by Cate Cameron
“If I’d pulled that stunt on you, you’d have said yes,” he retorted.
“Oh no,” she said. Her smile was gentle and knowing as she looped her arm through his and guided him toward the table where Trevor was dispensing his scotch. “Not when it was about power, I wouldn’t have.” She shrugged. “At least, not if it was about your power.”
It occurred to him that being with Victoria wore him out, while spending time with Cassidy was energizing. Victoria took. Cassidy gave. At least, most of the time she did.
“Power?” he asked, already knowing he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“Control,” Trevor said, easing into their conversation with the confidence of someone who was used to having his opinion sought. At least he had the courtesy to hand over a glass of damn fine scotch as he spoke. “This is the twenty-first century. People get married because they love each other, not because they want to figure out a more convenient custody arrangement.”
“You’re presuming a lot.” Will straightened, trying to dredge up some moral outrage, but Trevor and Victoria both looked at him levelly, and he had to admit they weren’t wrong. His proposal had been based on convenience, not romance. “She doesn’t want to move to the city,” he said grudgingly. “Says she doesn’t want to be a nanny and doesn’t want to get in the way of Emily’s social progress.”
“Really?” Victoria said, sounding impressed. “And she doesn’t want the life of leisure, either? Doesn’t want to be the bored housewife of a dutiful but bored husband? What are they putting in the water upstate these days? Something interesting, apparently.”
“What, you’re on her side?” Will frowned at her. “She makes no sense! She doesn’t like her current life, but she won’t change it. She’s hanging on to that damn diner as if it’s all she—” He stopped and took a sip of his scotch, barely tasting its smooth strength. “As if it’s all she has left,” he finished after he swallowed. All she had left. Damn it. “She thinks she’s going to lose Emily, thinks she doesn’t really have me, doesn’t feel comfortable with anything going on in the city. So it’s the diner. That’s what’s going to keep her going after Emily leaves.”
“She thinks she doesn’t really have you,” Victoria repeated thoughtfully, and then waited and watched Will’s response. He tried not to give her one but apparently didn’t manage it. “Really. That’s what you’ve been looking for? I mean, she’s not ugly—”
“Watch it, Vic,” Trevor said. “You’ve been fairly useful up to now. Don’t ruin it.”
Her eye roll was certainly more elegant than one of Cassidy’s snorts, but Will couldn’t bring himself to enjoy the difference. “Fine. I won’t analyze the attraction, at least not with the two of you. But, honestly, Will, if you do—” She stopped and cut her eyes toward Trevor. “Are we going to use the ‘love’ word? Can I say if he does love her?”
“Probably too early,” Trevor said. “We don’t want to put him into shock.” He sipped his own drink and turned his attention back to Will. “If you really care about her,” he started, and then took a moment to accept Victoria’s appreciative nod for his word choice, “then you need to make her see that. Proposing to her when she thinks you’re just trying to convince her to do what you want? Would you really want to be married to someone who would give in to a scheme like that?”
Victoria shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation, trying to tell a man who just dumped me how to woo another woman. Neither of you is nearly as uncomfortable about the situation as you should be!” She looked amused rather than truly upset. “And I don’t seem to be as uncomfortable with it as I should be, either.”
“Probably because you never actually wanted to marry me,” Will said. “I was a friend and a convenient bed partner. Right?” He stopped feeling so satisfied with his analysis when he realized Victoria wasn’t the only person who seemed to feel that way about him. At least he hadn’t made the mistake of falling for Vic. No, he’d saved that mistake for Cassidy. And now he was going to be paying for it.
Chapter Sixteen
The next morning was about as awkward as Cassidy had expected it to be. She’d managed to soothe Emily the night before with a vague explanation of Will’s behavior as a sort of joke, one that Cassidy had taken too seriously. She’d offered to apologize to Will the next morning, and Em had snuggled in next to her on the impossibly large guest bed and said probably Will should be the one apologizing, but if he did, it would be nice if Cassidy did, too. And then they’d fallen asleep together with the noise of the party in the main room muffled by well soundproofed walls, and Cassidy had managed to stay awake just long enough to freeze the scene in her memory, wondering if she and Em would ever snuggle that way again.
In the morning, of course, Will didn’t know he was expected to apologize first. He just stood there in the kitchen, already dressed in his “casual” dress pants and shirt, as Cassidy stumbled out in her makeshift pajamas and told him, “Em thinks it was a joke. I’m going to try to believe it was a joke. You going to get in the way of that?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, and somehow he didn’t sound sarcastic. “But I’d like to talk about it some more, some time, when you’re ready?”
“You’d like to talk more about us getting married?” She stumbled a little farther into the stainless-steel-and-ceramic-tile kitchen. “No. No more talking about stupid things. Just coffee.”
“Coffee first?” he’d suggested. “And then talking?”
Thankfully, Emily came in then, and Will apologized for making a scene the night before and made her a smoothie with all her favorite ingredients, and everything was almost back to normal until they were packed up and loading everything into Will’s car to go home. That was when Emily crawled into the backseat instead of the front.
