by Judi Fennell
“Fine. So stay at my place until something else comes through. A day or two. A week even. I’m sure that when your friends come back from vacation, this will have blown over and you can stay with one of them.”
“That’s not going to happen either.”
“Huh?”
“Once they find out about this eviction, I’m going to be a topic of discussion. A scandal. These women can be vipers, Liam. They live for scandals. For talking about other people. For making themselves feel better by crushing others. No one’s going to risk Mitchell Davenport’s wrath to take in his daughter. No, I’m pretty much a pariah now.”
Which meant she damn well better take him up on his offer and be grateful about it.
And quick. Before he changed his mind. Or saw the light in not pissing off her father. “Okay, I’ll do it. Stay with you.”
She didn’t know who was more surprised: her or Liam.
“You will?”
“Unless you changed your mind?”
“What changed yours?”
“Brutal reality. I have nowhere to go.” Dammit, she could feel the tears well up behind her eyes. But she was not going to let them fall. Not for Da—Mitchell Davenport. The man wasn’t worth it.
Silence filled the space around them, thick and uncomfortable. But then, that went part-and-parcel with brutal reality.
Oh. My. God. Her father had kicked her out. He’d cut her off. No phone, no credit cards, not a single luxury. Not her car, and no one who’d come near her with the scarlet specter of his ire hanging over her head.
She was on her own. Totally. Completely.
And broke.
A chill washed over her and her knees wobbled. She shouldn’t be surprised. Not really. This feeling, this itchy floating-above-it-all-knees-wobbling feeling was the same one she’d felt when her mother had walked out. Dad had been just as unemotional then, a bland, “Your mother is gone, Cassidy. She doesn’t want to live with us. It’s just you and me now,” as if he was discussing a field trip or what was for dinner. Then he’d closed her bedroom door without one whit of emotion and left her there. Alone.
She’d cried herself to sleep and even then she’d understood it was because she had no one.
She wasn’t going to cry now. Not this time. Being evicted was merely the physical manifestation of the emotional desert she’d been in since she was four years old.
And hey, at least she’d have time to paint. She’d show her father. He didn’t have a hold on her any longer. She’d crank out those pieces so fast, it’d make his head spin.
Except . . . Crud. She’d left her paints in the penthouse.
“All right, then.” Liam picked the bag back up. “Let’s get going.”
“Um, Liam?” She really hated to ask him this, but she had no way of getting any other supplies, what with being cut off and all. “Could you . . . I mean . . . That is . . .”
“Spit it out, Princess. I don’t have all day. I have to get you situated at my place, then come back here to finish the job I was hired to do.”
“About that. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind getting something of mine I left back there.”
“I am not taking anything out of that place and having your father accuse me of theft.”
“Oh, trust me. He’ll probably give you a reward if you do.”
Liam’s gorgeous blue eyes narrowed. “What is it?”
“My new paints. I left them in the bottom drawer of the credenza in the dining room.”
“You paint in the dining room?”
She shook her head. “I stuck them there after I bought them the other day. It’s the least-used room in the place, so it’s the last place Dad would think to look for them. If he’d even think to look for them. After last night, I’m sure he’ll be more than happy not to have them around as a reminder. So if you could get them for me, I’d really appreciate it. It will allow me to start earning some money to pay you for my stay.”
Liam rubbed his chin. “We’ll worry about you paying me back later, but, yeah, I’ll get the paints. Anything else? Jewelry, gowns, shoes?”
She shook her head. “No. Nothing. If I know my father, and unfortunately I do all too well, he’ll have Deborah inventorying everything against the charge slips. I don’t want anything of his.”
“Then you might want to leave those rocks on your ears here.”
She fingered the diamond studs. “I’m keeping these. I earned them.”
“Doing what? Entertaining visiting dignitaries? Hosting heads of state?”
She glanced away and blinked back more tears that sprang up at his sarcasm. Silly really, since he was right, but oh how she wanted to be valued for what she could do instead of what she looked like. And the ironic thing was, she had earned these. Chit-chatting with people she had no desire to speak with, attending events that left her bored to tears, and being thought of as nothing more than a pretty face with the occasional pass-by ass-patting deserved recompense.
“Look, I get what you think of me. I know what people think of my life. That it’s all wine and roses and I should be happy as a clam living in the gilded tower with my clothes and jewelry and nice things. I get that. The thing is, that’s who he wanted me to be. I bought into it for a while, but I’m not that person anymore. There’s more to me than that.”
She wanted to wipe that skeptical look off Liam’s face, but words alone would never do it. She had to show him. She had to show them all. And she would, dammit. This was her chance. Her shot at making over her life as she’d planned to do during the lunch yesterday—had it only been yesterday?—with Dad.
“If you say so.” Liam picked up her bag. “Okay, then. Let’s get going. My truck’s over here.”
She watched him swagger ahead of her. Oh, it wasn’t an intentional swagger; those, she could spot a mile away. His was all natural grace and athleticism, with one hell of a nice butt—
Okay, not thoughts she ought to be having at the moment. She was going to stay with the guy just until she got on her feet, not move in with him forever. No sense starting something like that and risk having him think that was how she was going to pay him back—
Uh oh. That wasn’t what he thought, was it? He’d talked about paybacks . . . He didn’t think she was going to . . . That she would . . .
