Off the Hook (13 page)

“I didn’t…Jesus, Liam, you had no right to keep that from me.”

“I had every right! You were fifteen years old and still having nightmares about—” Liam stopped short.

“Fuck you.” Finn wasn’t even close to yelling, but he almost vibrated as he yanked one arm out from behind him and jabbed his finger in Liam’s direction. “The day I left for that goddamn school trip, I got into it with Ro, called him a fucking asshole and told him all of our lives would’ve been so much easier if he’d have left with Ma.”

“Oh.” Kate tried to catch the whoosh of air before it escaped, but she was too slow, and just as her hand clapped over her mouth, Jessie came hustling back into the kitchen.

“What?” she asked, but no one answered. Instead, Finn kept going.

“When I got home, he was gone and you wouldn’t tell me why. So all this time I thought he left because of me. Just like Ma did.”

“What are you—” Liam stopped cold when Finn’s eyes darkened. Kate didn’t know what that meant, but she knew better than to ask right then. “Fine, I’m sorry, maybe we should’ve told you, but we didn’t. We didn’t tell anyone.”

“Tell anyone what?” Jessie demanded. Again she was ignored, especially by Kate, who was desperately trying to find somewhere else to look.

“Bullshit. She knows, doesn’t she?” Finn tipped his chin Kate’s way but didn’t move off the wall, which made Kate kind of happy, because she was pretty sure if he did, things were going to get bloody again.

“I told her last night, but only because I need to get the shack done before Ro comes home. You and Jessie are so fixed on getting through that damn list, so, yeah, I told Kate. If I hadn’t, she’d have been up here all morning doing inventory instead of helping me gut the place.”

Before Finn could fire back, Jessie held up both hands.
“What the hell are you talking about?”

His sandwich forgotten, Liam rubbed his face roughly and started at the beginning. By the time he got to the part about Jimmy cornering him, Jessie had slumped into a chair and covered her face with her hands.

When he finished, she wiped her eyes and sat back.

“For the love of God, Liam, why didn’t you tell us?”

“Because.” When that didn’t seem to appease her, Liam cursed quietly and threw up his hands. “Fine. Because when he came at me that night, I knew he wasn’t going to stop. There was a look in his eyes I’d never seen before, and—”

He gripped the nearest chair, bent over at the waist, and exhaled loudly before pushing himself upright again.

“And instead of standing up to him and fighting back, I fell into the corner, crying like a baby and pissing in my pants, until Ro was forced to take him down. So which part of that whole scene do you think we wanted people to know, Jessie?” His voice got increasingly louder, increasingly harder. “Do you think it was fun having an old man who liked to use us for punching bags? Or that he scared me so bad I pissed my pants when I was sixteen? Or how about the part where for about ten seconds there we were sure Ro’d killed him, and for about two of those seconds we were both glad?”

The only thing stronger than Kate’s worry that she might throw up was her need to go to Liam and wrap her arms around him until the memory washed away. It was no bloody wonder he hadn’t told her anything down in Vegas about his family. Her childhood hadn’t exactly been a picnic—with the number of boyfriends her mom moved in and out on a regular basis, and especially that one year they spent living in their car—but that was nothing compared to any of this.

“I’m sorry,” Jessie whispered. “I had no idea it was that bad.”

“Yeah, well, now you know.”

Long seconds ticked by without anyone saying anything, and the longer the silence dragged on, the more Kate wished she hadn’t come up for lunch. This was family business, and Kate wasn’t even close to being family.

Much to her surprise, it was Liam who finally broke the awkwardness that followed his confession, with a quiet choking laugh.

“Couple days after that, the idiot over there”—he tipped his head toward Finn—“he walks into the shack while I’m gutting my catch and says, ‘Smells like piss in here.’ D’you remember that?”

Finn shook his head slowly.

“I swear to God, I must’ve gone through about fifty gallons of bleach trying to get that smell out, but even today…” Liam snorted softly. “I open that door, it’s all I smell.”

The only thing Kate smelled down there was salty ocean air, but telling him so wouldn’t change anything. As long as that shack stood, it’s what he’d smell.

“So what you’re saying, then,” Jessie said, her expression softening, “is that you think it’d be better for business if our fish shack smelled like fish instead of piss.”

