Willa grinned. Her phone buzzed where it rested by the sketchpad. She picked it up, looked at it, then tossed it away.
“Go,” Shea ordered, finger pointing to the door. “Go out. Stop ignoring all your admirers and take back your social life. I’m okay now.”
Willa shrugged. “I’m good here. They can wait.”
“You’ve been here five days. I love you, but come on.”
Willa folded her arms on the table and eyed Shea hard. “They mean nothing to me. You mean everything. And you called me for a reason. When you leave your apartment, I will, too. Besides,” she said, as she picked up a black pencil, “do you even know how much work I’ve finished here this week? My clients are going to be thrilled. I’ll actually beat several deadlines and deliver early. I’m thinking I should start paying you rent. Maybe make this table my permanent office.”
Shea rolled out of the couch that was trying to eat her and wandered over to the table. It was reclaimed wood, and she’d bought it earlier that year because she thought that someday it would look wonderful in a rural farm.
Willa was sketching a logo for some new restaurant opening up near the High Line in the Meatpacking District.
“You’re really good,” Shea said. “I know I’ve told you that a million times, but I love your eye, your style.”
Another phone went off, and this time it was Shea’s. She pulled it out of her back pocket and stared at the text next to the little pic of the bagpiper.
Landed. When can I see you?
She flipped the phone around so Willa could see. “It’s him. He’s back.”
Willa sighed dramatically and looked forlornly at the spread of design work. “And I was getting so much done.” She winked at Shea. “Just kidding, darling. I’ll get out of your hair. That is, if you want me to. You’re looking a little, I don’t know, doubtful?”
Shea stared at the silly bagpiper. “I’m . . .” The suitcase still sat by the front door, the train teetering on top. “I’m excited. I’m nervous. I guess I am a little doubtful. It’s been a week. Things were so . . . weird . . . when he left.”
“So you don’t want to see him? That’s the vibe I’m getting.”
“No. I mean, yes. God, yes. I want to see him.” Shea wiggled the phone. “But this whole thing is so strange. Right before he left for South Carolina things were . . .” She sighed. Actually sighed. Like she was in a nineteen-fifties sitcom or something. “And then that shit with his brother and family happened, and then his apartment, and then Marco and the photos, and—”
Willa shoved a hand at Shea. “Stop. Those are nothing. A stutter.”
“A stutter?”
“None of those things had anything to do with the two of you.” She tapped a pencil on the table in time with her words. “I wish I could videotape you guys just so you could see the way you are together. Maybe you two could be the first couple in history to skip the whole ‘I don’t know how he or she feels’ step in a new relationship. You’re crazy about each other. End of story.”
“That argument we had after his apartment got broken into was pretty bad. He was really frustrated with me, and I was with him. And then he went to Switzerland without us really talking about it. I could’ve told you where we stood or what I thought two weeks ago, but now?”
“Oh, for heaven’s—” Willa snatched Shea’s phone from her grasp.
“Give that back.”
Willa typed something at lightning speed. “There. Done.” She held up the phone. She’d texted: Now.
“Why did you—” Shea began over the sound of steam pushing through her ears.
Her phone buzzed. Byrne.
Be there in an hour. I have something for you.
Willa gathered up her things, gave Shea a kiss on the cheek, and left.
Fifty-seven minutes later, the sound of his knock on her door made her heart ride a pogo stick. She jumped up from where she’d been sitting, anxious, on the couch. She threw open the door and suddenly there he was.
He’d been wearing a little smile as the light from her apartment fell across his body, but as he took her in, it faded. But in one of those good ways, like what he was feeling was too much for his expression to hold in. She knew exactly what that was like, because she was just standing there, staring at him.
Then his head sagged to one side, his crazy-gorgeous eyes turned to starlight, and he whispered, “Oh. Look at you.”
The sound of his voice lit a fire in her and she reached out, grabbed the front of his shirt—not silk, cotton—and yanked him inside. He kicked the door closed and his big arms came around her. She buried her face in the crook of his neck and, good lord, his scent invaded her, made her dizzy.
“You feel amazing,” he said into her hair. “I wish I could’ve done this for you the day I had to leave.”
That managed to pull out a few of the tears she’d been resisting for a week now, but she sniffled them back before he would know.
Slowly he released her, only to take her face in his hands. His lips parted as if to kiss her, but then he asked, “Anything new? Anything since Marco’s statement?”
The call from her parents, but she didn’t want to mention that just then. “They took the photos down but the Amber’s still swamped, apparently. I haven’t gone in. Willa’s been keeping me company.”
His thumb grazed her jawline. “I wish it had been me. Can you forgive me for leaving?”
“There’s nothing to forgive. It’s work. There are things you can’t get out of. Believe me, I understand.” But she felt her eyes start to fill up again, and this time he did notice. His face softened and she started to extricate herself from his hold. “I think I need a tissue.”
He let her slide away.
