Because the last time I was there, so was Mia.
And she was there with Austin.
Suffering through just two days of him having his hands all over her and seeing how happy she was with him had made me want to pitch myself off the roof. I’d flown back to Seattlehellbent on finding any and every excuse I had to never return to Chicago again. Even after Mia and Austin broke up, I wanted to stay away.
I hated to see her heartbroken even more than I hated seeing her happy with another man.
“She’s right, you know,” came a loud voice, shaking me from my thoughts. “Holidays aren’t the same without you there.”
“What, no one to let you beat them in pool?”
Charlie Conaway let out his signature boom of a laugh at that, clapping me on the shoulder before he wrapped me in a fierce hug.
“Keep telling yourself that youlet me win,” he said. “You and I know the truth.”
“That you taught me how to play so you had someone to beat up on when you had hard days at the office?”
He smiled wide at that. “Hey, you paid me back when you got me on the ice.”
“Oh, that’s a day that lives rent free in my head. The way your arms windmilled like a cartoon before you went down…”
“Alright, now,” Holly said, patting both our chests, but Charlie was still beaming at me like I was his son. In many ways, he’d treated me as such.
But when he stared a moment longer, that beam took on a more warning tone.
He loved me. I knew that like I knew the Earth was round. But he was also wary of me, especially when it came to my intentions with Mia.
He’d asked me to call him after the beach stunt, and then, he’d proceeded to grill me for twenty minutes straight. It didn’t matter that I assured him this was her publicist’s idea, that I was just playing along in whatever they asked me to, that I was still true to my word that I would never do anything to hurt Mia.
It was clear he didn’t believe me — not entirely.
I couldn’t exactly blame him, since the last time I’d been to his house in Chicago, he’d caught me in my old bedroom just moments away from tossing back an entire bottle of Xanax.
I shivered at the memory, remembering how dark everything was then, how a pill prescribed to me for what the Seattle team doctor saw asanxietyhad made everything worse. It was so easy to take those pills and make everything feel better. It was so easy to take more than I was prescribed, too.
And on that night, I’d had a thought.
What would happen if I took the whole bottle?
I’d been two seconds from finding out when Charlie found me.
I wished I could tell him that I was good now and know it was true. I wish I could tell him I wouldn’t have actually gone through with it, that I was better now, that I’d never give in to those impulses again.
But I could never be sure, could I? Not with my bloodline.
If only Charlie knew the lengths I’d gone to to keep my promises to him over the years, how I’d resisted his daughter in the most tempting moment of my young adult life.
Then again, I’d be a lying sonofabitch if I said I wasn’t taking this fake relationship thing and running with it while I could. Hell if I wasn’t going to make the most of the short period of time where I could touch her, hold her, kiss her, and pretend she was mine.
Maybe that was why her father still eyed me a bit warily as we drifted into easy conversation with Holly. He cocked a brow when I turned down the passing trays of booze, too, like I was playing some game and he was on to me.
“She’s already been hurt so badly…” he’d said to me on our phone call after the beach stunt, his voice thick with emotion. “I can’t pick her up off the bathroom floor again. I can’t stand by and let another man wreck her like that.”
“You know I would never hurt her.”
“Not intentionally. But she cares about you, Aleks.”
“I care about her, too.”