Titania wriggled in the crook of her arm and started to whine. “Um, Liam? Could you hold up, please? Titania needs a potty break.”
Liam looked back over his shoulder with his eyebrow arched. “Don’t tell me you got her a throne-shaped one of those as well.”
“Not funny.” She juggled her bag, her purse, the dog, and the leash to get the last two attached to each other. Normally, Titania wouldn’t run away, but with the way Cassidy’s luck had gone the past twenty-four hours, she wasn’t risking it.
The dog kept wiggling. “Hold still, Titania. The bushes are over there.” She hurried to the edge of the garage where the landscaping was above the chest-high wall, and plunked the cutie-pie among the petunias. “Go ahead. Do good girl.”
She caught Liam rolling his eyes in her peripheral vision.
Titania, being Titania, took her time sniffing the flowers before finding the perfect spot.
Liam’s foot started tapping.
All finished, Titania yipped her sweet little happy bark, then licked Cassidy on the nose before practically leaping into her arms. There was nothing like the unconditional love of a dog. That would be why Titania barely left her side. The Maltese was six years old and Cassidy could remember each day as if it were yesterday—especially the day she’d brought her home.
Dad had had a conniption. Cassidy had heard the term but never known exactly what a conniption entailed. Bringing a dog home to his new pristine, “highpoint of my career” penthouse induced the conniption. And what a thing it had been to behold. Exactly what she’d been trying to avoid yesterday at lunch by breaking the news to him gently.
Yet he’d gone and had one just the same. Granted,
it’d been in her—his—home, but still, it was the second time she’d ever seen that reaction from the normally calm and unflappable Mitchell Davenport.
She still couldn’t believe he’d cut her off. She hadn’t seen that coming. How could she have been so wrong about her own father?
“Are we all set, then? You don’t have softly scented, individually wrapped doggy wipes, do you?”
The sarcasm was rolling off Liam’s tongue, yet still the man held open the door of the truck and helped her into it. Thank goodness because it was really high off the ground, even with running boards.
“This is a big truck,” she said after he walked around the front and climbed in the driver’s side.
“Yes, it is.”
And that was it. There wasn’t another word spoken by Mr. Liam Manley the entire way, for which she was grateful because she was still trying to wrap her brain around the past hour. Dad had cut her off. He’d tried to force her to his will with money.
God, how pitiful. How utterly shallow did her own father think she was? How shallow was he? And Burton? How shallow was he to marry her just to become Mitchell’s heir?
Okay, well that might be incentive, but did he really want to marry someone who wasn’t in love with him?
Scratch that. People did it all the time, and being CEO of her father’s conglomerate was reward enough for a loveless marriage.
He’d. Cut. Her. Off.
Cassidy shook her head. Her own father, manipulating her—an almost thirty-year-old woman—into an arranged marriage. What was this, feudal England?
Cassidy looked out the window as Liam turned onto a quiet, tree-lined street with the houses spaced close enough to be called neighbors, but far enough apart that they wouldn’t know their neighbors’ intimate business.
Intimacy. Burton would have expected it. And with money as the basis for their marriage, her father would be consigning her to being a very well-paid prostitute.
She was going to be sick. She’d never even thought of him doing something like this. Oh, sure, the passing “being broke” comment had risen its head every once in a while when she’d thought about going out on her own, but she’d expected the “broke” part to be temporary while she waited to sell more furniture, not because every cent she possessed would be frozen due to her father’s long reach.
What was she going to do? When she’d first envisioned this, she’d expected to stay in the penthouse or maybe one of his other properties until she had enough income for a small mortgage. She’d planned to live simply. Make do with a thousand square feet instead of the four thousand she’d just been booted from.
Now, if it weren’t for Liam’s generosity, she wouldn’t even have one.
Liam pulled down a long driveway. Cassidy had to keep her mouth shut. And not shut, as in, she wasn’t going to say anything nasty, but shut as in preventing her bottom jaw from dropping. She was worried about one square foot? Liam probably had four thousand of them himself—and that was just the front yard.
“This is yours?” she finally had to ask him, not taking her eyes off the beautiful landscaping. She hadn’t known what to expect on a maid’s salary, but it certainly hadn’t been this. Tree-covered except for a small clearing that was lit as if from a beacon, with a lily pad pond in the center and stone-carved benches around it, with an old-fashioned water pump used as a fountain, and a beautiful array of annuals at the pond’s edge, the place actually looked like a fairyland. Titania would have a blast curling up by the rocks. “Are there fish in there?”
Liam nodded. “Koi. I have a few that are over a foot long.”
“Wow. I’m impressed. Koi need just the right touch to live so long.”
Seemed to be a metaphor for her life.
Liam drove over a narrow arched stone bridge, then circled around to the left, going behind the A-frame cabin-like structure with a front wall of windows that reminded her of the penthouse. The difference was (a) it wasn’t owned by her father and (b) it was in the middle of nature, not above it. She’d always wondered about people who liked to live above nature. Who thought looking down on it was so much better than living within it. After all, a patio-sized waterfall couldn’t even begin to compare to the beauty of Liam’s oasis and its gurgling water pump, or the butterflies flitting among the flowers, and the dragonflies hovering just above the surface of the pond with their wings humming in the silence.
