AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She sighed and made her way along the path that connected the guest house to the main house, already dreading the walk in winter. The guest house didn’t have a garage, and Kate continued to park her Lexus in the one attached to the main house. It was one of the few times she allowed her mind to drift to the future, a silent acknowledgement that the guest house wouldn’t work for her little family forever. Eventually she and Declan would have to figure out what the futureheld.
Marriage? Their ownhome?
She couldn’t even begin to think about those things until they found Neil. Until they made himpay.
Beth was more complicated. If she hadn’t been in on Neil’s plans to murder Mac Walsh, to initiate some kind of takeover of WMG, why had she disappeared? Why had Kate found a copy of WMG’s financial reports — complete with Neil’s notes in the margins — before Beth had dropped off the face of theearth?
All of Beth’s actions screamed guilt, not just her disappearance but the fact that she’d obviously been working with Neil in some capacity allalong.
She was a landmine in their family, buried deep but ready to blow them all to bits if they got too close, but Kate couldn’t bring herself to step around it, to leave it behind. Not until she knew the truth about Beth’s involvement. She was still Kate’s sister, and estrangement aside, Kate found that surprisingly hard toshake.
She slowed as she approached the main house and considered the possibility of stopping in to say hello to her mom. They needed to discuss their dresses for Aiden’s wedding, now only two months away, a task Kate had already put off for toolong.
Instead she continued toward thegarage.
It was childish to hold a grudge against her mom for her lapse with Neil almost three decades ago, although less so for the lie she’d perpetuated since then, but Kate couldn’t seem to help herself. She’d always been closer to her father, had blossomed under his praise, withered under his rarely displayed disappointment. Mac had been the one Kate lived to impress, and she’d eagerly drunk from the cup of his wisdom, all of which was designed to train her for an eventual role leading WMG besideAiden.
Her father’s daughter had no glass ceilings to crack, not only because he’d prepared a place for her at the table of his company but because he’d settled for nothing less than the utter destruction of anyobstacle.
He’d tutored Kate in the art of that destruction, had raised her on pearls of wisdom touting the merits of using her considerable brain power to make the decisions that would shape herlife.
He was far from cold, he was even lavish with his affection, his laughter the sound that most came to mind when she thought of her childhood. But he’d always made it clear that heart had to work together with mind — and that mind should win if there was ever atie.
Her mother was different. Sharp and insightful in ways that would have been indefinable to her father, that were sometimes indefinable to Kate, but still soft when it counted. There were few things Annie Walsh couldn’t forgive. Neil’s betrayal was at the top of that very short list, but she didn’t understand why Kate was having so much trouble dealing with an affair that had happened so long ago, one that, according to her mother, even Kate’s father had somehow reconciled before hisdeath.
Kate wasn’t sure she could even explain it to herself, but in the months since Kate had confronted her mom with Beth’s surprise paternity, Kate had been walking the line between pretending everything was okay and avoiding her momentirely.
She swallowed her shame and entered the garage using the back door. She just needed time, that wasall.
Time andjustice.
Once they found Neil, once they made him pay for what he’d done to Kate’s father, she’d be able to put it all behindher.
She got into the Lexus and thought about the past six months. They’d learned painfully little about Neil’s plans since his disappearance, but they knew he’d been planning a takeover of WMG. The shareholders MIS had interviewed who’d come clean about being approached to sell their shares had all said the same thing: that they’d been approached by a shadowy company led by an anonymousCEO.
It made sense that Neil was behind the takeover. He’d eliminated Kate’s father, had cozied up to Beth, who had the largest number of shares next to Kate, Aiden, and Annie, all of whom would neversell.
Kate pulled the car out of the garage and cracked her window as she started down the long drive that wound parallel to the cliff at the edge of theproperty.
“Where are you Beth?” shemurmured.
The sun and fresh air should have made her happy, but a familiar melancholy washed over her. Ever since her father’s death, her life had been in turmoil. Some things had gone right — she was happy to be back in Boston, she had Declan in her life again, they were afamily.
But even that felt uncomfortably temporary, the lies in her parents’ marriage buried so deep, hidden so well, they made Kate question whether anything was real, whether happily ever after evenexisted.
Maybe if you looked deeply enough, even the happiest of relationships were a lie. And what was she supposed to do with that as she started her life withDeclan?
It all felt like a house of cards built on top of the ticking bomb of Neil Curran, whatever he’d been planning when he’d had her father killed, and whether he was still out there, waiting for the right time to finish what he’dstarted.
