Off the Hook (24 page)

When he didn’t answer right away, she nodded slowly, as though she already knew the answer, but he still couldn’t quite bring himself to answer truthfully. Instead, he pushed off the wall and began to gather the rest of their mugs.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Are you kidding me?” she choked. “It’s the only thing that matters.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, snorting quietly. “I think you’ve been reading too many of those Caroline What’s-Her-Name books.”

“Linden,” Jessie said. “And I’m serious. If you love her, and I mean really love her, do something about it. Don’t be such an O’Donnell this time.”

“Don’t be—” Liam laughed as he shifted the mugs to one hand so he could straighten the chairs with the other. “I hate to tell you, Jessie, but I am, in fact, an O’Donnell, and I doubt very much that I can be anything else.”

He’d just stepped through the doorway into the kitchen when Jessie’s quiet but rock-steady voice reached him.

“How do you know if you won’t even try?”

—

“I’m sorry,” Kate said, blinking hard as she pushed to her feet.
“What?”

“We want to know if you’ll work with us,” Finn repeated, a little slower this time.

Kate jammed the tip of her shovel into the ground beside her and then leaned on the handle. “And exactly what is it you think I’ve been doing this whole time?”

“God almighty,” Ronan grunted, giving his brother a soft shove. “It’s no wonder Jessie sent me out here with you. What he’s trying to say is that we’d like—or, rather, we were wondering—if you would like to work here permanently.”

“Permanently?”

“Yes.”

“Here. With you guys.”

“Yes.” The exasperation in Ronan’s expression wasn’t helping make it make sense.

“You want me to quit my job?”

“Y-yeah,” Finn said haltingly. “We know it’s shitty to ask, but we need you, Kate, so what do you say?”

“I…I don’t know.”

A minute ago, she’d been happily planting rows of kale and carrots, and now she was being asked to turn her whole world upside down. If there were some kind of guarantee that come July they’d all still be there, then it’d be a hell of a lot easier to say yes. But if she quit her job with the Foster Group and that didn’t happen, she’d be screwed three ways from Sunday.

And, yeah, it was more than just the work. Being there with Liam was better than any other place she’d ever been, but how long would that last? If she gave everything up to jump on the Buoys full-time, where would she be if Liam decided, again, that he’d had enough of her?

Sure, everything between them was clear skies and smooth sailing right now, but she’d be kidding herself if she thought that’s how it was going to stay. When the storm hit, whatever that storm might be, where would she end up? Because if there was any chance of her ending up the same way she had ten years ago, then there was no way in hell she could even consider any of this.

“Kate?”

“Yeah, sorry,” she muttered. “I, um, wow. I’m going to need to think about it.”

“Sure,” Finn said, nodding. “Fair enough. But we kind of need to know in the next few days, because if you’re both leaving, we need to figure out what the hell we’re going to do.”

Both? Kate frowned as she watched them walk back to the lodge. Who else was leaving? He must mean Ronan; he was only there for a few days. But somehow that didn’t make sense to Kate. There were only two other people he could mean, and there was no way in hell Jessie was going anywhere.

The May sunshine that had made her sweat just a little while ago now wasn’t doing a damn thing for her. It was as if her entire body had been injected with glacial water; her fingers shook so badly that she couldn’t open the pack of seeds and had to resort to using her teeth. Her heart rattled more than it beat, and no matter how many times she swallowed, that damn lump would not be dismissed.

So Liam was leaving; she’d known it was coming. It was why he’d spent so much time out on that damn mound every night. It was what he lived for; it was what he wanted.

And Kate wasn’t going to be the one to make him second-guess that. No way. Even if that’s what he and his brothers probably expected her to do, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

But they were all kidding themselves if they thought Kate could stay on at the Buoys now, because, once again, she’d been stupid. Sure, she’d been able to pick up and make a life after he left her the first time, because she didn’t have to see him every day, didn’t have memories of him in every corner of her day like she did now at the Buoys.

And how awkward would it be when he came home to visit? And—ugh—sooner or later he’d probably bring a woman with him, and that was just going to be too much.