“I sat in front on the way down,” she told Cassidy. “And I’m probably just going to sleep anyway, so you should be in charge of keeping Will awake. It’s a safety thing. If we don’t have someone alert in the front passenger seat, he could doze off, drive us into oncoming traffic, and we’ll all die. So, yeah, I think I should sit in the back.”
“I am a little tired this morning,” Will said, and he and Emily exchanged smiles.
Cassidy flopped into the front seat, graceless and grumpy, and tried not to watch Will as he drove. There was something almost hypnotic about his confidence in the city traffic, the way he found a balance between being too aggressive and too timid, weaving through the cars without making other drivers angry or Cassidy nervous. His hand almost caressed the gearshift, and his thighs tensed just a little when he applied the clutch or brake, just enough to make Cassidy remember the way his legs had moved against her, around her—
“Don’t you ever have to go to work?” she asked, her desperate need for distraction overcoming her intent to stay quiet. “You’re coming back up with us, without doing any work? Are you not missing important meetings, or something?”
He didn’t seem put off by her nosiness. “Most of my money is passively invested right now. The stock market, or long-term holdings in stable companies. There’s one deal I’ve been working on, but honestly, Trevor is completely capable of handling it himself.”
“At a thousand dollars an hour?”
“When you’re looking at a deal worth a couple hundred million, paying a lawyer a few hundred thousand is just a cost of business.”
She tried to make it make sense in her head. A couple hundred million dollars. A hundred million. Even just for Trevor, paying him a few hundred thousand. In her whole life combined, had she made a few hundred thousand dollars?
When Will had offered her millions the night before, he’d been throwing her a bone. Scraps from his bountiful table. It wouldn’t have affected him at all if she’d accepted, but what would it have done to her?
She’d been right to refuse him. Absolutely. But it was strange to realize that it wasn’t just because it would have been so demeaning for her to become an object of his ch
arity. It was also, strangely, precisely because it would have meant so little to him. She didn’t want to be the dog sorting through his scraps, gratefully accepting his casual leavings. She wanted him to notice her, to be shaken by her, changed by knowing her. It would be easy for him to throw money at her, so damn it, she wouldn’t take his money.
His marriage proposal should have been a different situation. She stared over at him as he drove, his profile sharp, his skin warm and smooth. That man, the one driving the Audi away from his luxury apartment toward his luxury rental home, that man had asked her to marry him. That had happened. And the moonlight had been streaming into the condo’s central room as he’d proposed, so really, according to her ridiculous system of thinking, she should have been allowed to say yes.
But he hadn’t meant it. Well, he’d probably meant that he’d marry her, if she forced him that far. He’d show up at the ceremony and say the words, and maybe he’d even keep the vows. But he didn’t love her. He hadn’t been changed by her. She hadn’t shaken his world the way he’d shaken hers. He’d marry her, maybe, but it would all just be words. Trevor would probably inspect their prenup and maybe even their wedding vows. It would be a contract, not a joining. Intellectual, not emotional.
And she wanted more. More for herself, but also—well, if she was being completely honest, sitting there in his car as he guided them through traffic, she wanted more for him. More from him. She knew she’d never get it, but that was okay, because recognizing it at least made it clear what she was missing. To him, she was a problem to be solved. A tool to be utilized. To her, he was—damn it. Better not to think about that.
“You should get thicker blinds for your apartment,” she told him. “How do you sleep with the moon shining in so bright? The sun must wake you up, too.”
He glanced over at her. “I’ve got pretty good blinds, but I usually leave them open. I like the sun. The moon, though? That’s not the moon. It’s the light from the building next door, combined with all the city glow. I can’t think of the last time I saw the moon from my place.”
She wanted to laugh but was afraid she might lose control of it if she started. There had been no moonshine, no escape from reality, no excuse for her weakness. She’d really done it. She’d slept with the man who was going to take Emily away from her. She’d let herself care about him, maybe even—no, that was going too far. She’d let herself care about him, and it hadn’t been in an alternate world. It had been in this world, and she was going to have to deal with the consequences, without the benefit of pretending none of it had really happened.
…
They were about an hour out of Lyonstown when Will decided he needed to take advantage of the together time. Once Em was back at school and Cass was working all hours again, it would be rare for the three of them to be able to sit down together.
“Have we got a decision on the schools?” he asked, looking in the rear mirror to make eye contact with Em. “Technically there’s an application process, but Trevor’s already done the legwork, and we shouldn’t have any trouble getting a late acceptance.” The amount of the required donation would vary from school to school, but there was no sum that would dissuade Will, not if Emily decided she wanted to attend.
“I don’t know,” Emily said, and he caught the motion in the backseat as she shifted over to sit behind him and then rebuckled her seat belt. Behind him but with a more direct line of sight to Cassidy. “Aunt Cassidy? Have you decided?”
She swivelled in her seat. “Me? The idea was for you to decide if you wanted to go to one of those schools.”
“They all seemed really cool,” Emily said calmly. “I think I’d like the one with NASA, but the one that does the trips to Haiti was good, too. I could show those rich girls how to really help build houses, not just sit around and have a ‘growth experience.’ But I don’t want to get too caught up in choosing between them, not until I know there’s a point to my choice.”
