by Laura Drewry
And number two: She was distractingly pretty, and every time he glanced her way, his brain misfired and he had to start the whole thinking process from scratch.
Damn it.
Okay, he could do this. All he needed to do was keep his eyes averted and find a neutral topic, but before he could do either, Hope swiped her finger across her bottom lip and looked over at him with what appeared to be genuine concern.
“The not knowing’s the hardest, isn’t it? With Olivia, I mean.” She waited until he nodded, then went on, “From what Chuck told me, you’re all pretty tight with her, eh?”
“Yeah, especially Kate and Jessie.” Ro rolled his mug between his palms and sighed. “I wasn’t here for all of last season, but the rest of them lived with Olivia twenty-four/seven for almost five months.”
“You weren’t? I saw the episode they filmed here last summer, and you—” Hope’s brow wrinkled for a second, but she shook her head. “Sorry, it’s none of my business.”
With Olivia lying in ICU, everything else seemed so trivial, so what did it matter if he told her why? His divorce was no secret; Hope could easily get copies of the court documents if she wanted to.
“As part of my divorce settlement I had to keep paying the mortgage on the house, and I couldn’t have done that if I gave up my job.”
“Oh. Right.”
“If I could’ve convinced Mandy to sell the damn thing, I’d have been back here in a heartbeat, but…” He would have, too, because despite the shit that they’d lived through, the Buoys was still home. It always had been.
“She didn’t want to sell?”
“No.” Ronan’s snort was loud, harsh. “Wouldn’t even consider it. And this place barely made enough money to pay Olivia last year, so there wasn’t a hope in hell I’d be able to keep making those mortgage payments if I moved home.”
“That must’ve been hard,” Hope said, her voice a whisper. “Being so far away.”
“Yeah.” Hard didn’t even begin to describe it. “But then Liam got offered that contract with Oakland, which meant we were going to be seriously shorthanded here, so I took all my banked overtime as paid leave instead, added it to my vacation time and came back while he was playing ball.”
“How long were you here for?”
“ ’Bout eight weeks or so.” Ro ran his thumb over the rim of his mug, trying to forget how much it almost killed him to pack up and leave that last day. He’d strapped into his seat on the Cessna and pressed his forehead against the window, not even blinking until his brothers were nothing but specks on the dock. Clearing his throat, Ro lifted his shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “And then I came back again when your people were here filming that Hooked episode, but that was just a couple days.”
Hope’s gaze skittered his way, and even though she didn’t ask, Ro figured all those crinkles on her forehead were more questions she wasn’t sure she should ask or things she wasn’t sure she should say. And even when she did finally speak again, she was hesitant, as though she didn’t want to push too far too fast.
“Must have been a big relief to finally sell the house, then, eh?”
“What?” Ro frowned. “Oh yeah—no, we still haven’t sold it.”
“But you’re here.”
It wasn’t a question, so Ronan didn’t have to answer her, but he did, and that was mostly because, of all the things he wanted to keep private, the generosity of his brothers wasn’t one of them. His eyes still burned every time he thought about it, but he wasn’t about to let Hope see that, so he blinked it away and forced a cough to clear the lump in his throat.
“The A’s paid out Liam’s contract when he blew his shoulder apart, and he used that money to pay off the mortgage.”
“He—” Hope stopped, her eyes wide before she blinked long and hard. “Wow.”
“Yeah.” It was a debt Ro didn’t think he’d ever be able to repay. The money, sure, he’d pay that back eventually, but by giving Ro the money, Liam and Kate had sidelined their plan of building themselves a proper house and starting a family, and there was no way he could ever repay something like that.
“That’s…wait, what?” Hope’s hand jerked so fast she spilled some of her tea. “You mean you paid off the house and then walked away from it?”
“Hell no!” His laugh came out more like a loud dry choke. “I might not have collected my mail there in a long time, but that place is still half mine; I just need to keep on Mandy until she agrees to sell. And I can do that just as easily from here as I could from there.”
“Why won’t she sell it?”
Ronan inhaled slowly, then released it even slower. It was something he’d practiced doing every time he thought about Mandy and that damn house.
“Because,” he said, trying to keep his voice low and even and free of any Mandy-induced rage, “she knows it pisses me off.”
Hope’s slow nod seemed knowing, almost methodical.
“One more reason to rent,” she said. “If I decide I want to take a job in Tuktoyaktuk, I can, and I’m not stuck with house payments in the city while I’m living up there.”
“Tuktoyaktuk?”
There was that smile of hers again: soft and slow.
“If they hadn’t given me this job, that’s where I would have ended up, working on a documentary about the changes in and around the Beaufort Sea.”
“The Beaufort? No shit?”
“No shit.” Hope snorted quietly. “And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it would have been an amazing project, but I really hate being cold. Like…I’m not even kidding, it infuriates me, so you can see how that might have been a problem.”
“Li’l bit, yeah.” Considering how nervous she’d been around him all day, it seemed awfully strange for her to be sitting here talking to him like this. Cool, but strange. “Does that happen a lot with your work—you picking up and leaving?”
“Enough that my apartment is on a month-to-month,” she said, shrugging. “And I only use folding chairs as furniture, because they’re so much easier to move or put in storage.”