Even if she stayed with the Foster Group and Paul formally offered her the position of general manager here at the Buoys, she wouldn’t be able to do it. Not now. The thought of it actually made her nauseous. In fact, the mere idea that the Buoys would be run by anyone else at all made her nauseous.

“This is what you get for letting yourself get soft and ignoring Strong Kate,” she muttered, suddenly realizing she’d dug a hole almost two feet deep instead of two inches. “Damn it.”

The iciness inside her began to slowly give way to a low-grade burning anger, not just at herself for falling so hard again but at Liam. Why hadn’t he told her? They’d spent every night of the last week together, talking about everything and nothing into the wee hours of every morning, and not once had he so much as mentioned the possibility of him leaving.

And why hadn’t he come out with Finn and Ronan?

“Hey, Kate!” Ronan came walking across the back lawn with the same beat-up wooden tool crate she’d seen Liam use before. “Which cabin’s yours?”

“Uh, number two.”

With a wave of acknowledgment, he headed straight for her cabin and closed the door behind him, and it was only then that the first tear breached her defenses and slid down her cheek. She was going to miss that stupid cabin. So tiny and cramped that she usually felt like she should go outside to turn around, it had somehow become more of a home than the apartment she’d lived in for the last eight or nine years.

Just the thought of moving back there, with its paper-thin walls and view of the brick apartment building next door, was enough to make her drop to her knees in the dirt. She couldn’t do it; she couldn’t go back to that place.

Maybe it was time she took some of her savings and looked for a new place instead of hoarding the money for “one day.” Clearly she’d had no idea what the “one day” was that she’d been waiting for.

“You should get yourself a cat,” she mumbled. “A fluffy one.”

Yeah, that was it. She’d find herself a nice new place to live and fill it with cats. That didn’t sound depressing at all. In the meantime, she still had seeds to plant, because no matter what happened with her, she wanted Liv to enjoy her new job.

By the time she was done and had cleaned up, she had a skull-quaking headache and enough crampiness to know the only place she wanted to be was in bed with a hot-water bottle. She forced herself to sit through dinner but didn’t bother hanging around afterward.

“You okay?” Liam asked, following her out the back door.

“Yeah,” she lied. “An Aunt Flo thing. I’ll see you later.”

She didn’t even kiss him, just turned and walked straight down to her cabin without so much as a glance back. Armed with her hot-water bottle and a couple of Advil, she bypassed the coziness of the tub chair and climbed into bed with her laptop, notebook, and pen.

It had been a few days since she’d emailed Paul to update him on how things were progressing, so she’d do that first, and then she’d check out what was available to rent these days. It was unlikely she could afford to buy, not in Vancouver anyway, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t look.

New emails from both Laurel and Jeanette and two new emails from work. The first was nothing but the monthly newsletter Lorraine sent out, which Kate usually deleted without reading, and the other one, which had just landed in her inbox with the subject line
FG-0630,
was one Josh had looped her in on.

Typical. The office might close at five, but Josh never stopped working regardless of the day or time. She quickly scanned the long thread, which appeared to have originally started between Josh and Paul before they cc’d both Lorraine and one of Paul’s lawyers.

>>Kate—thoughts?

>>The only money they have is coming from the ball player, and he’s tapped. Even if he does sign a new contract, it’ll be too late. I’m counting on Kate to make sure of that.

Sure of what? Thoughts on what? Frowning, she took screenshots of the entire thread and saved them to a new folder for easy access if she needed them again later, then started at the first message and worked her way up the entries, which bounced back and forth in concise blasts.

Paul wanted an update on FG-0630, a project number Kate wasn’t familiar with—until Josh’s responses started to make it clear they were talking about the Buoys. But that wasn’t the project number Kate had for it. What the hell?

She scrolled some more, then reread it all, even though there were only a handful of words that jumped out at her: “ex-husband,” “has-been,” “underbid,” “need-to-know.”

“Son of a bitch!”

How the hell had Paul found out about her and Liam? And what kind of asshole would use something like that to his advantage? Paul Foster, that’s who. What Paul Foster wanted, Paul Foster generally got; they all knew that.

