Page 97 of Nothing to Deny
“If he won’t tell me, you have to. What is it? Did you two hook up or something?”
“No!” Not that she should be so offended by the idea. “It’s nothing like that.”
“Then what?” Kelly’s pleading tugged at her heart. “Please, someone tell me what I’m missing.”
“It’s nothing. I said it’s nothing.” Nickson adamant in the statement. “Forget about it. Trust me. You don’t need to know.”
“If I go downstairs and ask Holly? Baer? Donaghue? You think I’m an idiot, I get that. I’ve seen the way all of you whisper behind my back.”
Which was exactly what she hadn’t wanted.
“Tell her.” As adamant as Nickson was that Kelly should forget and move on, Freya was just as adamant that she should know the truth. “You’re not going to get a better time. She knows that something—”
“Because of you,” Nickson barked. “Why couldn’t you just keep your nose out? You think because you’re rich you can tell people what to do?”
“I think because you’re marrying her, she deserves to know the truth of your past. You tell her, right now, or I will.”
“Try it and I’ll go straight downstairs.”
“I told you that doesn’t scare me,” she said, edging closer. Her cousin needed support, to know she had allies, that people were looking out for her. Right now, Kelly probably felt ganged up on. “It’s not a big deal, Kelly, just something that you should—”
“Shut your mouth! Don’t you say another damn word!”
“What is it?” Kelly begged her fiancé. “Nothing anyone could say would change the way I feel about you. I love you. We’re getting married—”
“Then what does it matter?” Nickson had quickly turned from hostile to placating. “Just trust me that it’s not important. It’s just a dumb, stupid mistake, from a long time ago.”
A long time ago? Not that long ago, in fact they hadn’t got to the bottom of just how long his work at Squires overlapped with his and Kelly’s relationship. Did the time elapsed really matter? Maybe not. If he’d been sleeping with other women while sleeping with Kelly, yes, that made a difference.
“Then why wouldn’t you tell me? Why would you tell my cousin—”
“I didn’t tell her. She found out on her own. No one’s going to talk about it again. We’re going to forget it, completely forget it, and have a happy, fun vacation. That’s it, over. No more Squires talk.”
Forgetting that two of its current employees were nestled with her family downstairs.
He tried to put his arm around his fiancée. Pushing it away, Kelly shoved his chest, sending him back a step.
Getting close, Kelly hit his shoulder with the side of her fist. “We’re supposed to be real with each other. I can’t marry a man who won’t tell me the truth.”
“You know everything. Everything important, this is just bullshit. Your cousin’s interfering because she doesn’t like me.”
Kelly’s focus darted to her. “Is that true? You don’t like him? Why? Freya, what did he do? How do you know each other? If you didn’t hook up—is it Chapman?” Back to Nickson. “It’s Scott Chapman, isn’t it? What did you do? Do you have a record?”
“Never heard of a Chapman.”
“This isn’t Chapman.” Though she couldn’t say with a hundred percent certainty the men hadn’t come across each other, she didn’t decipher any recognition in Nickson. “And we’ve never met, Nickson and me, not before this vacation. It’s—”
“I told you to shut your mouth!”
“Stop talking to her like that,” Kelly bit back, leaving her fiancé to approach, probably sensing she was the weaker link. Though in this scenario, was that such a bad thing? Telling the truth wasn’t a sign of weakness… was it? “Whatever it is, Freya, you know I need to know. You know what it’s like when your guy’s lying to you. If any of us knew the truth about Chapman—”
“I know,” she said because her family would’ve told the truth. Except did Chapman still have to come up in every conversation regarding her love life? The sooner the world knew about her and Baer the better. She needed to move on from the Chapman debacle. “I want you to know the truth, but it’s better coming from him. He has to want you to know.”
He had to show her that respect at least. Choosing not to should be a major red flag from Kelly’s perspective, would be from hers anyway. Though they’d all been guilty of being blinded by love in the past; a relationship meant for the altar needed a different kind of scrutiny, in her opinion.
“Nick doesn’t want me to know. I don’t know why—”
“Because it’s irrelevant.” He jumped in. “Why won’t you trust me?”
