“Sure. Anything, Dad.”
“Will you pass out Halloween candy to the trick-or-treaters tonight? There should be a bag of chocolates on the counter in the kitchen.”
Her father had always loved celebrating Halloween in Langley Park. Em forced a smiled. “Yeah, Dad, I can hand out the candy to the trick-or-treaters.”
She settled her father into bed, took one last look at the photograph on the end table, and turned to open the front door. Before her hand even reached the handle, the door swung open, and she was face-to-face with Anita Benson.
“Mrs. Benson, I didn’t expect…”
Anita narrowed her eyes and met Em’s gaze. Twelve years may have passed, but the woman’s smug, self-righteous expression was as fresh as ever. “Look who finally made it back to Langley Park.”
Em opened her mouth to speak but shut it when nothing came out.
Anita was dressed in blue nursing scrubs. She was holding a dolly with an oxygen canister. “I’ve come to swap out your father’s oxygen tank. I hope you haven’t upset him. He’s had a rough couple of weeks.”
Em bit the inside of her cheek.
“I assume you’re here to help sell your father’s house?”
Em lifted her chin. “That’s between me and my dad.
Anita’s eyebrows shot up. “I see. Well, as far as your father’s care goes, you should know a nurse will be in every day to check his oxygen and make sure he’s taking his medications.”
“Are you his nurse? I thought you worked at the hospital.”
“My, my! You have been gone a long time. I left the hospital years ago. I only work part-time now. I’m here at the Senior Living Campus three days a week. It looks like we’ll be seeing a lot of each other while you’re back.”
Anita Benson was the last person Em wanted to run into at the Senior Living Center. The woman’s pointed gaze oozed with judgment. Em wanted to yank that oxygen tank off its dolly and hit her over the head with it, but she clasped her hands in front of her. “Thank you for helping my father, Mrs. Benson.”
“Why, it’s the least I could do. He’s been through so much. And all on his own.”
Anita’s words twisted like a knife in her heart, but they also added fuel to the fire of urgency burning inside her chest. She had to figure out what happened that night. She had to show her father that her injury wasn’t his fault. And now that she was back, she was going to learn the truth and show everyone she hadn’t squandered her talent and thrown her life away.
Em found a second bottle of Teeling Irish Whiskey in the pantry, poured herself a glass, then popped a miniature Snickers bar into her mouth. She thought about the run-ins with the security guard and Anita Benson. She had to learn the truth, but where to start?
She went up to her room and braided her hair into an elaborate inverted fishtail braid. The floor was still littered with reminders of her past, and her fingers moved like the gears of a clock as she tried to recall the last thing she could remember from the night at Sadie’s Hollow. But the sound of someone knocking on the front door broke her concentration.
She went downstairs, flipped on the outdoor light, and opened the door to find a pint-sized little girl dressed as Harry Potter. “You are my first trick-or-treater.”
The kid cocked her head to the side. “Your light’s off. Nobody will knock on your door if your house is dark.”
A smirk lit Em’s face. She liked this little smart-ass. “You knocked.”
That seemed to stump the mini wizard. Em bit back a chuckle and held out the large bowl of candy. The little girl’s skeptical expression was replaced with one of delight. The kid started thumbing through the chocolates when a man’s voice called out, “Em, is that you?”
It was surreal to hear someone other than her father call her by her nickname. After leaving Langley Park, she had gone by Mary Michelle. It was easier. She needed to distance herself from the person she was and dropping her nickname had been the first step in letting go of her dreams.
“It is.”
The little girl grabbed a few chocolates and skipped down the porch steps. Em followed behind but stopped on the bottom step.
“It’s Ben Fisher,” the man replied.
Though she hadn’t seen him for well over a decade, Em knew damned well it was Zoe Stein’s older half-brother, Ben. She had known him her whole life. He used to make pillow forts for them in the Stein’s living room. Her gaze traveled past Ben and over to the sidewalk where she saw a willowy blonde, Barbie-look-alike standing next to the last two people she ever wanted to lay eyes on, Zoe Stein and Michael MacCarron.
