Stay With Me (22 page)

“On camera?” Missy piped in.

“No, ma’am,” Emery said. “We have our own trained people for that part. If you choose to stay on, it will be in a background role, and salaries can be negotiated.”

Dad was too quiet and it was pissing me off.

“So—let me see if I have this,” I said. “You want the hometown feel, the look of the rivalry between businesses, and the families that have been running them for decades. But without those actual people?”

“Those actual people aren’t actors,” Emery said. “Not everyone can just be put in front of a camera.”

Linny strode up, hands on her broad hips and a big smile on her round face.

“Hey, do we know what we want yet?”

Dad looked up and smiled politely before meeting my gaze and locking down.

“I think we do.”

The feeling of cold dread was there in the core of my stomach, like an icy ball. I shook my head, but I suddenly knew it didn’t matter.

• • •

It wasn’t often that I made the trek upstairs to Dad’s little world. It was cluttered and random but had an order that made sense to him, and if you moved anything he’d get upset. Easier to just stay out of the way.

Today was different. Because I knew he wouldn’t come to me.

Ms. Slade had bid us good-bye
for now
and moved on to her next plan for the day. Dad had been oddly quiet ever since.

“Hey,” I said, stepping carefully around his stacks.

“Hey.” He was sitting on an old ottoman, watching
Animal Planet
and drinking a root beer in a bottle.

“Got any more of those?” I asked.

He gestured to the mini-fridge on the far side of the loft. “Plenty. Help yourself.”

I plucked one from the fridge. All glass bottles. “So much better than cans,” I said.

“No comparison.”

I sat on his work stool and risked his wrath by picking up a clock pendulum that was lying on the table. Such a useless object on its own. A random piece of metal. But when attached to a live functioning timepiece, it was the central visual element.

“You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?” I said, not looking up.

He didn’t answer, and that was like the blow of a gavel. I felt the crushing of my chest as it turned inward, the burn in my belly that somehow reached my eyes.

“Then why this game?” I asked, hearing the tears in my throat. “Why make me feel like I had a voice in this?”

“You do,” he said.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “All that was noise to fill time.”

Dad sighed. “Savi, you don’t understand.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” I said. “Nothing will ever make me get why you’d throw everything away that you’ve built—that we’ve done together.” I stood up. “This is my life, Dad.”

“It wouldn’t be for long.”

The sentence rang out alone in the rafters, making me open my mouth to respond and then close it again. “What?”

“It’s about to change, Savi,” he said, raking both hands through his white hair, messing it up. “Very soon, it won’t be the same business we’ve created.”

I felt a chill settle on my skin. “And why would that be?”

Dad rubbed at his face as if wanting to scrub the subject away. “Because I’ve dodged the bullet about as long as I can.”

It was one of those moments, like realizing your parents are about to tell you there’s no Santa Claus. You already knew it, but you played the game because they played the game, and somehow you just knew that once it was all out in the open, all the magic doors of childhood would be sealed shut forever.

I didn’t want him to know anything. I wanted him to stay forever my innocent and wonderful bumbling dad, Abby’s poppy, grumpy old Theo Barnes.

“We don’t lie to each other, Dad,” I said, in spite of that thought.

“Oh, that’s bull, Savi, and you know it,” he said, slugging on his root beer. “It’s the nature of parent and child since the beginning of time, to lie to each other. We lie to protect you, and you lie to stay out of trouble.”

I swallowed hard. “So what have you been protecting me from?”

As Dad continued to stare at the TV, the light flickering on his face, he suddenly looked old.

“That McMasters boy you used to run around with—he came by his ethics naturally,” he said. “His dad had none.”

Heat flushed from my chest to my scalp. “Ian’s not like him, Dad.” Damn it, he had me defending him, which royally pissed me off.

“Whatever,” Dad said, holding up a hand. “You’ve been blind, deaf, and dumb about him your whole life, so I know I’m preaching on deaf ears, but you never saw what I saw.”

He was right. It was an old song. “Which was what?” I said.

“Bobby Greene’s dirty work,” he said. “Anything to make a faster buck than hard work would get him.”

I pulled in a slow breath. “Well, that was a long time ago.”

“And some things never change,” he said, shaking his head wearily. “That’s fine. I don’t want to talk about Ian. I’m grateful every day that Jim missed that crap for Lily’s sake, but his dad—he started a stone rolling that never stopped.”

“With old buddies,” I said, the words sticking like peanut butter in my mouth. “Were you part of it? Are
we?”

He gave me a long look. “Is that what you think?”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “But you wanting to sell all of a sudden—”

“That’s so we
don’t
have to go down that road, Savi,” he barked.

Slamming down his empty root beer bottle, he stood up and looked around the room, his hands spread wide like he wanted to do something with them. Break something. Throw something. It wasn’t a side of him I’d seen much of.

“James and Georgie cooked up this mess years ago,” he said, staring into a pile of what looked like random mechanical levers. “When you’re young and stupid, the stupid often trumps it all.”

I stayed very still, nearly holding my breath, not wanting to hear it and knowing it was coming anyway.

“It all started innocent enough, I guess,” Dad said. “Back then, there was no tracking and reporting, and they were just skimming small change. Then Georgie’s brother Bobby got in on it, and all the dynamics changed.”

I nodded, swallowing past the sand that had taken over my mouth. “And where do you come in?” I asked softly.

