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“Go inside,” he ordered finally.
“You’re not the boss of me,” she said, hoping her legs still worked. He grinned, and hell, she nearly came.
They’d be sleeping together. Soon. It was as inevitable as morning.
A long time later, she lay in bed, her fingers tracing her lips.
This night might’ve turned out horribly, horribly wrong.
Instead, she was in love.
CHAPTER FIVE
THEDAYAFTERHESAWBRYCEATO’ROURKE’SLUCASPULLEDUPto Joe and Didi’s house in his rental car, turned off the engine and sat for a moment.
In the fourteen years since he’d left for college, Lucas had been back to Manningsport only a handful of times, and only once since he’d gotten married.
Here was the thing about Didi Nesbith Campbell, Lucas’s aunt by marriage. She had a vision of how life was supposed to be, goddamn it, and when life didn’t obey, she got mad. Was still mad, in fact.
She’d married Joe just after he’d sold the rights to a video game for a million bucks when he was twenty-four years old. Rat-Whacker got picked up by Nintendo, and Joe seemed on track to billionaire status, joining the whiz kids of that era who made their first million before they were twenty-five.
And, like most of them, Joe was a flash in the pan.
That first million turned out to be the last million, but by then, they had a big house in the suburbs and a baby boy. Much to her supreme dissatisfaction, Didi had to get a job. She found her niche at an insurance company, denying claims of horribly injured people. Even as she rose through the ranks, she never got over the bitterness of having married the guy who failed to become the next Bill Gates.
The other great inconvenience of Didi’s life was inheriting Lucas. She already had her only begotten son; she certainly didn’t want the silent child of her slacker husband’s criminal brother.
Well. Time to see Joe. Lucas took off his sunglasses and headed toward the house.
It was beautiful up here, that was certain. The leaves were fresh and green, glowing with good health, unlike Chicago, which was currently baking in a heat wave. But here, where the landscape was dotted with deep glacier lakes and waterfalls by the dozens, where green farmland spread out on the hills and the forests were thick and deep, it was cooler and more lush than the flat Midwest and its punishing summers. The air was heavy with the smell of lilacs, so painstakingly trimmed along the border of Didi’s perfectly landscaped (and somewhat soulless) yard.
Lucas would be in Manningsport for a month, maybe two. He wouldn’t be staying at Didi’s, that was certain, no matter that the house had five bedrooms and a basement apartment. No, he’d rather amputate his own foot and eat it than do that. For the moment, he was staying at the Black Swan B and B.
He knocked on the front door. Nephew or not, Didi wouldn’t like him coming in unannounced.
Sure enough, she opened the door. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Hello, Didi,” he said. “How are you?”
“I’m quite well,” she said, her lips tight. “You may as well come in.”
“Is Bryce here?”
“No, he’s at the gym.”
Bryce still lived at home, though he’d bounced around a little bit after dropping out of college. He’d tried to live in Chicago for a short time, and Lucas had even gotten him a job with Forbes Properties, which lasted five days before Bryce quit. Bryce had also tried Manhattan, San Francisco and Atlanta, but all roads led him back to Manningsport, specifically, to the basement apartment that Didi had made for her baby boy, giving him the illusion of adulthood while remaining clamped under her thumb.
“How’s Ellen?” Didi asked.
“Good,” he answered. She waited for more. He didn’t offer it.
The one thing Lucas had ever done that won approval from Didi was to marry Ellen Forbes. “Any relation to Malcolm?” Didi had immediately asked when he’d told them. No curiosity about why he was marrying someone he’d never mentioned, or what had happened with his longtime girlfriend, or why he wasn’t going to law school. Just “Any relation?” Her eyes alight with a sudden, keen interest.
The answer, of course, was, yes.
And suddenly, Lucas was a beloved nephew. Didi wanted to help plan the wedding, justlovedEllen to death within seconds of meeting her, thought of Lucas like ason,wanted so much to have holidays together, one big happyfamily,the Forbeses and the Campbells, wasn’t itwonderful?
Granted, Ellen and her parents saw right through her, but Didi was too busy trying to pretend she was completely at home with their vast wealth, the penthouse overlooking Lake Michigan, the maid who served dinner, the sailboat and cars and drivers and wine.