It was so peaceful. So beautiful. A place where someone could go to escape the stresses of the day and just relax.
“Something wrong?” Liam’s voice had a sharp edge to it. “I know it’s not the Ritz or the Hilton or anything like that, and the water’s dirty, and the bugs are buzzing around, but this place suits me. I like sitting on the bench and watching the air bubbles on the surface from the fish, or the frogs jumping to catch the insects flying by. Or the occasional plop as one jumps in.”
“Sounds peaceful.”
“It is. Sometimes there’s nothing better than a little solitude in nature.”
It was a hell of a lot better than solitude in her gilded cage. She was going to like it here.
Titania squirmed around in her lap, put her paws on the door by the window, and started yipping.
“Aw, look. She wants to play.”
“She’s not going to keep up all that yapping, is she? She does go to sleep at some point, right?”
“Of course she does. She’s just excited right now.”
“What about accidents? I spent too much money on the flooring to be her potty-training service.”
“Titania’s been housebroken since the day after I got her. You don’t have to worry about a mess.”
“Oh, I wasn’t worried, since you’ll be cleaning it up.”
“Well, of course I will. She’s my dog. I clean up after her.”
Liam pulled into the garage and was around to help her out of the passenger side before she’d gathered Titania and the rest of her things.
“Put her down. She might as well learn the place from the get-go.” Liam set Titania on the floor. It was so strange to see her little dainty dog in Liam’s large, strong hands. It reminded her of an Ann Geddes photo with a baby cradled in its father’s hands.
Whoa. She was being way too fanciful here. Liam was just trying to help and she was the one weirding the situation out with her stupid imagination.
Save it for the artwork, Cassidy.
Exactly—Uh oh. Her art. The furniture. It was in the warehouse that she—fortunately—had leased in her own name. The rent was paid up to the end of the month, but if Dad found out about it before then . . .
She needed to get all the pieces out of there.
Thank God Liam had a two-car garage. Now hopefully he’ll be amenable to letting her furniture move in for a few days as well.
She followed him through the garage to the laundry room where the heater, laundry tub, and a contraption of pipes that might be a tank-less water heater greeted her.
“Leave your shoes here in the mudroom,” he said, taking his own off.
Really? The man took off his shoes in his own home?
“I try to keep the mess to a minimum so I don’t have to clean a lot.”
“I guess you don’t want to after doing it all day for your job, huh?” Made sense. She slipped off her flip-flops and put them on the shelves in the closet along the back wall.
“Here’s where I keep all the cleaning supplies.” Liam pointed to the shelves on the left. “Broom, dust mop, a wand for the blinds.” He pointed to the things lined up on the pegboard along the far side of the closet. “The attachments for the central vac system are in here.” He opened a cabinet. “I also have a hand-held vac, and the bags and attachments are here.” He flicked a hanging black vinyl pouch thing. “Extension rod and gripper for the light bulbs, which are up here.” He opened a cabinet within the closet to show her various types of light bulbs and a couple of big batteries and flashlights. “Trash bags, batteries, duct tape, some tools . . . This is
where you’ll find everything.”
Because she was going to need duct tape and hammers why?
Titania scratched at the door leading to what Cassidy presumed was the rest of the house.
“She scratches? Dammit, I just finished painting the doors.”
Cassidy scooped the dog up. “She doesn’t usually. I guess you have something that smells really great behind that door.”
“Dinner.” He opened the door. “I put salsa chicken in the Crock-Pot before I left.”
The scent of salsa filled the air. “That smells really good.”
“It is. Easy and good, too. Crock-Pot cooking is a godsend.”
Cassidy didn’t mention that though she’d heard of a Crock-Pot she wasn’t quite sure what one was or how to use it. Probably better to leave out that bit of info, since he was all “yes, Princess” this and “yes, Ms. Davenport” that. She didn’t need to know how to use a Crock-Pot to survive on her own.
Or maybe she did. Cooking on a budget hadn’t been included in any of her curriculum. Cooking hadn’t, either. Menu-planning, on the other hand, and how to deal with staff, had.
Well, maybe cooking was something she could learn while she was here. Guys liked when women cooked for them, right? Surely Liam wouldn’t mind. Most guys probably never set foot in their kitchen except to get beer and pizza from the fridge.
Apparently Liam did more in the kitchen than that. His was a mess.
“What happened here?” Cassidy set Titania down and surveyed the cardboard-box-covered quartz countertops.
Liam sighed and raked his hands through his hair. “My grandmother. She stops by every so often to restock my fridge, as she calls it. I guess today was that day.” He grabbed a box and started breaking it down. “We moved her to an assisted living facility and she misses cooking, so she borrows the facility’s kitchen and cooks up a storm.” He opened the stainless steel fridge door. “See?” He stepped back. Plastic container after plastic container lined the shelves. “She thinks I’m going to eat all of this before it goes bad.”