Barbie walked up and stood next to Ben, and Em clenched her fists.
“Em, this is my wife, Jenna, and our daughter, Kate.” He gestured to the smiling Barbie doll and the mini Harry Potter who was now petting a dog in the front yard.
“Em,” the little girl echoed then glanced back at Zoe. “Is this one of your favorite gingers, Auntie?”
Em vibrated with anger. Who the hell was Zoe of all people to tell her niece that she, she was one of her “favorite gingers”?
The air hung heavy and charged as if the tiniest of sparks could ignite a massive explosion. Em looked away from the little girl and settled her simmering gaze on Zoe, who had opened her mouth to speak, only to snap it shut.
Jenna-Barbie took a few steps forward and extended her hand. “I love your hair.”
Em turned her attention to the tall woman and, without thinking, shook her hand.
“Maybe sometime you could show me how to do that,” she continued, gesturing to Em’s braid. “Kate’s obsessed with braids, and I’m sure she’ll be asking me to do her hair like yours when we get home tonight.”
“Yeah, sure,” Em answered with a forced smile. She was here to sell her father’s house and figure out what happened at Sadie’s Hollow. If she had even one shred of luck, this would be the first and last time she would see Ben Fisher and his Barbie dream house family.
Barbie was talking again, saying goodbye or something along those lines. But Em couldn’t concentrate on her words. Only a few yards away, Zoe and Michael stood slack-jawed as if they had seen a ghost.
The temperature seemed to drop. Em’s eyes darted back and forth between her two closest childhood friends. Michael’s gaze went to her left hand. She pulled her sweatshirt sleeves down so that only the tips of her fingers remained visible.
She knew what Michael was thinking, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of gawking at the jagged scar that spanned the length of her ring finger.
“I didn’t know,” Michael began, his words laced with apprehension.
His voice. God, she’d missed his voice. It was deeper now, different but still the same. It was like hearing a treasured song you had forgotten how much you’d loved.
Enough.
This is the man who abandoned you when you needed him the most. This is the man who kissed you then left you to go screw some slutty cheerleader.
Michael shifted his weight from foot to foot. “You’re—”
Em smirked. Michael MacCarron, always so at ease, always so in control, was talking like his mouth was full of marbles. A surge of triumphant heat filled her chest, prickly and hot, the anger wrapping tighter and tighter around her heart.
Michael stilled. “You’re back.”
His words hung in the air as the sound of children’s far-off laughter floated into the space between them. The anger burned hotter inside Em’s chest with each spoken syllable.
You’re back? That’s it? That’s what he has to say after all this time?
She could yell. She could call them selfish assholes. That’s what they were, right? She could tell them she had been stuck, unable to move forward because of their self-centered choices. They’d ditched her, left her, and she had paid the ultimate price for trusting them.
She met Michael’s gaze and remembered the boy with the auburn hair. She remembered her body pressed up against her house, staring a
t Micheal’s pressed against his house, laughing as they dared one another to run into the downpour and come over to the other side.
Michael always ran to her. He was always the one to brave the storm. Sopping wet, he’d sprint across their driveways and flatten his body against the side of the house next to her. Em could almost feel his wet shoulder pressing into hers as they laughed and listened to the rain, a symphony of sound—the drops echoing off the roof.
Em pushed the memory of a smiling Michael, water dripping down his cheeks, from her mind and let the anger take control.
Fuck them. Forget them. It didn’t matter that regret seemed to be wafting off them like the scent of roadkill decomposing in the hot sun. What they did was unforgivable.
Unforgivable.
The word rolled around her mind. It bolstered her resolve and annihilated any fond childhood memories from permeating the fortress of anger constructed around her heart.
She lifted her chin and met Michael’s gaze. Then, without a word, she walked back inside her house and slammed the door shut.
7
“Did you know she was back in town?”
Michael shook his head.
“Jesus, Michael! She never even opened any of the letters I sent her after she left for Australia.”
