by Ally Blake
“You’ve read it?”
Harper read company accounts, stockholder documents, investigative reports. If she had a spare half-hour on a plane she answered correspondence, checked in with erstwhile clients. She hadn’t read for pleasure in years. Which, in that moment, felt kind of sad. And again she felt a wave of a kind of lost feeling come over her—as if she was missing out.
“Have not,” she admitted.
“It’s a brilliant book. A modern classic. But it’s not pretty. About a kid with a ken for violence, whose mother dies during childbirth.”
“Jeez,” Harper said on a long, loud breath before she could hold it back. “Sorry. That’s...”
“Dark?”
“I was going to say intense.” And unexpected.
Seeing him in high school, anyone would be forgiven for imagining his was a life full of ease, and comfort and love. After the...incident, it had made it easy to despise him, believe he had no clue what it meant to struggle.
Now she felt as if she’d peeked through a crack in his front door. That she’d seen things he hadn’t wanted her—or anyone—to see. And the edges of the neat and tidy box she’d put him in began to fray.
At the thunk of glass on wood Harper jumped.
Cormac had let his drink drop to the bar. Under his breath he said, “My mother is not a dark person. Circumstance played a part. Environment. Ill-fated choices.”
Silence settled over them, as it was her turn to fill it. But there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to override her deeply ingrained aversion to getting personal. Harper’s knee jiggled and she glanced back to the dance floor, figuring it the lesser of two evils.
Then Cormac sighed, used both hands to rub his face, before tugging them through his hair, leaving spikes in their wake. After pressing his fingers into his eye sockets, he once more looked out into nothing.
It had been a long time since a man had turned to her for solace. Either because she wasn’t the kind of woman who attracted men who wore their hearts on their sleeve. Or because she’d avoided them at all costs.
Harper swallowed as a wave of regret broke over her. What if the son of the London restaurateur was right? Was she an empty, soulless, robot? Ice cool. Untouchable. Closed off to human emotion. Didn’t the fact she kept half a world between herself and the person she loved most say it all?
Whether it was the rum—and bubbles and green stuff—speaking or if she’d truly had some sort of epiphany, Harper finished her iced water in one go, turned to Cormac, leaned her chin on her palm and said, “Tell me about it.”
Cormac blinked several times then looked her way.
“Your mother,” Harper said, forcing the words through numb lips. “Darkness. Ill-fated choices.” She leaned in and gave Cormac a nudge with her shoulder. She’d sobered up enough to bounce back. “Think of me not as Harper Addison, Lola’s dazzling big sister, but as a ghostly apparition, a stranger, a ship passing in the night. I’ll be long gone by this time next week, so anything you say goes with me.”
Cormac’s gaze remained snagged on hers, thoughts too deep to catch slipping and shifting behind his corrupting eyes.
Then, with obvious effort, he dragged his gaze away, lifting his hand to call for another beer. Only when it was in front of him did he say, “That song.”
“Which song?”
He tilted a chin towards the band. “The one you like so much. My father would play it ad nauseam the nights he was holed up in his study. I should like that song, as at least it meant there was a wall between him and my mother. And yet the warm, fuzzy feelings remain at bay.” He lifted his drink to the heavens, as if offering a toast, then downed three large swallows.
“I’m taking it your dad was no peach.”
Cormac coughed out a laugh, though he didn’t look her way. As if imagining her a stranger was the only way he could get the words out at all. “Not so much. He was more of a mean bastard, actually.”
Harepr breathed, and forged on. “Did this have something to do with your mother’s time in the dark?” A nod, then, “He blamed me for drawing her attentions away from him. He blamed her for my existence. He blamed us every chance he got.”
He lifted his drink to his lips, then stopped. Put it slowly on the bar before pushing it away.
While Harper’s throat tightened. Her insides twisting and squeezing. And it had nothing to do with the number of drinks she’d had.
She ached for all the things he hadn’t said. The confessions between the words. The grey area she usually had no time for. It was shaky ground for her. Terrifying, actually. But in her experience the only way out of the bad stuff was through.
“We, Lola and I, were brought up by our dad.”
Cormac glanced her way, his eyes still warm, despite the subject matter. How did he do that? How did he keep his compassion when she had so little?
“Where was your mum?”
“She left. I was too young to really remember.” Saying the words out loud, she felt like an overblown balloon. One slip and she’d burst. “But our dad, he was formidable.”
Images of her father chased one another like drops of liquid mercury. “He’d take us out of school to spend entire days at the beach. He’d happily learn the dances we choreographed for him. Or wake us at midnight for chocolate feasts.”
“Sounds like a hell of a guy.”
“He was. Most of the time,” Harper amended. “When he was on top. When things were bright and shiny. But when things got shaky, when things didn’t go his way...”
The memories flipped over on themselves. “Like the time he came home with a litter of kittens, forgetting Lola was allergic. Or the times he forgot to pick us up from school at all.”
“Was he violent?” Cormac asked, his voice rough.
Harper glanced over to find his attention completely hers, the man’s charisma like a heat lamp, making her burn.
