Page 24

“I tried talking to Jane about it last year,” I said after a while. “My mistake was telling her the drinking had got bad. She was mad that he’d replaced one vice with another and begged me to stay away from him. And Jane doesn’t get mad. It freaked me out.” I laughed, and it came out slightly manic. “Her and Mary were always closer to Mum than they were to Dad, and after what he put her through, I don’t know that they’ll ever want anything to do with him.

“I don’t blame them,” I added firmly, because I hated the thought of Kev thinking badly of my sisters.

“Neither do I,” he said in a gentle voice. “Addiction is a disease that hurts everyone it touches, and not everyone can handle the ugly.”

I flicked my eyebrows up in acknowledgement of that then licked my finger and used it to pick up the last few crumbs from my plate. Desperate times.

“How’s the new job going?” Kev asked. “I hope taking today off won’t get you in trouble.”

“Actually, I was glad to be away from the office for a day.”

“Are you not enjoying it?”

“It’s not that.” I grinned. “But there’s this… situation.” I gave him a quick summary of the idiotic part I was playing as Bingley’s girlfriend, and he did not hold back in telling me how daft he thought I was for going along with it.

“Especially if this man’s going to be angry with you when he learns the truth.”

“I’m not worried about that. I can’t see Darcy holding it against me when I was only doing his friend a favour. He seems all right.”

Kev looked at me with a gleam in his eye. “Do I detect a hint of admiration?”

“Maybe,” I said, too tired to be bothered to lie. “He’s grumpy as sin, and we didn’t get off to a great start, but he’s growing on me. The last few times we’ve talked, he’s been… you know… not a complete arsehole.”

Kev laughed. “A ringing endorsement! Well, if nothing else, it’ll take your mind off worrying about your dad.”

He wasn’t wrong. I probably thought about Darcy more often than was wise, but every time we interacted, I caught another tantalising glimpse of the man beneath the scowl, and I was frankly fascinated. It didn’t hurt that the face doing all the scowling was so easy on the eye, but it was what I’d seen of his cleverness, the respect he drew from others, his affection for his family, and his surprising gentleness that had me trying so hard to sketch his character.

“Yeah,” I said with a small smile. “As distractions go, Darcy is definitely a ten.”

12

DARCY

I stopped in the middle of my darkened living room and looked at my phone, debating whether to accept the incoming call. There were a multitude of reasons I didn’t want to talk to Bingley—or rather, things I didn’t want to talk to him about. I despised lying, yet a conversation with him at the moment would be a minefield of embargoed topics.

Having already decided I wasn’t going to bring up Elizabeth’s dinner with Billy, it followed that I should also eschew mentioning her call from Kev. Omission number one, therefore: Bingley, there’s a chance your girlfriend might be playing you. Omission number two: I also want to bang her brains out. How’s work going, by the way?

The answer to that, I already knew, was not great. We’d been emailing about it all day—I really did need to speak to him. But the call rang off, and I blew out a huge breath of relief.

It immediately started ringing again. I swore and hit answer. “Bingley.”

“At last!”

“Sorry, I was showering.” I winced. One second in, and there went my first lie.

“No, I’m sorry. I’m going stir-crazy in this hotel room.”

I lowered myself onto the sofa. “How did it go this afternoon?”

“Better than I was expecting, but I don’t know that I pulled it back completely. O’Connor’s definitely going to need more convincing, and Kline looks like she’s going to walk. Thornton really pulled a number on us.”

Thornton, one of the smaller potential investors, had rattled the others by publicly questioning our acquisition strategy—but our numbers were watertight, and he knew it. He was trying to spook the other investors into lowering their offer so that he could outbid them. We knew he couldn’t match our funding requirements alone, though, so him scaring off all the competition meant we were sailing perilously close to shit creek with an increasingly tenuous grip on the paddles.

I rubbed a hand over my face. I’d put the money up to buy Vertex myself if Bingley would let me, but that was one thing he’d never wanted. He’d accepted my offer of early investment, as well as my guidance on setting up his business, but he’d never wanted a free ride.

“I sent you the files you asked for,” I told him. “Should shut down a lot of his objections.”

“Got them, thanks. I’m obviously going to need to stay longer. Can you cover things in the office?”