Michael crossed his arms and remembered the shoebox he had stashed in the back of his closet filled with letters stamped RETURN TO SENDER.
“Come on,” Michael said. “Let’s go talk in the carriage house.”
Nearly all the homes in Langley Park came with a carriage house, a separate one or two-story structure set back in the corner of the property. The size of a two car garage, most folks parked their vehicles inside and sometimes built out the second floor to be a storage room or even a studio apartment. Michael’s carriage house mirrored the carriage house on the MacCaslin’s property. Standing one story tall, Michael’s contained the Range Rover he drove in high school, a well-used punching bag, and his digital audio workstation for mixing and producing musical tracks.
“You don’t want to go in the house?” Zoe asked.
Michael shook his head and whistled for his golden retriever, Cody.
They walked down the packed gravel driveway in silence. The crunch of the tiny rocks sounded too loud to his ears. A light flicked on inside the MacCaslin Foursquare, but he didn’t dare look over at the house. He unlocked the side door of his carriage house and ushered Zoe inside as Cody padded in and curled up on an old futon against the back wall. He turned on a space heater and sat down in the chair at his workstation then swiveled around to see Zoe pacing back and forth.
She crossed her arms. “At least we know how she feels about us. I mean, Jesus, you just helped Dr. MacCaslin move into the Senior Living Campus. He didn’t mention anything to you about Em coming home?”
“You know he wouldn’t. After Em left for Australia, Bill barely spoke a word about her.”
Zoe tugged at the ends of her shoulder length hair. “Micheal, I know she lost a lot. I know she deserves to be angry. But we lost part of ourselves that night, too. I know it wasn’t the magnitude that Em lost, but, we—we paid for that night.”
“I know.”
“I couldn’t even make it at Gwyer College. My parents had to come and get me after the spring semester ended. I just couldn’t keep pretending I was okay. I thought being surrounded by total strangers would be the best thing for me, but…”
Michael met Zoe’s gaze. He knew all about Zoe’s breakdown, knew the guilt she carried over Em’s injury had become too much to bear.
“I know, Zoe. I know.”
“It’s taken me a long time to get here. To get to someplace where I don’t absolutely hate myself. If it wasn’t for my mom.” Zoe put her hands on her hips and raised her gaze to the ceiling. “I don’t know where I’d be.”
After Zoe’s breakdown at Gwyer, she shared the events of the night at Sadie’s Hollow with her mother. Zoe’s mom, Kathy Stein, a retired social worker, had worked with her daughter and Michael during the summer between their freshman and sophomore years of college.
Kathy never called it therapy, but every couple of days, she would call over to the MacCarron law practice in the town center where Michael was working for his father during the summer. She would ask if he could come over and assist her and Zoe in a gardening project. There would always be something heavy to lift or a lawn ornament to move. While the three of them worked in the Stein’s backyard, they would talk. At first, it was difficult for him to discuss his feelings, but after a few weeks, he’d found himself watching the phone at his father’s law practice, hoping the next call would be from Kathy Stein.
He never forgot Kathy’s words: You can’t force someone to forgive you, but you can learn to live with the knowledge that you did everything humanly possible to try and make it right.
Zoe patted the hood of his old Range Rover. “I can’t believe you still have this.”
“She does great in the snow and ice,” he answered, but that wasn’t the only reason he kept the old car.
Zoe nervously ran her hand over the hood. “I thought this would be easier. You know, seeing Em for the first time. I didn’t think I’d stand there like some sort of dunderfuck.”
“Jesus, Zoe,” Michael said and shook his head. “Where do you come up with these words?”
She brushed a tear away and released a shaky breath. “We never wanted anything terrible to happen to Em. We were young. We could have made better choices, but what’s happened has happened. We spent years reaching out to her. We tried to apologize.”
Zoe was right, but still—just seeing Em nearly tore his heart out. The guilt and shame seeped back into his chest as fresh as the morning they found her sprawled across The Steps to Hell.
Zoe wiped her cheeks. “I better go.”