“Yeah,” Liam laughed. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Well, all right, then.” The smile on Jessie’s face wasn’t a happy one but rather one of understanding and compassion, mixed with a hint of sass. “There’s no need to get so dramatic about it.”

Pushing out of her chair, she stepped up next to him and wrapped him in a tight hug, exactly how Kate had wanted to.

Giving her the token one-arm hug back, he shrugged. “You know me, Jess, I’m all about the drama.”

“Yeah, right.” Snorting out a laugh, Jessie swiped her eyes again as she released him. “Well, come on, then, you big crybaby, let’s go get this shack done.”

She was half a dozen steps past the door, on her way to the mudroom, before she turned back and tugged on Finn’s sleeve until he followed her. Kate didn’t move until Liam finally turned to face her.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Just great,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Nothing I like more than rehashing shit like that.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Not your fault.” He took another bite of his sandwich, but he clearly wasn’t tasting any of it. “I shouldn’t have yelled at Jessie like that.”

“Maybe not, but the two of them were pushing you kind of hard.”

“Yeah, but…” God, he looked tired. “She’s the one who convinced Da to join AA. We’d just celebrated him being twelve years sober a couple months before he died.”

“Twelve years,” Kate breathed. “That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, it was. He could still be a right son of a bitch when he wanted to be, but at least he wasn’t drinking.”

She handed him a napkin to wipe the peanut butter off his lip while she put their supplies away.

“You ready to go back?” he asked. At first she thought it was a rhetorical question, but it wasn’t. His blue eyes searched her face, as though the answer lay somewhere there instead of in what she said.

“I am. Are you?”

Without a second’s hesitation, he shook his head. “Nope. So let’s just get it done.”

They were heading for the door when Jessie’s voice called out from the mudroom.

“Hey, Liam?”

He stopped, looked straight up at the ceiling, and sighed. “Yuh?”

“In the span of a week we’ve found out this
and
the fact that you were married, and you thought neither of those things were worth mentioning. Is there anything else we should know?”

“Nope, that’s it.” Pressing his hand against his eye again, he continued toward the door, with Kate right beside him.

“What’s the matter?” she asked as they stepped out on the porch. “That’s twice your eye’s gotten all twitchy today.”

“It’s nothing,” he muttered. “I’m fine.”

Even if she had believed him, which she didn’t, she didn’t get a chance to call him on it, because Jessie and Finn came out behind them.

“All righty, then,” Jessie said. “Are we good?”

Liam’s gaze flicked to Kate for a second before she turned a well-practiced smile Jessie’s way.

“Yup,” she lied. “All good.”

“Great. Then let’s burn this thing down, shall we?”

Chapter 6

I’d rather be a good person off the field than a good baseball player on the field.

—Bryce Harper

While Liam didn’t think Jessie had meant what she said about them burning the shack down, Finn took it to heart. For obvious safety reasons, they didn’t just torch it, but anything that could burn did, including most of the stuff Kate had stored on the boats.

Always a bit on the superstitious side, Finn thought the whole shack and everything in it was contaminated and said it would be wrong for them to give any of it to the Return-It place, where their family’s disease would infect others’ lives. So while Jessie and Kate fed and tended the fire by the water’s edge, Liam and Finn took sledgehammers first to the building and then to the sink and freezer.

It was damn therapeutic, he’d give Finn that much. Watching it burn was like one of the last pieces in Liam’s recovery. When the old man finally decided to start going to AA, Jessie had begged and pleaded with Liam, Ro, and Finn to go to some Al-Anon meetings; only then did Liam recognize that Da’s drinking was an illness that made him do things he wouldn’t have done otherwise.

So while the kid in Liam, and probably his brothers, too, still remembered every beating, the adult he’d grown into had managed to put most of it behind him. The shack had been the last physical memory of any of it, and now it was gone.

Neither he nor Finn spoke much while they worked, and Kate and Jessie seemed to understand why, because they didn’t force conversation to mask the silence. Even later, when Liam was out with his bucket of balls, Kate came waddling out of the lodge and took her place behind the plate without so much as a word.

And to show his appreciation for that, Liam wound up and nailed fastball after fastball at her until his arm begged for mercy.