“Never that,” she said. Not, I imagine, like yours. “He was...unreliable. Disorienting. Even during the good times, I felt as if I was walking on eggshells, always waiting for the ground beneath us to suddenly drop away.”
Harper leant her elbows on the bar, and dropped her chin into her hands, her head suddenly too heavy for her neck to support.
Had she really felt that way? Even as a little kid? She must have. She’d simply never voiced it, as it would have made it real. It would have messed with the good memories of her dad she’d secretly let herself keep.
“I wonder now if there was something else there. Some undiagnosed condition. Bipolar perhaps? Something...”
She turned her head slowly, her brain following at a lapse. Saw Cormac watching her.
“I’m so sorry. We were talking about you, about your dad, and I totally hijacked things.”
Cormac smiled, as if he too felt lighter than he had ten minutes earlier. As if talking to her had actually helped. “It’s called a conversation, Harper. It’s what grown-up people do whilst getting to know one another better.”
“Is that what we’re doing?”
“So it would seem.”
Harper swallowed, trying to press down the uncomfortable feelings swelling inside her. And said, “Your dad—he was violent, wasn’t he?”
Cormac picked up his beer, the bottle dangling between his fingers, the amber liquid swaying and sloshing against the glass. And after a beat he said, “He was an angry man.”
“Why was he angry?”
“That I don’t know. All I know is that he got off on making others feel insignificant. As if the only way he felt important was to make sure everyone else did not.”
Harper remembered the conversation she’d had with Lola in the shop that morning. About how Cormac went out of his way to make sure everyone who worked for the Chadwicks feel as though they mattered. She’d seen herself that he’d done the same at school. And now
she understood why.
He knew what it felt like to be marginalised. And, rather than give in, rather than believe it, he redressed the cosmic imbalance by making sure everyone else he ever met felt seen. Heard. Felt the glow of his attention.
She’d known he was special when she was a teenager. Now, having lived in the world, she knew how truly rare that quality was.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. For his childhood. For thinking his motives were purely selfish. His closeness with the Chadwicks could not be put aside, but it was a strange kind of relief to know that he wasn’t all bad.
“He died,” Cormac said, without inflection. “Heart attack a number of years ago.”
Harper nodded. “And your mum?”
“Has moved on admirably. She remarried a perfectly nice man with a bald patch and a caravan.”
He pulled his phone out of his back pocket and slid it along the counter. Under a contact labelled “Mum”, complete with a picture of an attractive woman with a short grey pixie haircut, was a message that had come through only a few minutes before.
Sorry, buddy, won’t make it to Gray’s wedding. Loving the reef so going to stay a while longer. Love, Mum. XXX
She glanced at Cormac to find him staring through the phone. “You were really hoping she’d come.”
Cormac breathed out long and slow. “I was really hoping she’d come.”
“How long has she been away?”
“A year. And a bit.”
“She sounds like she’s having a great time. Which is nice for her.”
Cormac looked into the mouth of his near-full bottle, as though searching for an answer. He let out a sharp breath, as if he was letting something go. “I’m not sure why I even told you all that.”
“Because I asked?”
He sniffed out a laugh. “Maybe.”
In the onset of quiet, Harper heard the music had gentled. She glanced out towards the dance floor to see Lola and Gray slow dancing.
Wasn’t that all anyone wanted in life? Someone who listened. Someone who stuck around.
Since the moment she’d looked into Cormac’s eyes by the car outside the Chadwicks’ house, there had been something there between them. She’d thought it the zing of latent attraction. Now she wondered if it went deeper. What if they’d recognised in one another the look of someone who had it all together, while inside they were both secretly hanging on by their fingernails?
Harper swallowed against the rising tide of something that felt a hell of a lot like tenderness and reached for her water.
“Way to bring the mood down, Wharton,” she said, before having a gulp. “Just saying.”
Cormac burst into laughter.
She caught his eye; saw light, brightness, oodles of charm. And her epiphany faded like mist on a morning lake. Either he actually did have it together, and tonight was a rare anomaly, or he was the best at hiding it she’d ever seen.
Either way the spell was broken. She couldn’t help but grin. Then soon joined in the laughing herself.
When they both settled down, Cormac asked the bartender to take away his untouched beer and ordered two more iced waters. Then they sank into an easy kind of quiet.
Until Cormac said, “You, Harper Addison, are an unexpected wonder and delight. When you’re not all sniping and stubborn, that is.”
His words whistled lightly through the air before lodging in her chest. “Well, you, Cormac Wharton, are far deeper than you at first appear.”
Cormac coughed out one more laugh, taking the insult hidden inside the compliment for the mood-lightener that it was.
He held out his glass. She clinked hers against it.
And they drank.
Harper’s heart felt strangely light. Lighter than she remembered it feeling in a very long time. Even as they sat close enough now that every time one of them breathed in, their arms brushed.
Yet neither made a move to pull away.
And, blinded by the light, she found herself saying, “So what do you really think of the happy couple? And this time I want the truth.”