Not only had Paul gone digging around in things that were none of his business, he’d flat-out lied to her
and
the O’Donnells. He’d sent her to the Buoys with promises of a promotion and all sorts of great things, when clearly that was nothing but a steaming load of crap. It wasn’t written anywhere in the messages, but she knew,
she knew,
that the minute Paul got his hands on this place, she’d be whisked out of here and sent back to the chrome-and-glass cage on Burrard Street.

And, worse than that, he had no intention of making any kind of decent offer to the O’Donnells. His lawyer’s message assured Paul that both offers were ready to go whenever he wanted them, but the details and the prices listed weren’t even in the same ballpark as Paul had told Kate.

The first, which Paul directed to be sent out on June 20, undercut the value of the Buoys by hundreds of thousands, and the second bid, due to be sent out late on June 30, was worse, but it would probably still be more than what they’d get if the province snapped the property away from them.

So if he was going to be such a prick, why not wait until it actually went up for auction?

“Ugh,” Kate growled. “Because once it goes up, there’ll be competition for it.”

And Paul Foster didn’t do competition. There was a reason he had a Monopoly board set up in his office, and it wasn’t because he liked to play with the thimble.

Fuming, she was staring blindly at the screen when a pop-up box suddenly appeared, asking for her to allow the sender of the last email to retract it.

“Retract this, asshole.”

Kate agreed and then sat there waiting, knowing a new message would be coming any second. Yup, there it was.

From: Joshua Rivers

To: Kate Hadley

Subject: Call me right away

—

That was it: no actual message, just the order to call him. Oh, she’d call him, all right. Throwing off the covers, Kate pulled on the first things she could reach, jammed her feet into her gum boots, and marched straight back to the lodge.

“Hey,” Jessie said. “How’s the headache?”

“Pounding, actually. Can I use the phone for a minute?”

“Of course. You might want to close the door, though, because Finn’s hooked up the Xbox in the great room, and it’s about to get really loud in here.”

Nodding, Kate closed herself up in the office, took a long, steadying breath, and planted a huge Suzy Sunshine smile on her face before dialing Josh’s number.

“Hey, Josh, what’s up?…Oh yeah, no, I’d just opened it when the retract request showed up. I figured it must have been sent by mistake anyway, because I didn’t recognize the project number….Yeah….So it wasn’t anything for me?…Okay, good.”

With the phone gripped tight in her left hand and Jessie’s stapler in her right, Kate fought to keep her voice light, breezy, Kate-ish, while the noise level on the other side of the door got increasingly louder.

“How are the wedding plans coming?…His mom?…Oh, good, I know Kyle was worried she wouldn’t be up for the trip, so that’s great….Yeah….Here?” She lowered her voice for effect. “They’re really great people, but there’s no way they’re going to make that tax payment….No….I wouldn’t be surprised if they call Paul in the next few days to work out a deal….Yeah, it is too bad.”

She played along for another minute or two before sending Kyle her best and hanging up.

“Call my husband a has-been, will ya? You little shit.”

Slamming the stapler down, she yanked the door open, then went back and stood the stapler up gently, setting it where it belonged. And, rules be damned, she filled both hands with chocolate chip cookies before heading for the door.

“Uh, Kate?” Jessie stood just inside the kitchen door, her grinning eyes fixed on Kate’s stash.

“I got my period,” she said, laughing over a shrug. “Trust me, there won’t be a single crumb left anywhere for even an ant by the time I’m through.”

“Oh God,” Jessie groaned in sympathy. “Take the bag if you want.”

“Tempting, but it’ll take long enough to run these off next week.” With a wink, she ducked out and headed to her cabin, where she spent the next few minutes digging up the contact info she had for Robyn, her financial adviser at the bank.

She should have thought of this before, but before now she’d been living under the glittering delusion that the years she’d put in with the Foster Group meant something.

Bullshit: That’s what those years had amounted to. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. If there was one thing she’d learned, it was that if you wanted to succeed, you needed to strike first and strike hard, and that was exactly what she was going to do.