tanned fingers. I wondered what else he could do with those fingers and I blushed, snapping my head back to look out of the window.
“You okay?” he said, reaching over to squeeze my knee.
“Yeah. Where are we going?”
He sighed and went back to glaring at the road ahead. “I thought about taking you to the chapel again, maybe cleaning the place up and having our first date there, but I wanted to do something a bit different. So, I’m taking you to one of my other favourite places.”
We pulled into a car park and I couldn’t stop myself, “A park?”
“Not just any park. This has a forty-acre woodland garden. Plus, it’s a royal park. If it’s good enough for Liz, it’s good enough for me.” He gave me a cocky smile and I narrowed my eyes at him.
“I never had you down as a conservationist.”
“I know a lot of hidden gems around these parts.”
Yeah, like disused buildings for illegal purposes. I narrowed my eyes at him.
“This is different though,” he said as if he’d read my mind and he gestured to the greenery outside his window. “My mum used to bring us here when we were kids. I think the overdose of testosterone in our house got to her sometimes, so she brought us here to feed the ducks and connect with nature. Probably to regain some of her sanity too after a day of refereeing our fights.”
We got out of the van and Ryan grabbed a large backpack from the back and hauled it onto his back. It looked like he’d packed enough for a weekend stay.
“Are we hiking?” I asked, thinking I’d probably need those flats now, instead of the heels I’d got on. I rooted through my bag and dropped the ballet pumps onto the floor and then kicked my heels off, storing them in the footwell, and slipping into the much more comfortable and foot-friendly sparkly slippers.
Ryan laughed at me as I changed my footwear. “I guess I should’ve told you to wear shoes for walking. I didn’t think. I’m not used to all this girls’ stuff,” he said, pointing to my feet.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m always prepared. Like a boy scout.” I didn’t want him to feel bad about bringing me here. He’d obviously put thought into the date.
“You mean a girl scout?” he corrected.
“Yeah, that’s what I said.”
He chuckled and held his hand out for me to take. “Come on, Dora. Let’s go and explore. Then we can find a good spot to eat this picnic my brother, Connor, packed for us.”
I raised my eyebrow at him. The Hardy boys were full of surprises. “Your brother, Connor, made a picnic? For us?”
“He can be an asshole sometimes, but what he doesn’t know about baking isn’t worth knowing. He could give Mary Berry a run for her money.”
I was shocked he even knew who Mary Berry was. “Is this the same Connor who works with you at the garage?”
“Yep. He’d always wanted to go to catering college, but then Mum died, and he dropped out. Guess we all made sacrifices for the good of the family back then.”
Damn, this boy was continually throwing me off my game.
“Your dad must be really proud of you all.”
I gave his hand a squeeze as he led me along a path, through trees decorated with blossom and bushes of flowers with the most vibrant fuchsia pinks, lilacs, and splashes of yellow that I’d ever seen. I was clueless on the names. Unless it was a rose or a lily, I didn’t stand a chance at guessing.
All I knew was this place was beautiful. Nature at its best. And Ryan was sharing it with me.
“He’s the best. He’s had to put up with a lot over the years,” Ryan said, starting to open up to me. “When Mum died, he pulled us all together. Then it all went off with Liam and Connor-”
“He doesn’t live round here, does he? Your oldest brother, I mean.” I wanted to ask what’d happened, but I didn’t want it to look like I was gossiping. Word around town was Liam left after a fight with the family.
“No. I see him every few weeks. He still won’t speak to Connor, though. I guess walking in and finding your fiancée in your little brother’s bed will do that to you.”
“Oh my God! That’s awful! Did he still marry her?”
“No. And in Connor’s eyes, he did Liam a favour showing him what she was really like.”
I was starting to get a clearer picture of the Hardy family and why Sean was so wary of Connor when I met him. “I think he could’ve found a better way to out her as the bitch she obviously was.”
Ryan laughed. “I didn’t much care for her. Couldn’t understand what Liam saw in her to be honest. She was a spoilt brat.”
“Well, they do say love is blind.”
“It must be, ‘cos when she left she took the contents of his bank account with her and he didn’t even try to get it back.”
I winced. “Ouch! That’s brutal.”
“Yep. He definitely dodged a bullet there.”
I knew this park would be a winner. I’d asked Connor for his advice on the best place to take a girl to get her to open up and he’d nailed it. Even baked a shit load of scones and fucking fairy cakes to help me ‘seal the deal’ as he put it. I wasn’t lying when I said Mum loved this park, she did. We usually tore through the gardens at high speed though, back in the day. Racing to get to the open space so we could kick the football around. Mum would’ve loved a daughter like Emily. Someone to share all her lighter moments with. They were mostly lost on us.
I could tell Emily was interested in what I had to say. She hung on my every word and asked questions about my brothers, genuinely interested in my response. I’d never really told anyone about the Liam-Britney-Connor shit-show, because I was a guy. We never talked about feelings and shit. My mates heard what happened, thought, ‘fucking hell,’ the same as I did, and we all moved on. Well, all of us except Liam, but that was another story.
