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I want to scream at him that I’m not one of them, but I don’t, I can’t. Because in ways I don’t want to be, I am. I have to let him walk out the door and he does. He’s gone. I’m alone, but no matter how I connect to his family, I’m still a fish in a sea of Kingston sharks, and I’m going to have to grow my own teeth.
Chapter twelve
Harper
There are people who float in and out of our lives, like ships passing in the night never meant to stop or know one another, but what happens when they do?
The idea of leaving New York City and Eric behind is brutal, as if I’m leaving a piece of myself, and that’s just nuts. Last night was sex, nothing more. Six years ago was also sex, nothing more. He came. He made me come. He left. He didn’t look back. And yet here I am, fretting over leaving without seeing him again, to the point that I’m pacing my hotel room and contemplating skipping my flight.
I tell myself it’s because I need his help, but I know this runs deeper for me. That man affects me and if I thought this trip would provide closure that would allow me to move on from that party six years ago, and him with it, I didn’t get it. More of Eric fed my need for even more of him.
The doorman knocks on my door, an alert that tells me, I’m out of time. It’s officially decision time and for me, that comes back to one key thing: Eric was right. I haven’t told him everything. I also can’t lie to him the way everyone else in this family has, but if I turn the wrong pages, expose him to the deep, dark tales, his words will prove true: he’ll ruin the Kingston family and that means my mother and my father’s legacy along with it. I was playing with fire coming here. It’s time to go home before I do something I’ll regret the rest of my life. Decision solidified, I let the doorman in.
An hour and a half later, I’m on a plane, and when I should be trying to decide how to move on without Eric, creating a plan to save my family business, I’m thinking about him—and every touch, every kiss, every word we’ve shared plays in my mind over and over again and my regrets are many. I should have said more. I should have stopped him from walking away, but I remind myselfI couldn’t.He saw too much and it would be foolish to expect agenius who sees too much to stop seeing too much. You don’t ask a man like Eric to help you see what you can’t and expect him not to see everything.
By the time I’m on the ground, it’s early evening, and when I walk into my downtown home, I strip down to sweats and a T-shirt, order takeout, and sit down at my computer. It’s time to focus on what’s before me. My cellphone rings with Gigi’s number and I let it go to voicemail. I need a plan before I talk to her. She’s no spring chicken and the idea of Eric helping us seemed to have calmed her down. I need to give her another rope to hang onto. Heck, I need to give myself another rope to hang onto. Hiring help appears to be my next best move, and that help has to be someone that can’t be bought off by Isaac. A difficult task when Isaac floats in a boatload of money while I have a canoe and possess limited resources.
An idea stirs, and I snatch my purse and pull out the business card I’d grabbed from Eric’s desk. Confirming his cellphone and his email are on it, I pull up my own email and before I can talk myself out of it, I start to type:
Eric—
I grabbed your card from your desk. I wanted to call but it felt like you were pretty finished when you left. I wasn’t, but that just seems to be how things work with us.
I stop myself. What am I doing? This isn’t a personal email. I should delete that. I start again.
Eric—
I grabbed your card from your desk. I wanted to call, but I thought you might welcome an email more freely.I know that your history in Denver runs deep and dark. I shouldn’t have asked you to come back here in the first place, but I need someone to help me figure this out. I need to hire someone and Isaac has money and resources that I don’t. I need someone I can trust who can’t be bought off. So, this is me asking for help one last time. Who would you hire to investigate Kingston Motors? Just a referral would be appreciated and I don’t even have to mention your name.
Harper
I read the message and while there’s more, so much more, that I want to say, I think better. I hit send and hope for a reply. In the meantime, I start researching and looking for someone I can hire on my own. I create a list of operations outside of Denver who will be less influenced by Isaac and my stepfather, who may or may not be a part of what’s going on.
Hours later, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my mind racing. I grab my phone from the nightstand, pull up my email, disappointment stabbing at me with the discovery that there’s nothing from Eric. I’m such a fool. Obviously, I was nothing more than a conquest he needed to get out of his system. And he did. Ishould haveknown, and for reasons I can’t explain, it felt like something more happened between us, like there was a real connection, something lasting, but clearly, I was wrong. It’s time to move on. And yet, as I doze off, slipping into the haze of early slumber, I’m back in the past, living that moment by the pool when his eyes had found me, the tingling sensation running down my spine. The lift of my gaze and the force of that man’s attention. I’ve clearly never recovered.
My memory floats forward to me standing on that stage, scanning the crowd for Eric and catching a glimpse of him disappearing down the path. I wanted to shout for him to come back.
“Good riddance,” Isaac had murmured next to me. “I hope he’s leaving.”
And he had. He’d left. I’d felt that certainty like a sharp knife in my chest even before I knew. And yet still, the minute I was free of that stage, the minute the world of people I’d spoken in front of were focused solely on my stepfather, I’d hurried to confirm. I’d walked that path toward the cottage, my heart racing in my chest, and found the door unlocked. I’d also found the cottage empty. And I’d gone to bed that night, like I am this one, with the feel of his hands on my body, the scent of him in my nostrils. Those piercing eyes haunting me, and the two nicknames that define our separation in my mind: the princess and the bastard.
Eric
I’m sitting on the slate gray couch of my living room with a whiskey in my hand and my MacBook on the coffee table in front of me, that damn email from Harper open and staring back at me as it has for a good two hours. I down the amber liquid in my glass, asmooth thirty-year, and much needed when stomaching anything Kingston. I snatch up the Rubik’s cube sitting on the table beside me and start turning it, the numbers in my head telling stories that no one else would understand, and doing so every damn moment of my life. Right now, they’re telling the story of the bastard and the princess.
I set the damn cube down and stand up, walking to the floor-to-ceiling window to the left of the main living area. I stop in front of the glass and nothing but inky night touches my eyes, a storm on the horizon. Out there beyond that darkness is a spectacular Manhattan skyline to kill for that I worked my ass off to earn. That no one named Kingston gave me. They don’t get to give or take from me ever again. And they did take.
I press my hands to the glass, cold seeping through my palms and sliding up my arms, but there is fire in my blood, memories of the only person that could ever get me to give two fucks about anything Kingston in my mind:Harper.
My lashes lower, numbers exploding in my mind that become all about her again. And I end up replaying exactly ten different moments with Harper in my arms, with me inside her, the scent of her on my skin, the taste of her on my lips. What the hell is it about her that makes me need another taste? That makes me remember how she tastes? What is it about her that drives me fucking insane? It should be over. I finally had her. I fucked her, so what if I want to do it about another twenty times? It’s over. That’s how it has to be.
I need help,she’d said in her message.
My lashes lift and I shove off the window. I do not help the Kingston family.
The end.
The princess is part of their clan now, and six years deep, at that. Helping her is helping them, and she wasn’t even honest with me. There was something she wasn’t telling me. She didn’t even deny that as truth. I sit back down on the couch and refill my glass. I don’t like unknowns and where the Kingstons are concerned, that gets personal. Especially after they sought me out through Harper.