When she came out of the bathroom, he was still standing in that spot by the front door, hands in the pockets of his flat-front gray pants, looking around her place. A small leather airplane bag hung from one shoulder. He looked different. Good different. Amazing different.
“Thank you for that.” She gestured to his arms, stupidly. “I needed it. I don’t think I knew just how much.”
He gave her a wonderfully warm smile, not remotely crooked. “Of course.”
She stepped closer, gazing up into his face. “I really wish I could’ve done that for you, when you came back from South Carolina and found your apartment the way it was. I really wish I could’ve helped you like that.”
His smile sagged. “Well, you came at me with words, not with arms.”
Her mouth dropped open.
“Oh crap.” Blood drained from his face, his eyes growing wide. “That didn’t come out at all the way I wanted. I’m so sorry. That was a shitty thing to say.”
“Yeah, it kind of was. I was trying to read you that day, and you had this barrier up like I probably shouldn’t touch you—”
He kissed her. A brief, hard meeting of just their mouths that reminded her of their very first.
“You can always touch me,” he said.
She blinked at him, a little thrown by the sudden change. “I, um—”
He grinned. “Come here.” With a gentle tug on her fingers, he pulled her over to a couch. Right before he sat down, he unhooked the bag from his shoulder and set it on her coffee table. He unzipped it but didn’t take anything out. Looking up at her, he patted the cushion next to him.
She sat not because of some outside force, or some invisible magical woo-woo that belonged in a storybook, or because he was gravity, but because she wanted to. Because she’d missed him, and she needed to know about him. About where they stood right now and where they went from here.
He looked bottled up, she just realized. Like he had something he wanted to tell her but couldn’t get it out, so she asked, “Any news on your brother?”
“Yeah.” He scratched lightly at the back of his head, but it q
uickly turned to a rather violent scrubbing, his face all scrunched up. “They caught him hopping a subway turnstile in the Financial District. Dumb shit. Almost like he wanted to get caught. Maybe he did.”
She came to her knees on the cushions. “And your apartment?”
“As soon as they found out it was him, they charged him with—what was it?—burglary, criminal damage to property.”
“Is that something you get sent to jail for?”
Byrne sighed, and it sounded soul deep. “Yeah. Stealing my parents’ money isn’t going to help him, either.”
“Will you get to see him?” When he didn’t answer right away, she amended, “Do you want to see him?”
“Yes. And no.”
She nodded, thinking that if she were in his position, she’d think the same thing.
He turned his head to meet her eyes. “Are you going to take that meeting with Whitten?”
The answer lodged in her throat. A hard, small word that felt like a pill swallowed the wrong way.
“Can we just not talk about that right now? I’ve been not talking about it for a week and it’s been great.”
Pressing his lips together, he glanced at his bag. “I have to say, that really doesn’t seem like you.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Avoidance.”
“Well, I don’t want to sit here hiding, but I feel like the second I step into the Amber the wrong kind of attention will sprout up. I don’t want success from infamy. And I don’t want to make any big deals under that ugly umbrella. I’m just a girl from Pennsylvania who wants to live out her dreams. But I’m . . . embarrassed. There. I said it.”
“You know”—he shifted a little to face her—“I’ve watched you working before. I’ve seen you in action, so to speak. You are absolutely justified in feeling what you do, but I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit to rise above it. Or to power through it.”
Pierce had said much the same thing.
She flopped back into the embrace of the cushions. Slowly, slowly, they swallowed her until all she could see was the set of shelves on the opposite wall.
“I just want what I want,” she said. “No matter which way I turn, I can’t help feeling like I come up against huge roadblocks. And they’re not something I can mentally get over. It’ll take time and a completely different route that I just can’t see yet.”
Byrne leaned over, around the pouf of cushion, until he filled her vision. He kept licking his lips, kept shifting his eyes over to the right.
“What?” she asked. “What’s that face for?”
“What if,” he said carefully, “you could get what you want?”
Embarrassingly, she had to struggle to sit back up; the couch practically had her down its throat. “What do you mean?”
“The distillery up in Gleann.”
Grinding fingers into her eyelids, she let out a huge sigh. “I told you. The cost is prohibitive right now. It would take some serious capital to even get the down payment for that place, not to mention all the remodeling and start-up costs for the distillery itself, and the fact that I couldn’t even make a dime until years out. It’s a pipe dream, Byrne. I thought I could do it if I stuck with the Amber and squirreled away any money I made with Whitten, and then I’d be able to think about shopping around for a mortgage and business loans in maybe another five years or so—”
“But what if you didn’t need Whitten to get started?”
Was he not listening to her? “But I do.”
“What if you didn’t?” He reached over to his bag, slipped his hand between the open zipper, and pulled out a large brown envelope. One of those big ones with the flap and the string that looped around two attached cardboard circles. He looked at it for a moment, then placed it on her lap.
“What’s this?” Her mouth went bone-dry.
“Open it.” His knee bounced a little. His big shoulders rounded forward, and the corners of his mouth ticked up, as though the crooked smile couldn’t decide if it wanted to make an appearance.