“So what does your…I mean…are you…” Fuuuck. Could he possibly sound any stupider? Ro ground his teeth together and blinked slowly. “Your family and, uh…stuff. What do they think about you dropping everything and taking off to places like Tuk?”
“Oh.” Hope didn’t look at him, just stared down into her mug. “I lost both my parents, and I don’t have any other family to speak of, really. I mean, there’s a couple cousins back east, but that’s it.”
“No husband? Wife? Partner?” God, why couldn’t he just shut up?
“Nah. I was engaged a couple years ago, but it didn’t work out.” She released a short grunt that sounded a little strangled. “Turned out he expected me to devote my whole life to what he wanted, starting with giving up my career to build his company with him—and that wasn’t gonna happen. Not in this lifetime.”
A flash of his mother shot through Ronan’s mind, but he shoved it back into the deep dark corner where it belonged. She’d come to Canada with Da to help build his dream lodge and then walked away and left them all high and dry when they needed her most.
“What, uh…” Ronan stopped, cleared his throat. “What kind of company?”
Hope’s mouth twitched slightly before she turned her full smile on him. “Mountaineering.”
“Mountain—” Ro stopped because she was already nodding. “Are we talking hiking the Grouse Grind, or are we talking about recruiting Sherpas and heading up Everest?”
“Both. And everything in between. He has other guides working for the company, but they do the smaller hikes and treks, so he thought it’d be a great idea if I got trained up and then we could work together on the big trips like Everest—the ones with glaciers and crevasses, where frostbite occurs on a daily basis.”
Ro’s loud laugh bounced off the trees and echoed across the cove. “But you just said—”
“Thank you!” She punctuated the air with a raised hand
as if he was the first person to understand the problem. “I mean, I get it, climbing’s great; I’ve even gone with him a few times, but that was on bareface rock like the Stawamus Chief. In the summer. When it was warm.”
Ronan nodded.
“There’s no way in hell I was going to do any kind of ice climbing, and when he finally got that through his thick skull, he was pretty pissed off. But then he said it was fine because his office manager had just quit, so he needed someone in the office every day to deal with the paperwork and organizing the tours.”
“Let me guess,” Ro said. “Paperwork’s not your thing?”
“Oh no, I don’t mind paperwork,” she said. “God knows there’s plenty of it in this job, but I’d rather claw my own eyes out than sit in an office all day answering phones.”
“Amen.”
“Anyway, at some point during the many things we probably shouldn’t have said to each other, he called me a selfish bitch, I called him an asshole, and, yada yada yada, I’m here sitting on your porch drinking my favorite tea and he’s leading a group up Denali as we speak.”
“So you keep in touch, then?”
“Hmm? Oh no, not really, but I’m linked in with his sister on social media, and she’s always posting updates of where he is, where he’s going next, who he’s dating…”
She didn’t seem overly upset by the whole thing, but still, it had to hurt.
“I’m sorry,” Ro muttered.
“It happens, right?” Her quiet shaky laugh floated out over the air. “You think you’ve got it figured out, you’re so sure you’re in love, and then one day—bam!—you realize it’s all just a big fat mistake.”
Hell yeah; Ronan knew all about that kind of bam.
“In hindsight and all, I know that if I’d really loved him, I wouldn’t even have hesitated to do what he wanted. I would have done whatever it took to keep us together, and I wasn’t willing to do that.”
“Doesn’t sound like he was willing to do it, either.”
“No. No, he wasn’t.” She stopped, twisted her mouth into a wry grin. “And I’m not gonna lie, that came as quite a blow, ’cause as the only child of older parents, I was raised to believe that the sun rose and set for my benefit alone and that the whole world revolved around me.”
“Yeah?” Ro smirked, liking the way she could laugh at herself. “How’s that working out for you now?”
“Not so well, actually.” That grin shifted something inside him, something he immediately pushed down, out of the way and into that dark corner where he shoved so much other shit. “And it’s not that I regret walking away from him, because most of the time I still think it was the right thing to do.”
“But?”
“But I’m thirty-four, my friends are all either married or as-good-as, and while they all have someone to go home to, I can’t even get a cat or a houseplant, because I’m not home enough to look after either one properly.” Hope shrugged slowly. “So every once in a while, like when I find myself bingeing something on Netflix or…when I see how you guys are with one another, I can’t help but wonder if I let my only chance of ever having a family slip by.”
She could keep pushing that grin all she wanted, but she couldn’t completely cover up the waver in her voice. Thankfully, before Ronan could even start to think of what to say in response, the door opened again and out stepped Kevin. With a short chin lift at Hope, he immediately turned to Ro.
“Dude. Chuck and I are gonna get a game of poker going down in our room. You guys in?”
“Uh…” Hope shot a quick look toward Ronan. “Sure.”
Ronan just snorted. Kevin and Chuck were sharing Liam’s old room downstairs, and Ro knew from experience that there was barely enough space for the two of them, let alone anyone else. If Hope wanted to squeeze in down there with them after watching them drink that many pints of Guinness earlier tonight, she was welcome to go, but not Ro. There was no way to describe what that room was going to smell like in a while other than to say it was going to be gruesome.