I held Emily’s hand as we strolled amongst the flowers and tried to keep a clear head and not pull her into the undergrowth and show her what I really wanted to do. The place was more or less deserted, save for a few dog walkers and the odd elderly couple. When we came to the little decked pond area, she lit up like a Christmas tree and we stopped to watch the ducks. I would’ve offered to feed the fuckers, but I didn’t want to attract them over to us. I hated the snappy beaked little shits.
“So, I know a little more about you. But I know nothing about how the whole Renaissance thing started. What happened there?” she asked, no doubt fishing for some gossip.
“What, you mean that period of discovery, also known as the rebirth, from the middle ages? Or my three asshole friends from high school?” I replied, stalling for time.
She gave me a playful slap on the arm. “Your friends, dummy. Unless you have a burning desire to give me a history lesson.”
“My knowledge of the real Renaissance ends there I’m afraid.” I gave her my best cheeky smile and then nudged her arm. “What do you want to know?”
“I guess, how you all got to where you are. What made you friends? I know you were always the popular guys at school, but sometimes I watch you with Brandon or Finn and you’re just so different.” She shrugged and went back to watching the ducks.
“Popular? I think you went to a different school than us.”
“Oh, shut up. You guys had the whole school wrapped around your little fingers and you know it. You said jump, and everyone asked how high.”
She wasn’t wrong there.
“Apart from you.”
“Apart from me. But I noticed you.” She leaned against the wood
en fencing, watching a family of ducks swim past us.
“I noticed you too.” I leant across and rubbed my nose against hers. She gave a low laugh and pulled away shyly.
“Are you trying to distract me?”
“Is it working?” I smirked.
“Maybe.”
I thought about getting her off track, and I put my arm around her waist to pull her closer to me. Then I remembered that this date was also a chance to get her to tell me about Danny and the accident. To open up about her dad too. To do that, I needed to open up as well.
“We weren’t always the popular kids.” I sighed. I didn’t like trips down memory lane at the best of times, but today, I had to learn to suck it up. “I guess we were the misfits of middle school who just happened to find each other at the right time in our lives. I was the kid whose mum died, and Zak was the first one to talk to me like I wasn’t a leper. He had a PlayStation at home and we couldn’t even afford an Atari, so I started going to his house most days after school to play Street Fighter and stuff like that. His mum and dad are pretty cool. His little sister is a pain in the ass, but then every family’s got one, right?”
“Like me, you mean.” She gave a sad smile and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask her about Danny. “What about Brandon?” she said, interrupting my thoughts.
“Brandon was always the angry kid. Can’t say I blamed him. He was left on his own when he was three for five fucking days while his mum got high at some crack den in London. Social services picked him up after a neighbour gave them the tip-off. They found him scrabbling through the bins for food, caked in his own shit. Don’t tell him I told you that, by the way. He’d kick my ass if he knew I’d talked about it.”
“That’s heart-breaking.”
“Yep. Good job his Nan stepped up to take care of him. Otherwise, he’d have been chewed up into the system and spit out at eighteen. He has issues, but he hasn’t turned out too bad considering.” I watched the ducks as they waddled back onto land. The parents fussing over their ducklings and fluffing up their feathers. Even animals took better care of their young than Brandon’s mum had. The woman truly was a piece of work.
“Does he still see his mum?”
“I don’t think she’d even recognise him if he walked up to her in the street, wearing a T-shirt that said ‘I’m your son.’ I don’t think she even cares.” Emily scoffed and shook her head. I guess her mum wasn’t looking quite so bad now compared to Brandon’s egg donor.
“That’s so sad.”
“He’s fine.” That was a fucking understatement, but I wasn’t about to wade into the murky waters of the Mathers’ family history and bring us both down. So, I moved onto the last of our crew. “Finn didn’t speak for the first seven years of his life. Not to adults, anyway. His parents palmed him off on so many different counsellors, we all lost count. He’s always loved art though. It helped him to communicate, and then, once he joined our little gang, it didn’t matter if he stayed silent for weeks on end or chatted complete shit about abstract-expressionism or neo-classical whatever. We just let him do his thing. Turns out overpriced psycho-babble is no match for a decent set of friends and someone taking the time out to really get to know you.”
“Wow.”
“Like I said, we were the misfits.”
“And the parties? How did they come about?” She really wanted to get to the nitty-gritty.
“We all wanted to make something of ourselves. When we sat down and put our heads together, the party thing kinda made sense. I do numbers. It’s my thing. So the money side was mine.”
“And the gambling,” she added with a hint of sarcasm.
“It’s all numbers. Who else is gonna manage those odds and get the money rolling in? Zak has the computer know-how. He worked all the technology; messaging people, getting word out there and setting us up on social media. He bagged that D.J. gig from the start too. If we left it to Brandon, we’d all be listening to hard-core rap, gothic rock or dark metal. Finn wanted to do his thing. We were never gonna argue with that. And Brandon? He has three main skills; fighting, drinking and women. He had the last two already covered, so we went with the fighting. It channels his negative energy and we all make a lot of money.”