Instead of heading to her cabin afterward, Kate simply refilled her ice bag and grabbed a clipboard and pen from the office.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“We need to get the inventory done.”

Liam popped the top of a beer and held it out to her. “It’s late; we can do it in the morning.”

“Sure we can,” she said, as she dragged one of the chairs over near the counter and climbed up on it. “Or we can start now while we’re having our beers. There’s another clipboard on Jessie’s desk.”

He couldn’t help but smile a little at that. Wasn’t he supposed to be the one cracking the whip?

“Where’re the other two?” he asked, already heading for Jessie’s desk.

“When I was getting geared up, Jessie was heading upstairs to inventory the guest rooms now that they’ve been cleaned, and Finn was starting in the pub.”

As he made his way back into the kitchen, Liam flicked on the radio, set it to a Top 40 station, and adjusted the volume so it wasn’t too loud.

Inventory wasn’t anything new to Liam; he’d done it every year as a kid, but he’d never liked doing it. Not until now. Maybe it was because he didn’t have the old man barking in his ear the whole time, telling him to recount again and again. Or maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the way Kate hummed along with him to some of the songs, or the look she got on her face when she pulled the wooden fish out of the far drawer.

“Uh, Liam?” Frowning, she turned it over and over in her hands. “What the hell is this?”

Laughing, Liam dropped his pen next to his clipboard and lifted the fish out of her hands.

“That’s Otto!”

“Otto?”

“Yeah, watch this.” He opened the oven door, hooked Otto’s dorsal fin around the top rack, and pulled it out as far as it would go. “Earned myself a B plus on this, I’ll have you know.”

“You made it?” Crinkles formed around her eyes as her mouth curled up into a smile. “It’s…um…great. Good job.”

“But, wait, there’s more.” Giving her his best, albeit creepy, ShamWow Vince smile, he unhooked the fish and held it up again. “Watch this.”

Angling Otto’s open mouth against the edge of the rack, he pushed it back inside the oven, then lifted Otto up for applause.

“Ta-da!”

“That’s…” She started to laugh, then squinted at his work of art. “You carved eyes in it?”

“ ’Course. You didn’t see Michelangelo leaving any of his masterpieces without eyes, did you?”

“So we’re comparing this…
stick
…to David or the Sistine Chapel, then? Is that what we’re doing?”

“Welllllll…” He grinned. “Maybe not the Sistine Chapel, ’cause that was just a painting, but there was some serious sculpting going on with Otto, so…”

There it was: the tiny bursts of amber in her eyes that made him believe, if only for that moment, that he wasn’t a total schmuck, that maybe there was a tiny part of him that was worth something to her. Her cheeks flushed a bit pinker in that moment, and then she turned and went back to the drawer she’d been working on.

“Why Otto?” she asked. “Where’d that come from?”

“
A Fish Out of Water
. It was my favorite book when I was little. D’you ever read it?”

“Uh, I don’t think so. I was more of a
Harry Potter
girl.”

Of course she was; probably had the whole Gryffindor outfit, too.

It didn’t take them nearly as long to get the kitchen done as Liam had thought, but in the time they had, he learned a few more things about her, like how she’d never had a pet—not even a goldfish—and that after Vegas, she’d returned to Vancouver and had eventually found herself a tiny one-bedroom apartment, which she still lived in even though she could well afford something better now.

“You saving up for something?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You gonna tell me what that is?” Liam closed the last drawer and leaned back against it.

Her shoulder lifted slightly, but she never turned to look at him. “I’m not really sure yet. My own house maybe, or I might invest in one of Paul’s projects one day. I’d like to do some traveling, too.”

Having spent most of the last decade in hotel rooms, the idea of travel didn’t do much for Liam. Not unless it was somewhere like—

“Africa.” The word slipped out of both their mouths at the same time, making Liam smile and Kate blush.

“One day,” she said. “Not anytime soon, but one day.”

Yeah.
One day
. Liam knew all about “one days.” One day his agent was going to call with an offer, not another false lead. One day he’d get his fastball back up to ninety-plus miles an hour. One day Ma was going to show up and explain why she’d walked away from the three of them. And one day he was going to meet someone who made him feel the same rush he’d felt walking into that damn chapel with Kate.