THE CALLAHANS (A Mafia Romance): The Complete 5 Books Series (20 page)

I started to turn, but stopped when Pops asked, “Did you know Stacy’s getting married?”

I shrugged. “Ian might have said something.”

“Why didn’t she call me?”

I crossed my arms over my chest and regarded him for a long moment. I could almost see what Pops was thinking: I was the oldest, the one all the other kids went to whenever they had a problem. But I was already in high school by the time Stacy came to live with us. At ten, she was a handful, but I was the only one who could calm her without fail. If anyone knew what was going on in her head, it was likely me.

“She was there, in the house, when Mom got sick, but you didn’t say anything to her. She and Kevin felt like you left them out of everything, that you took away Mom’s last good days. She’s pissed.”

“That was her excuse for leaving for college so quickly after graduation. But that was almost five years ago. Is she never going to forgive me?”

I shrugged. “I know it was Mom’s idea. Sean and Ian know it, too. But the others? Kyle and Kevin and Stacy? They’re still pretty pissed. They think you kept the truth from them because you didn’t think they could handle it.”

“That’s not true. She simply didn’t want them to watch her suffer longer than they had to.”

“You’ve got to talk to them about it.”

But, as far as I knew, he never did.

“I’ll stay.”

I hung up a moment later and glanced up at the building. Stacy was standing just inside the glass walls of the lobby, speaking to a model-esque brunette. I’d seen them together this morning, the brunette glancing out the windows as though she thought I couldn’t see her. Or maybe she knew I could see her and she wanted me to know she was watching me. Either way, she was all business up until the moment Stacy turned and strode confidently toward me. I felt the woman’s eyes rake over me, but it was Stacy I was watching. Petite and curvy, golden and creamy, she was so familiar that it almost hurt to look at her. Her hair had been purple up until a month ago, a bright, glossy purple. I almost missed the bright color even though the gold was respectful; it was the proper appearance she was going for with this new job. But the purple was her personality. She was redefining herself slowly, bit by bit, in the aftermath of Davis’ death and that bothered me.

What was wrong with whom she’d been before.

“Do you have to always be here? What do you do all day?”

“Flirt with the pretty girls coming in and out of the offices.”

She glanced at me. “Find anyone interesting?”

“Who was that brunette you were just talking to?”

“Sara. My immediate supervisor.” I could hear the eye roll in her voice even though she stopped short of actually doing it. “She stood just behind my shoulder all day, correcting every single little mistake I made. It was my first day, for God’s sake! But she wouldn’t let me get away with anything, not even an extra minute on my afternoon coffee break.”

“Isn’t that her job?”

Stacy glared at me. “Just like you to side with her.”

“I ran the entire PR department at MCorp. I know what it’s like to have employees who try to take advantage of everything.”

“Yeah, well, I’m just a girl trying to do the best I can. I don’t need someone breathing down my neck twenty-four seven.”

“Then go into self-employment because that’s the only place where you can do whatever you want. Though, I don’t suppose it would please your clients if you didn’t at least deliver the work on time.”

She groaned, but she didn’t say anything else. We walked in heavy silence to the subway, jumping the train for Brooklyn. She had a little apartment on the corner of a quiet residential street there. It was paid for by money she got from Davis’ life insurance. I was surprised, to be honest, that the man had bothered to change the beneficiary of his insurance when they became engaged. But he apparently did, and my dear sister got enough to buy the apartment outright and pay off her college loans. If there’d been more, she would have gone to graduate school. But there wasn’t, and she wasn’t about to take money from Pops, something I both admired and thought was just plain stupid. If I hadn’t had Pops’ support, I never would have finished school. She should finish school, but it wasn’t like she was going to listen to anything I had to say.

I felt her watching me as we traveled at opposite ends of the train car. She thought she could escape me if she rushed off ahead of me, but she never did. After six months, I could predict her every move before she even knew what she was going to do. She rarely surprised me.

Until tonight.

“Why don’t you come up? Have dinner with me?”

I glanced at her as we walked the short distance from the train to her building.

“Really?”

She nodded, her eyes cutting away from mine.

“Sure.”

She gestured for me to lead the way as we slipped through the front door. I glanced back at her, a little concerned she might stab me in the back or something. It wasn’t like Stacy to be generous, especially to me, but she actually smiled when our eyes met.

“I only have chicken,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mom used to make that baked chicken with the potato chips on it. Remember? It was always my favorite.”

“Mine, too.”

She grabbed a big bag of potato chips and tossed it at me. “Get to work.”

I raised my eyebrows, wondering why she was suddenly being so kind. But I got to work, crushing the potato chips while she got the thawed chicken from the refrigerator. We worked side by side almost like we once did when Mom was still alive. She’d be proud if she could see us now.

“I miss her,” Stacy said a while later as we sat at the kitchen table, digging into the food.

“Me, too.”

“Do you think things would have been different if we’d known sooner? If we could have had a say in her care?”

“She had pancreatic cancer, Stace. She was going to die no matter what we did.”

She nodded, as she dragged her fork over her mashed potatoes. “If he’d told us sooner—”

“It wasn’t his decision. Mom didn’t want us sitting around, watching her get sicker and sicker. She wanted us to suffer as little as possible.” I put down my fork and lifted the bottle of beer she’d provided for me. Just before I put it to my lips, I looked over at her. “Do you think it was easy for him, dealing with all that alone? Do you think he didn’t want us there, that he didn’t want the support of having his family around to help him make choices? It was all her, not him.”