“Do you want me to give you a lift?”
“No, my car’s just over at Ben’s. I think the walk would do me good.”
A cab pulled up in front of Em’s Foursquare as Michael and Zoe made their way down the driveway. They stood in the shadow of the house and watched Em, clad in sky-high boots and a skirt that resembled a scrap of fabric step off the porch and head toward the cab. She opened the door.
“Where to, miss?”
“The Levee.”
Michael cursed under his breath and flicked on the Audi’s turn signal. The car gripped the road as he turned onto Westport Road and headed toward The Levee. The Levee was a Kansas City institution. A bar that had been around for years, it offered live music on the main floor and a sports bar upstairs. Tonight, it would be crawling with patrons celebrating Halloween.
After he had said goodbye to Zoe, he let Cody back in the house and grabbed his worn University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law hoodie. Em may not have anything to say to him, but he wasn’t going to let anything happen to her. He didn’t care if his intentions were antiquated. He’d be damned if he was going to stand by while she went bar hopping alone on Halloween.
He parked on the street a few blocks away and entered the bar. Just as he thought, it was packed, teeming with costume-clad adults out celebrating. The bar was buzzing and boisterous as a band played, and patrons knocked back shots and sipped on local Kansas City craft brews. Em wasn’t hard to find. Her braided red hair may have looked childish on someone else, but on her, it was stunning—auburn with hints of gold and fiery like the sun. He hadn’t noticed her leggings were ripped, giving everyone a glimpse of her creamy thighs. Her blue eyes seemed larger outlined in dark smoky makeup.
Christ, she was sexy.
Em had an edge about her, something that said, I might be small, but I will fuck you up. Petite and curvy in all the right places, she moved toward the bar like she owned the place.
She hadn’t noticed him. He planted himself on a stool near the far end of the bar. He hunched forward and pulled up the hoodie, trying to disguise his six-foot-four-inch frame. From his vantage point, he was able to observe Em’s every move.
She was a siren. His jaw twitched watching man after man vie for her attention. She’d let a few buy her a drink, but her eyes kept scanning the crowd like a wolf.
A trio of men settled in at the bar next to her, and Michael breathed a sigh of relief as he took in the group’s apprehensive posture. These were not your typical bar brawling, pickup artists. These guys were the type more at home in a lab or deciphering lines of code. Nerd could not be Em’s type. That he thought he knew for sure, until she turned on her stool, tapped one of the men on the shoulder, and flashed him an alluring smile.
The nerd had taped a shit-ton of gray paint samples on his t-shirt. Fifty shades of actual gray. Christ almighty, this is what Em liked? She leaned in and fingered one of the samples, pulling Fifty Shades in closer. Michael rose to his feet. He needed to get a closer look.
It was easy for him to watch her but still stay out of her line of sight. The place was packed with several layers of patrons standing around the bar, many trying to jockey their way in to order drinks. Michael settled in next to a large group. His jaw tightened as he watched Fifty Shades lean in and whisper something into Em’s ear. Her legs were crossed between his, revealing more of her thigh. The position looked intimate, and Michael nearly charged the bar when the guy placed his hand on her knee, but his attention was drawn lower as Em rubbed her boot against the nerd’s leg.
Like a black widow luring in a mate, Em was in control. Michael saw the assertive glint in her eyes, the confident lift of her chin and grew hard. Watching Em toy with this nerd was the hottest thing he’d ever seen. What would he do if it were his hand gripping her thigh? He’d rip those leggings and press her up against the bar. He’d fuck her right there in the middle of all these people. But just as he was about to lose himself in the fantasy, Em stood and led Fifty Shades over to the dance floor.
From his vantage point, he could still keep Em in his sights. His erection strained against his pants as she snaked her arms around the nerd’s neck and pressed her body into his. She moved her hips in rhythmic circles, grinding into Fifty Shade’s cock. Michael’s system flooded with a torrid mixture of anger and arousal.
The Complete Langley Park Series (Books 1-5) Page 30
