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“What’s that tattoo of?” Brianna pointed to my hand, once again letting her curiosity get the better of her. She best be careful; being curious in Montgomery Manor would inevitably lead to her demise.
“This?” I lifted my hand toward her, letting her get a better look at it. “It’s nothing, really.” I chuckled softly. “A woman I used to like had a small tattoo like this. When she died, I got it in memory of her.” A lie, but close enough to the truth it made my insides twist.
It still hurt to think about what happened all those years ago. I didn’t think I’d ever recovered fully. I never tried to.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Brianna said, her voice hesitant and gentle.
“Don’t be,” I spoke with a shrug. It was what it was. “It was a long time ago.” I offered her the flask again and asked, “So, I take it you’re not excited to move in to Montgomery Manor?” Had to keep the focus on her and her future.
Her fingers brushed mine when she went to take the flask from me. Just the quickest, most fleeting moment, but I felt how soft those fingers were. It’d been a long time since…
Shit. Not something I should be thinking about.
Brianna replied, “Not really. I’m sure it’s a nice enough place, but… I have the feeling it’s going to feel small with Gareth there.” She took the smallest sip, immediately making a face. I would’ve chuckled at her if I wasn’t wrestling with the memory of how soft her hand had felt.
I ran a hand down the side of my face, letting out a long breath. Perfect segue, but how should I put it?
“Yeah, that kid is…” I stopped and leaned in toward her, my voice dropping to a whisper, “You didn’t hear this from me, but that kid ain’t quite right. Alistair would never hear it, because he’s his dead sister’s kid, but Gareth ain’t all there in the head. I’d steer clear of him whenever you can, if I were you.”
I hated talking about Veronica that way, but Brianna didn’t need to know how close to the Montgomery family I was.
Brianna seemed to think on my words, a pensive look taking over her face. She started to hand me back the flask, but then a sudden shiver enveloped her, and she stopped short.
“Are you cold? Here.” I got up and took off my suit jacket, draping it around her shoulders before she could deny it. When I sat down again, I was a little closer to her, my body angled in toward hers in a way it probably shouldn’t be.
“Thank you,” she whispered, offering me the flask once more, and I took it.
After sipping from the flask, I said, “I feel for you. I do. I’d hate living in that house with them. It wouldn’t be so bad to be a Montgomery if it weren’t for the kid. But Alistair won’t hear of any concerns regarding Gareth, so you best prepare yourself for that. No matter what he does, he can do no wrong. Have a kid grow up like that and he’ll be nothing but a spoiled psychopath.”
A spoiled psychopath. That’s exactly what Gareth was.
What did that make me, though? What was I, the man who’d killed his own brother because he caught him cheating on his wife? Plenty of people cheated and got away with it. Sometimes husbands and wives even reconciled after the truth came out. It didn’t automatically mean the adulterer should die.
And yet…
She didn’t ask me what I meant by a spoiled psychopath. Hopefully she was smart enough to know. Maybe she could sense something was off with Gareth; she hadn’t looked too particularly thrilled to be stuck to his side walking up and down that aisle. And when they’d shared a dance… well, she looked as though she’d have rather been anywhere else.
We talked about other things, the conversation moving away from Gareth. She told me a little about herself, how she wasn’t so happy about moving in the middle of her senior year in high school, how she liked to paint.
An artist, just like Gareth. She better take my words to heart and watch out.
Sometime, during the conversation, we’d both leaned in closer to each other. I lifted an arm and set it on the bench behind her, not quite on her shoulders, but close enough. Our legs did touch, but she didn’t seem fazed by it. We shared what was in the flask, and I wondered if, perhaps, I should cut her off. If she wasn’t used to drinking, this might get her head fuzzy.
Getting Alistair’s stepdaughter drunk wasn’t part of the plan, obviously. Neither was sitting this close to her. Maybe, after all this time, I was just lonely, and she was someone new, someone from the city, totally unaware of the shit she was about to step into when she and her mother moved to Eastcreek.
“So,” she started, “how is someone like you friends with someone like Alistair?”
The flask sat on my other side, empty now. Her question, how she lobbied it at me, made me chuckle. “I get that question a lot. He and I, we go way back. Too far back, if I’m honest. I’ve known him ever since he pulled out of his family’s corporations and bought out Eastcreek.”
Everyone had thought it meant Eastcreek would step into the twenty-first century, that developments would be put up overnight and we wouldn’t be the poorest township around. Nothing changed, except the names on the deeds and the backers of all the local businesses. And the only reason we weren’t the poorest township now was because having Alistair Montgomery there skewed the data.
I went on, “I lived there for my whole life. Eastcreek is the kind of place that nothing ever changes, but when the Montgomerys came and bought up a whole bunch of land to build Montgomery Manor, I knew. Fast-forward five years, and they’d bought out a quarter of the town. Businesses, rental properties, all that stuff. Ten years later, Alistair’s getting parks dedicated to him. He funds everything, in one way or another, to the point where the entire town is dependent on him. Course, it wasn’t him who did it to start with. It was his sister.”
“His sister?” Brianna asked, sounding interested. I supposed if I wasn’t the one to tell her all this, someone else would, so it might as well be me.
I nodded. “She came to town with Alistair. He was living with her, since he wasn’t quite eighteen yet. Technically, Montgomery Manor was hers. When she died, he inherited it all and took over the town. He also got Gareth.”
“What about Gareth’s dad?” The innocent-sounding question made a pit form in my stomach.