“Thanks,” he said, “but I’m gonna pass this time.”
With another nod, Kevin ducked back inside, but Hope stayed where she was, looking a little…nauseated? Mortified maybe. It was hard to tell.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe I just told you all that. It’s certainly not what I planned on saying when I first sat down here.”
“No? What did you plan on saying, then?”
“Well, actually, I wanted to ask you something.” She chewed the inside of her cheek for a second, then turned to face him, but it seemed as though it took some effort. “Other than the fact that we pretty much changed everything you guys originally agreed to, what is it specifically about us that you don’t trust?”
Ro looked down at his mug and blew out a long breath. He hated conversations like this, but if this was going to work—and he owed it to his brothers to do his part—then he at least needed to be honest with her. If Liam or Finn asked, he’d tell them it was like a mini Oprah moment.
“It’s nothing specific,” he said. “There’s only four people in the world that I trust, and they’re all sitting in the great room right now.”
“Why?” Her question, little more than a whisper through the night air, sounded confused and maybe a bit hurt.
Ro clenched and unclenched his jaw a couple of times.
“A bunch of reasons,” he said. “But here, right now, it’s simple. At the end of the day, we’re nothing but a paycheck to you guys. And I’m not slagging anyone when I say that, I’m just stating a fact, because no matter what happens with this show, when all is said and done, you’re gonna pack up and move on to something else—maybe Tuktoyaktuk, who knows? But the fallout, good or bad, will be ours to deal with, because we’ll still be here, doing what we can to keep this place running.”
He had to give her points for not trying to argue that with him.
“Fact is, Hope, we all want this to be a success, but if it’s not, your studio isn’t going to go belly-up. We actually might. And as much as we all agree that this is a business deal, it’s also personal.” He bobbed his head to the side a bit and sighed. “Do you think Luka gives a flyin’ rip that the three of us all learned to walk right here on this porch? Or that when you’re in the restaurant, if you look closely at the bar, down near the window, you can see some of the marks we made when we were stuck there doing our homework?” He waited for her to say something—anything—but she didn’t. “Nobody cares about that kind of stuff except us, so we need to protect it. Hell, I don’t think we’ve ever had a single person ask why the guest rooms inside are named after Irish counties, and I’m betting that’s because they probably think Da just picked four counties off the top of his head so he could keep the Irish theme going and that was that.”
“Okay.” Hope tipped her mug toward herself a bit and peeked inside. “But those things are all kind of personal, and you’ve made it pretty clear we need to tread lightly around stuff like that.”
He lifted his hands in surrender and grunted. “This is why I drive the rest of my family nuts. I want people to come and experience the Buoys, I want them to have fun, I want to share all this with them, and I also want them to understand it’s not easy, that it takes a lot of hard work, but I don’t want them to know the details of how much shit we went through to get where we are. And I’ll be damned if we can all agree on where that line is.”
Hope didn’t say anything for a few seconds, just rolled her mug between her palms and chewed the corner of her lip as if she was trying to sort something out in her head.
“Okay, well, hear me out on this, will you? Clearly you only agreed to do this show because it’s the means to an end, and I get that. This isn’t how you and your brothers imagined you’d get the Buoys back to its old self, but like Liam said, the old ways of doing things are gone for the foreseeable future. And I know you have absolutely no reason to trust me when I say this, but…”
She l
ooked down at her bag, then tipped her head sideways at him, and God help him, if he wasn’t careful, those blue eyes would have him believing anything she said.
“I’ve been here one day, and when I look around, when I watch how all of you are together, I see more than a fishing lodge, more than a struggling business making sacrifices and changing things up to keep afloat. I see the family, five people doing everything they can to stay together, not just for the business but for one another, and if this show does what we hope, it’ll help you do that. It’ll give you the means to stay here with your family and build the Buoys back into what you want it to be.”
It was weird how a voice that soft could be that steady, that sure.
“But you’re absolutely right,” she said. “At the end of the day, this is just a TV show—one that we all hope will be successful but not at the expense of your family. You guys have things you want to keep private—who doesn’t?—and we’re going to respect that. Okay?”
Ro had to look away, because the sincerity staring back at him made him feel like a giant schmuck. Yeah, there were things they wanted to keep private, but it wasn’t as if they were serial killers with bodies buried in the basement. They just had things they didn’t talk about.
Like Maggie, like how often Da beat the crap out of them, or like what happened in the fish shack.
But maybe Finn was right; maybe none of that would ever come out. And maybe this new format for the show would be just what the Buoys needed to attract new guests while still keeping the old ones coming back.
If it was good for the Buoys, it was good for all of them, right? All he needed to do was learn how to accept change. He wasn’t too old to do that, was he? Nah. Thirty-five wasn’t old. Sure, twenty years ago, thirty seemed ancient, but now…
Shit.
He didn’t realize he hadn’t actually responded until Hope spoke again.
“We have a lot of information on you guys already from the forms you filled out, but I’m not going to lie to you, Ronan, we’re still going to be asking questions. So if you ever start to feel like we’re invading your space, just tell me, okay?”