CHAPTER SIX
CORMAC GLANCED AT HER, then past her towards the dance floor. Something flashed over his eyes. A different kind of pain from the one he’d dealt with earlier. For a second it felt like a mirror of her own; that sense of missing something.
“Come on, Cormac,” Harper pressed. Go hard or go home. “Tell me what you really think about Lola and Gray as a couple.”
“I think they are madly in love.”
“Do you?”
His eyes narrowed. “What’s going on behind those gorgeous yet devious eyes of yours now?”
Ignoring the “gorgeous” comment, or at least tucking it away for later, Harper said, “Come on, Cormac, you’re a smart guy.”
“Why, thank you.”
She shot him a look. “You know Gray far better than I do, so tell me if I’m wrong in thinking his only ambition is finding the next wave.”
Cormac did not tell her she was wrong.
“A man like that is not ready for marriage. For forging a future. And what about fatherhood? You can’t seriously tell me you think this wedding ought to go ahead.”
“I can,” he said, lifting his water in salute. “And I will.”
Then he let his glass drop as he looked deeper into her eyes. So deep she wondered if he might fall in.
Then he sat back far enough he had to grip the bar to keep his seat. He ran a hand through his hair, and Harper tried not to stare as it flopped back down into an adorable spiky mess. “You’re serious.”
“Of course I’m serious! This is my little sister. My flesh and blood. The only family I have left.”
“What could you possibly have against Gray?”
“I don’t have anything against him, per se.” His parents, on the other hand... “Though for one thing, he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.”
Cormac physically recoiled. Then looked off into the middle distance, muttering, “You’re unbelievable.”
“Lola is pure potential. She is far brighter than what she is currently doing. Which is my fault. I see that now. I gave her too much leeway. When she finally figures that out she’ll regret this. She’ll regret him.”
Cormac shook his head.
“Then tell me what I’m missing. Convince me. Why should I think Gray is good enough for my sister?”
“Because he’s Gray! Sure, he might appear a little laid-back. But so are half the guys who live around here. He might not be the most driven of all men, but he is all heart. Harper, he’s a good man who adores your sister. What more could you possibly wish for?”
Harper breathed out hard. In a negotiation, when tempers were high, this would be the moment she tore the opposition’s argument to pieces. But “good man” who “adored” her sister? The guy had just swept her legs out from under her.
Till Cormac added, “And Lola could not ask for better in-laws than Dee-Dee and Weston.”
At that Harper snorted.
Dee-Dee seemed lovely. But Harper knew, she knew, what kind of man Weston Chadwick was. The depths he’d sink to in order to keep himself top dog.
Cormac did not appreciate her snort. She saw it in the cut of his shoulders. The sharpness of his gaze.
She wouldn’t get any more insight out of him now. She’d drawn the lines and they stood firmly on either side.
She pushed her stool back.
Cormac twisted on his stool, blocking her. “Where are you going?”
“To the ladies’ room. The dance floor. The other end of the bar. What does it matter?”
“Don’t do anything stupid, Harper. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”
Harper’s hackles rose into needle-sharp points. When he breathed she felt it brush over her cheek and the rest of her woke as if dragged
from a deep sleep.
His gaze shifted from one eye to the other. “What on earth could you possibly have against the Chadwicks?”
No. Not now. She had to talk to Lola about this first.
Cormac turned to look around the bar as if searching for reinforcements, and his knee knocked into hers before sliding past her thigh. Not that he seemed to notice.
Harper, on the other hand, noticed. Every inch of her that hadn’t been touched felt cheated.
When his gaze once more found hers, he was close enough that she could feel his frustration. Like a heat wave washing over him, washing over her.
His voice was low, ruinous, as he said, “Tell me this: what does Lola have to offer the best friend I’ve ever had? The sweetest guy I’ve ever known? Apart from a bitter and confused sister she never sees and two MIA parents with murky pasts?”
He’d gone so deep, so fast, Harper blanched. For she felt herself flung back into the awful past couple of months at work, then right back to high school as if she’d been dragged there by icy claws.
“Wow,” she managed, frantically trying to haul every self-protection measure she had back into place. “You really went there? Talk about going dark.”
A muscle beneath Cormac’s eye flickered, but she took little pleasure in the hit.
“Look, I have nothing to prove to you, Cormac. We don’t need to be friends. The only thing I care about, the only thing in the entire world, is making sure my sister is happy.”
Cormac lifted a hand to rub it over his face before glancing off to the side. “The worst part is, I think you actually believe it.”
Harper reared back. “Excuse me?”
“If that’s all you cared about, why have you been gone so long? If that’s all you care about, why can’t you simply be happy for her? Hell, if that’s all you care about, why aren’t you out there dancing with her while you have the chance? Why are you sitting here, jousting with me?”
While Harper mentally batted at his every accusation, Cormac laughed, the sound throaty and rich, but completely lacking in humour. Then he tipped forward, elbows on the bar, face landing in his palms. After a moment he gave his face a good rub before swinging his dark gaze back her way.