Shea’s hands curled on her chest as she stared down at the heavy brown envelope. The window air-conditioning unit kicked on, spewing out a much-needed cold blast.
“Open it,” he said. “Please.”
Slowly she unwound the string and lifted the flap. Inside were several sheets of paper, fastened with a paperclip. She flipped through them, but they were full of tightly spaced, itty-bitty legalese.
“I don’t understand. What am I looking at?”
He reached out and set the first page on top of the stack again, then tapped a finger on a line. Suddenly it became clear that she was reading an address. An address in Gleann, New Hampshire.
Her head snapped up. “What is this? What did you do?”
Oh, the smile. That brilliant, slanted smile.
He said, “I bought you the farm.”
If she weren’t already sitting, she might have collapsed. “What?”
His eyes positively twinkled, the creases deepening at their outer corners.
“I bought you the farm. The one you showed me, the one you want. The house, the barns, the fields. Everything.”
“I know which one,” she whispered, blinking hard at the paperwork. There it was, the address of the rural route outside of Gleann. The purchase price with all those zeros. And Byrne’s name. His full name.
“Well, it’s not final yet,” he amended, “but they’ve accepted my bid. As of yesterday. I signed the papers overseas and put up the earnest money, and now it’s in a period of attorney review. That’ll end probably at the end of this coming week. Then all you have to do is set a closing date. It could be yours in another month.”
“My God, Byrne.” Her voice rattled like she was driving over railroad tracks. “You bought me all this?”
“I did. Well, I want to. There are still a couple steps to go through.” He reached for her hands where they rested on top of the papers, and her reaction was immediate and instinctual.
She jumped up, the envelope and its contents sliding to the rug.
The enthusiasm and joy dissipated from his face. He drew his hands back in. “That wasn’t exactly the reaction I thought I’d get.”
She didn’t want to know about his expectations for something this huge. Something this full of meaning. Something this one-sided. “But . . . why?”
With a firm nod, he looked her directly in the eye and replied, “Because I have the money. Because you deserve it. Because I know you’re devastated about the mess this fucking picture-website thing made, and that makes me sad. Because I want to help you, and not remotely in the way Lynch has. I’m no angel investor. This is your business. I don’t want a thing to do with it.”
She couldn’t find air. Overwhelmed didn’t even begin to describe the way she felt.
All those zeroes . . . “You have this kind of money?”
Another nod. “I do.”
Or he had it, anyway, if she actually let him go through with this.
“But that was for your land. Your parents’ land and the house you wanted for them.”
He stood up, too. “I have plenty more. Enough to do something else for my family when the time is right, when they let me.”
She looked at the papers strewn under the coffee table. “Maybe they never let you because it’s simply too much.”
A deep groove divided his eyebrows.
“Byrne, I . . . I can’t let you do this.”
“It’s done. Didn’t you see my signature on the end of the bid, my initials all over? I could stop the attorney review and get back my earnest money, but I really don’t want to.”
Still no air came to her. Her chest pumped, her lungs worked, but it didn’t feel like she was taking in any oxygen.
He inched closer, but it seemed like he crossed a great chasm t
o get to her. “The money is mine. I want to give this to you. I want you to have that distillery, and if you truly don’t want to go into business with Whitten right now, this is the way you can begin. I don’t want you to have to settle for anything. I want you to have that farm. The first step is done. You have the space. Now go out and find the capital to start everything else you said you wanted.”
Pressing a hand to her forehead that felt terribly damp, she turned away and went over to the table where Willa had been working. Shea replaced and straightened the centerpiece of eclectic vases, and when that was done she went to her shelves, where she adjusted every wineglass and snifter so they were perfectly even.
“You can pay me back,” Byrne said behind her. “If that’s what you need, if that’s what will make this all right to you. But I really do want to give it to you as a gift.”
Shea choked out a laugh as she whirled around. “That kind of money?”
He opened his hands, looking so very reasonable, and shrugged. “Then don’t worry about paying me back. Just take it. Start your dream. It would make me very happy, Shea. Very, very happy.”
“You don’t get it. I would have it hanging over my head. Every single day I went to work. Every day I slept in that house or walked across the fields to the barn. I would know what was given me and not what I earned myself.”
He frowned. “Hanging over your head? No, that’s not what I intended at all.”
“Did you listen to anything I had to say in Gleann? Or by that lake in my hometown? After everything I went through with Marco? I got out from underneath him because I had to be responsible for myself. I wanted my own life. And while I’m grateful to Lynch for helping with that, for getting me going with the Amber, right now I feel like I’m owing yet another person. That I’m beholden to him. My immediate reaction to this is that I would be escaping that cage only to jump into another.”
He came over to the table and gripped the back of an end chair. “I listened to you, Shea. To every word. And I just told you that in my eyes, it’s completely different from your position with Lynch. I just thought I could help—”
The Good Chase Page 29