“You’ve got it all covered,” she said, using our chosen saying with her response.
“Exactly.” I grinned. I was proud of what we’d built. We were four working-class lads with nothing, but now, we were on our way to better things.
“And Danny? Where did he come into all this?” And here it was. My golden opportunity to manoeuvre the conversation round to where I needed it to go.
“He came to a few parties, helped us with some of the legal stuff.”
“Legal?” She scoffed, giving me the side-eye. “What would Danny know about that?”
“He helped me check out venues. Made sure the floor wouldn’t collapse on us all. You know, logistics and shit.”
“He never talked about it. Not to me.” I could tell she didn’t quite believe me. Or maybe she didn’t want to think about her brother being the fifth Renaissance man.
“He didn’t want you involved. None of us did.”
She bit her lip in thought, then turned to me. My stomach flipped over at what she was gonna say, because judging from the look on her face, it wasn’t good.
“Kian said something the other day, when we saw him at the café in town.”
“Kian talks a lot of shit,” I spat back, knowing exactly what she was going to say. Kian had already given me the heads-up. “The guy was born with no filter.”
“I know, but he said that it was you that warned people away from me. Not Danny. I didn’t believe him. In fact, I don’t even know why I’m bringing this up. It’s crazy.”
“It’s not crazy,” I said, hoping a dose of reality might work in my favour. “It’s true. Danny didn’t want you involved in the parties…” I took a deep breath and jumped off that tall as fuck cliff into the abyss. “But I didn’t want anyone else near you.”
She frowned, not getting what I was saying at all. “I don’t-”
“I didn’t want some other douche-bag dating you. I noticed you, Em. I wanted you. So, I put the word out that you were untouchable.”
She sucked in a breath. “What? I don’t get it? I didn’t think I even registered on your radar. I was Danny’s gawky little sister.”
“You were mine. Even back then, I knew you were mine.” I tried to look her in the eye. I wanted her to see that I meant what I said, but she stared straight ahead to avoid me.
“Ryan, that’s crazy, and weird, definitely insane and I should be kicking your ass for totally destroying my high school experience. I went to the end of year eleven dance with Effy as my date. It was mortifying.”
I shook my head, trying to look regretful, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t give a fuck. I did what I did and I still stood by it. The girl was mine. She was too young to be with me back then, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand by and watch some goofy kid muscle in and take her away from me.
“Seriously, I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought I wasn’t good enough, Ryan. That’s a really shitty thing to do.” She looked at me now, and the pain in her eyes made me doubt myself a little. I pushed that weak motherfucker to the back of my mind right away.
“You were too good, Em. I’m not gonna apologise.”
Shit, this was going downhill fast. I needed to put the brakes on this.
“Well, it’s lucky for me I had good friends and an awesome brother. It didn’t destroy my self-confidence… Much.”
“I’m an asshole, Em. I’ve never claimed to be anything else.”
“You are an asshole.”
“But I’m your asshole.” She tried to keep the stern look on her face, but I was winning her back round, I could tell.
“I could make things very difficult for you, you know.” She narrowed her eyes at me in a threat.
I loved that fire in her. She probably
could make things very difficult for me. I already had the worst case of blue-balls I’d ever known. My girl could do untold damage. I’d take it though, because it was her. “And I’ll love every minute of it,” I said, egging her on.
“Ugh. You frustrate the hell out of me sometimes.”
“But you love me.” Shit that fell out of my mouth before my brain could engage. “You love it,” I said, hoping to claw back some self-respect.
The wide eyes she’d given me at my first statement softened slightly and she grinned. “I’ll tolerate you. For now.”
“In my defence, Danny didn’t try to stop me. He was all for me warning them off. I think he liked that we all protected you.”
Nice swerve, Hardy. Let’s get off that four letter L word and back on track.
“I miss him.” She sighed, so I pulled her closer into me and kissed her cheek.
“I was with him, you know. That last night.”
She gasped and turned to face me. Her eyes back to saucers again.
“What happened?”
I took her hand and led her to a clearing where we could sit on the grass. I plonked my rucksack down and took out the blanket Dad had insisted I pack. Apparently, women don’t like sitting directly on the grass. Who knew?
Emily sat down, and I sat next to her, taking her hand in mine. I wanted to offer her some kind of comfort as I explained to her all about what’d happened. That, and I just couldn’t seem to keep my hands off her. I needed to keep touching her whenever she was near.
I told her about Danny only drinking Diet Coke. That he hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol and didn’t do drugs, ever. I also told her that someone else had picked Danny up. Danny wasn’t driving that night. Or at least, he wasn’t when he got into the car.
“That makes no sense.” She furrowed her brow as if the answers would come to her here in this park. “Danny was found in the driver’s seat. There wasn’t anybody else there. And the reports-”
“Did you see the reports?”
Bingo. We have a winner.
“No. But Dad said the coroner found all this… Stuff in his system.”
And I call bullshit.
Renegade Hearts (Rebels of Sandland Book 1) Page 17
