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I may or may not have practiced on my hand—a fact I’d never tell a soul.
Not even Maeve.
The last person I kissed was this incredible guy I met last summer at Vivi’s bachelorette party—which in many ways feels like yesterday and forever ago at the same time.
The taut and tanned boat captain adjusts his gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses before glancing back at us.
I smile at him and lean my head against Burke’s tense shoulder.
As soon as the spotlight is off us, I lean back, though our hands are still unnaturally intertwined.
“Your pdf only had one little section on your family,” I tell him, though it was more of a single paragraph than an entire section. He had written two full pages dedicated to his favorite places to travel, but he only managed to write seven measly sentences about the people we’re about to spend the next eight weeks with. “I know your dad will be here . . . and then you have a brother and a sister. They’ll be here too?”
The lone paragraph mentioned nothing about his mother.
Not a sentence, not a word, not even a name.
I’m afraid to ask.
No one unintentionally leaves their mother out of a family write-up.
“Yes.” Zero emotion of any kind registers in his voice.
“What are their names? How old are they?” I wanted to ask these questions on the six-hour drive here, but I didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag in case Lenny was in the dark about our arrangement. “What are they like?”
The boat coasts up to a long dock, and the captain kills the engine—effectively killing our ability to have this conversation in front of him.
“You’ll meet them soon enough,” Burke says. “I don’t like to tarnish first impressions with my subjective narratives.”
Reading between the lines, I get the sense that he isn’t close with any of them—or perhaps there’s some bad blood.
At least he’s classy about it. Some guys I’ve known in the past would shrug and say “My brother’s a dick” or “My sister’s a raging narcissist” and then launch into a long-winded story about some family drama from years ago.
Whatever happened between them couldn’t have been that bad if they’re willing to spend eight weeks together on an island, though I suppose with sixty-five acres and a multitude of houses, there’s plenty of room to avoid one another.
The captain ties the boat to the dock, and Burke climbs out first, turning to offer me his hand.
In the distance, a grinning white-haired man stands at the top of a makeshift stairway carved into a rocky patch of land, with wooden beams for steps. He’s leaning on a cane, which leads me to believe he’s going to wait for us to get to him—not the other way around. His physique is thin and almost crooked, and the deep lines on his face are clear even from a distance.
“Is that your father?” I ask.
Up until now, Redmond Rothwell has been nothing but a name on a pdf I’ve spent the last weeks memorizing.
I tried to google their family, assuming that anyone wealthy enough to afford a sixty-five-acre island home would at least have a Wikipedia page or some website articles.
Only there was nothing.
It was like everything had been intentionally scrubbed from the internet.
I suppose when you can afford an island, you can afford online privacy too.
“Redmond Rothwell the third,” Burke says under his breath as he follows my gaze, “in the flesh.”
I’d almost forgotten Burke’s first name is also Redmond—making him technically Redmond Burke Rothwell IV. With his chiseled features and penetrating perma-stare, my boss doesn’t strike me as a Redmond or a Burke.
I don’t suppose things like that matter when you’re passing down a family name.
The captain unloads the last of the seven suitcases onto the dock, and a couple of staff in resort-style uniforms show up out of nowhere to help transport them to a waiting all-terrain vehicle at the end of the dock. We haven’t even made it to the physical island itself, and already I feel like I’m staying at an ocean-side Ritz-Carlton.
“Mr. Rothwell,” one of the guys says as he grabs a suitcase. “Welcome home. Great to see you, as always.”
Burke thanks him before giving his father a wave followed by a smile more obligatory than sincere, though I doubt his dad can tell the difference from where he’s standing.
“Should we hold hands again?” I keep my voice low.
Without a word, he interlaces our fingers and leads me up the wooden staircase to his waiting father.
“Dad, this is Briar,” he says, “my fiancée. Briar, meet my father, Redmond.”
With a death grip on his cane, Redmond extends his wrinkled right hand to me. “Lovely to meet you, my dear. I can’t say I’ve heard all that much about you yet, but I’m excited to learn how you managed to sweep this one off his feet.”