“What do you mean?” Cassidy asked. “Nothing’s been decided yet, but I think it’s important that we know what you want.”
“For now, probably,” Will interjected, “we could just go with a sort of agreement-in-principal. You’re interested in going to one of those two schools? You’d rather move to the city and attend one of those schools rather than stay in Lyonstown and go to high school with your friends?”
“I’m not sure,” Emily replied, and Will wished she’d stayed on the other side of the car so he’d be able to see her in the mirror, because he was pretty sure he’d recognize her expression as one he’d worn himself on many occasions. Emily was making a plan, maybe even setting a trap, and he approved wholeheartedly, at least in theory. And his approval went from theoretical to full-on admiration when she said, “I need to know where I’d be living, and who I’d be living with. If Aunt Cassidy is coming to the city and I can live with her, then I’m totally excited for either one of those schools. But if she’s staying in Lyonstown?” A pause, and then Em said, “If you’re staying in Lyonstown, Aunt Cassidy, I’m staying there, too.”
He snaked his left hand between his seat and the door of the car, back so Em would be able to see it, and gave her a thumbs-up. He was rewarded a moment later when her fingers closed around his in a quick squeeze.
Hell, yeah. For a moment, he thought he might have to pull over, as it all hit him at once. He had a daughter, and she was sweet and funny, which he couldn’t take much credit for, but she was also damn crafty, and he would claim her on those grounds. He’d always been a team player, always sought out friends and made the chosen few into family, so he’d never really been alone. But this? Emily was family, she was his blood, and she was with him. She loved her aunt and wouldn’t betray her, he knew, but pressure her? Hell, yeah, his daughter would pressure people she loved, if she was convinced it was in their best interest. His blood meant something after all.
But he had to keep his cool and play his part if he wanted to be the partner his daughter deserved. So he didn’t pull over, and after a return squeeze he retrieved his hand and put it back on the steering wheel. “That’s something Cassidy’s going to have to think about, I guess. No big rush. But, Cass, let me know what I can do to help with that decision.” Don’t gloat; don’t ruin it. “Maybe we should talk about this more.” Not about marriage, oh no, that would be out of the question. “We need to figure out what’s going to work the best for everyone involved, right? But we don’t have to do it right now. It was a good trip, but Cassidy, you’ve got the diner to open up this afternoon. Do you need help? I can drop Em somewhere and come over if you just need one person, but if you need two? Em, you have any big plans?”
She was on the same page as he was, still a team player, and she chatted about some friends she might want to see to tell them about the city, and how of course she’d need to show her new clothes to people. It wasn’t completely mindless babble, Will realized after a while. Deliberately or not, Emily was making her enthusiasm for the city clear. She loved NYC, she wanted to be in NYC, but she couldn’t go to NYC without her aunt. Excellent work, junior.
When they got to Lyonstown, Will dropped Cassidy at the diner, drove Em to Riva’s, unloading her luggage so the new additions could be thoroughly inspected, and then returned to the diner.
Cassidy was behind the counter but looked up with a frown when he came in. “If you’re going to be here, just chop up the chicken pie ingredients and don’t talk to me,” she barked.
And finally he’d had a bit much. “Oh, sorry, princess, is my unpaid labor not to your liking?”
“Your labor is fine. It’s your damn interference I don’t want to deal with.”
“Interference?” He froze in the act of pulling the now-familiar apron over his head. “Being interested in my daughter’s future is ‘interference,’ now?”
“Being interested in my future is interference, now and always!” She slammed the pot of potatoes down on the stove. “You can care about Emily without dragging me into it
. She’s the princess, here, not me! She’s your heir, the center of your universe, and I’m just the serving girl who comes with her.”
“Are you seriously jealous of your niece? You’re pissed because I’m giving her too much attention? Is that what’s happening, here?”
She froze and stared at him. And then, slowly, painfully, she nodded. “Maybe. If that’s the way you need to frame it in order to understand it, okay. Say I’m jealous. Say it’s petty of me to not realize that I’m born to be a supporting player, first to Penny, and now to Emily. Does that make it easier for you? If you can think I’m just being a bitch for wanting something for myself, and fooling myself when I think that Emily might be better off being raised by a woman who can take care of herself instead of a woman who has to be supported by a random man?”
She left the pot on the stove as she advanced on him. “Have you thought about that? Have you realized that I’m Em’s role model? Do you really want your daughter to be raised thinking that women need to be supported by men, because they can’t handle the world on their own? Is that what you want her to see?”
It felt like an internet debate, people being dragged into defending extremes they didn’t really believe just because they got caught up in the current of the arguments. And even realizing it, Will seemed unable to stop himself from joining in for his part. “Do you want her to see that women can only work menial jobs? Do you want her to see that women are afraid to leave their hometowns and try something new?”
She stared at him, and he stared right back. She was stubborn, infuriating, impossible. He wanted to shake her, yell at her, wanted to make her change her mind.
And at the same time, he admired her. She wasn’t caving in, wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear as so many people would. Her stubbornness was strength, she infuriated him because she was so often right, and she was impossible because the situation was impossible, because she was honest enough to express the problems that might otherwise go undiscussed.