“I don’t,” he said. “I was never interested in that, and I was too small-time. Besides, your mother would’ve skinned me.” He came back to sit on the ottoman, his knees still bouncing. “Wasn’t a big deal. Then it was.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Bobby didn’t like outsiders knowing, made him nervous, but Georgie always had my back,” Dad said. “Then Bobby started forcing people’s hands, making the trouble worse than the cost, and turned the small potatoes into something big.” Dad shrugged. “Being Georgie’s friend kept me the exception to the rule, but he’s about to retire.”

“Georgie’s retiring?” I asked. “Who’s taking over the car dealership?”

“He’s selling,” Dad said, turning to look at me. “Came to tell me. And with him and James both gone, I’ll have no buffer, no leverage, and Bobby’s little gargoyles will start hassling me. And you.”

“Hence, Antique Nation.”

He drew a long, slow breath. “Hey, they’re interested. Whatever it takes.”

Something poked at me with that sentence. “Huh,” I said under my breath.

“What?”

Slowly, I shook my head. “I don’t know. But doesn’t it seem awfully convenient that they show up to woo us right now?”

Dad’s eyes narrowed as he searched mine. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe nothing.”

Or maybe something.

• • •

All I could think of while staring into the eyes of a giant grouper fish was how much I wanted to jump in there with it.

Not in the way that Ian would—sans dive gear and fins—but just to escape the noise of this world. It looked so quiet in there. But I supposed the noise in my head wouldn’t stop no matter where I went.

The aquarium was cool, and probably fun for the under-ten age group, but there weren’t any of those around. It was really just us in there at the moment and I was kind of done after the first fifteen minutes. It didn’t help that my thoughts kept drifting to mob movie scenarios, where men in black suits and dark glasses waited behind trees and in the backseat of your car.

I needed to stop the insanity. Obviously we weren’t talking about the mob here. That was crazy. This was a couple of greedy old men and their spoiled entitled children.

“What’s going on in that head of yours?” Duncan said, coming up behind me and pulling me close with his hands on my shoulders.

I could feel his solid warmth behind me, his breath warm in my hair, his fingers doing intimate things on my shoulders. The little dress I was wearing—yes, a dress—was silky and feminine and wide on my shoulders, so his fingers felt sexy against my skin. I’d pulled it from the closet archives of things I’d bought but was never brave enough to wear and paired it with cowboy boots that weren’t of the donkey-visiting variety.

Very outside my box. But I needed outside tonight. I needed to be something other than the “normal” that my life had been, because normal was crashing around me.

“Just wondering what
they
think about all day,” I lied, pointing at my grouper friend. “People gawking at them all the time. You know they want to tell people to get a life.”

“Or throw food,” he said.

I laughed. “Would take some big food for these guys,” I said. “I don’t think there’s a giant can of fish flakes they sprinkle in.”

Duncan moved his arms naturally around me, wrapping me in a wonderful intimate embrace as we watched the fish swim around. I closed my eyes and tried to sink into it.

“So, I’m thinking
Merlin,”
he said against my ear, sending warm tingles all the way down my right side.

“Say what?” I asked.

“The big guy there,” he said, pointing. “All white and wise-looking.”

I chuckled. “Ah, totally. And her?” I said, pointing at a moray eel slithering slowly across a reef, mouth opening and closing as she moved.

“Oh, it’s a
her,
is it?”

“See that attitude?” I said. “She’s PMS’ing, no doubt.”

“Well, then by all means,
Myrtle.”

My chuckle turned to a giggle. “Myrtle, really?”

“She looks just like my great-aunt Myrtle while she was going through
the change.”

I laughed and ran my hands along his hands, his arms, loving the feel of being wrapped up in them. He made me feel sexy and pretty and—girly. That was a first. But that’s what it was. I felt very feminine with him. And very aware of just how manly he was.

“And not that my aunt Myrtle isn’t fascinating,” he murmured against my ear. “But this dress of yours is making me crazy.”

I smiled and tilted my head back against him. “Is that right?”

“Mmm,” he said, leaning down to brush his lips first against my neck and then lightly on my shoulder. “That’s right.”

Fuck. My knees nearly gave way and my nipples tightened. Two days of dancing the sexual tension mambo between Duncan and Ian had me a wound-up horny mess. Add to that the stress of everything else and I needed some serious relief.

“Well, you should know I’m not much of a dress kind of girl,” I said, turning in his arms to face him. I wrapped mine around his middle, pulling him to me. His face was only inches from mine and sweet Jesus he was beautiful. “But I thought I’d step it up a little tonight.”

His gaze locked in on mine with a burn that made me have to think about my breathing. “You look amazing.”

“So do you.”

“And then you should know that I’m trying really hard to be a nice guy here,” he said, moving his lips slowly down my cheek to my lips. “But I’m fighting it. Bad.”

Oh, shit molecules. Everything shot to important places as his kiss promised naughty things and the look in his eyes backed that up. My breathing quickened at the thought that maybe, just maybe he wouldn’t be in the mood to go slow tonight. Normally, I was way too aware of being in public to allow a PDA like that, but I forced all those outside logical thoughts away.

He was very good at kissing. His lips knew just when to search, just when to back off. He knew just how to hold me and mold me to him while his tongue made love to my mouth. It was hypnotizing, and I felt my nerves and knotted-up muscles begin to let go.

A little sigh escaped my throat as his hands moved up to my face, and I literally felt the rush of—something—go through him.

“Excuse me.”

I jumped and grabbed his hands, looking to my left at an elderly lady with a volunteer tag and a blue vest that read
Experience the Blue
. She was staring at us with her hands folded in front of her.