She shook her head and I could feel the heat of her anger burning just under the surface. I knew she’d understand some day, but right now, the grief was still a little too fresh—even though it’d been five years since Mom died. She was close to Mom, maybe closer than the rest of us. I thought maybe she was angrier with Mom for shutting her out when she could have used her support the most—rather than at Pops for keeping her away. But I wasn’t going to say that to her. She’d probably cut my balls off if I did.

“What kind of woman do you find attractive?”

Once again, she threw me for a loop. I stared at her, stared at her body language—she did not look like a woman who was in the frame of mind to have a casual discussion about romance—wondering where the hell this was coming from.

“Why?”

“Do you think Sara is pretty?”

“Sara who?”

“My supervisor. From the ad agency.”

I shrugged, downing half the bottle of beer before I set it down and took a generous bite of chicken. “She’s attractive,” I said around the food.

Stacy looked disgusted as she glanced at me. I wasn’t quite sure if it was because of my opinion or the whole talking with food in my mouth thing. All I knew was that I didn’t like it when she looked at me like that.

I set my fork down and studied her a moment longer. “Why?”

She shrugged. “It occurred to me that if you had a girlfriend, you might leave me the hell alone. And Sara expressed an interest.”

“Pops wants me here. As long as he does—”

“Yeah, yeah, we all know what a loyal son you are.”

“Why are you so averse to me being around? You used to like me.”

“That was before you took his side in all this.”

“In all what?”

“Mom. That new wife of his. The secret baby.”

“She’s hardly a baby. She’s only three years younger than me.”

“Yeah, well, she was still a secret. What do you think Mom would have done if she’d known?”

“Probably the same things she did for you and Ian and Kyle and Kevin. She would have welcomed her into the family with open arms.”

I knew she knew I was right. She pushed away her plate of food and stood, marching into the kitchen. I followed, catching her arm as she reached for a bottle of wine on the counter. The bottle fell and spilled across the counter, making her cry out.

“Asshole! Do you know how expensive that stuff is?”

“I’ll buy you a new one.”

“No, you won’t. I don’t want anything to do with your money.”

“Why?”

“Because it comes from him. I don’t want anything of his in my house.”

I grabbed a rag and sopped up some of the spilled liquid, lifting the bottle to keep any more from spilling. There wasn’t much of a spill. The bottle had been nearly empty.

“He loves you. And he’ll always be your father.”

“He’s not my father. My father was a drunk college professor who couldn’t handle the fact that the woman he loved chose someone else.”

“Pops raised you.”

“He put up with me. Mom raised me.”

I tossed the rag into the sink, wiping the sticky wine from my fingers with a piece of paper towel. “Hell of a way to be grateful, Stacy. If it weren’t for Mom and Pops, you would have been a ward of the state for your entire childhood and then sent out into the world without a penny to your name, expected to make it on your own. Do you think you could have survived without Pops’ help?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“He’s my father. I respect what he’s done for me and for the rest of the family.”

“That’s your problem.”

She started to move around me, but I grabbed her arm and pushed her back against the sink. There was fear in her eyes for a second, but it was quickly replaced by anger. That was the Stacy I knew, the girl who was always willing to stand up and fight for what she thought was right. Even when she was wrong.

“You can’t be angry all your life, Stacy. It’ll start to eat you alive and make you do things you’ll regret.”

“I already regret more than you’ll ever know.”

“Maybe. But when it comes down to it, the only people who won’t abandon you, the only ones who’ll always be there to pick up the pieces is your family. If you keep turning your back on us, you might find yourself alone.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

I studied her face, the funny twist of her full lips, the diamond earrings that spread from low on her earlobe to the tip of her beautiful ear. She hid them under her long, straight hair now, but they were still there, still a peek of her old personality coming through. She was so much more than this corporate wanna-be. I wanted to shake her, to bring the old Stacy back out. I wanted to turn her back into the high-spirited teenager I’d known six years ago, the one who I loved being around, the one I couldn’t get enough of. I wanted the Stacy I loved back.

But Davis’ death had changed her. I was afraid she would never be the same again.

I touched the side of her face, letting my fingertip run down the angle of her jaw.

“I hate to see you like this,” I said softly. “Mom would hate this.”

“Don’t,” she said, her voice little more than a growl. “Don’t use Mom against me.”

“It’s the truth. She adored you the way you used to be, the happy, go-lucky girl you were when she was alive.”

“I was a kid then.”

A flash burst through my head of Stacy walking into the kitchen in nothing more than a black crochet bikini when she was about sixteen. Her hair was cut super short then, a sort of spiky haircut that was all the rage at her high school. She had these earrings, most of them multi-colored balls at the time, and a tiny tattoo on her lower back that Mom laughed off when I expressed shock.

“You weren’t a kid. You were a lot of things then, but you were not a kid.”

Her eyes widened a little. “I don’t know—”

“You were beautiful and intelligent and confident. You were happy and funny and so full of life. You were so much fun to be around.”

“How would you know? You avoided coming home my last few years of high school.”

“I was busy with graduate school.”

“You were busy avoiding us.”

“I wasn’t avoiding anything.”

“Mom used to call you and beg you to come home for holidays, but you always had an excuse. You have a lot of room to talk to me about avoiding family obligations.”

“Maybe you should learn from my experience.”

Her lips softened, and the anger slowly left her eyes. She studied my face, her eyes so warm that I wanted to get lost in them. I touched her face again, and then I pressed my hand against her palm. I told myself it was a touch of affection that any brother might give to his sister. But there was more to it than that. There had always been more.