Off the Hook (26 page)

“When was the last time the three went out together?” she asked. “The three of you, no guests, no friends, just you?”

Not a single one of them could come up with an answer.

“Exactly. And who knows when you’ll get the chance to do it again? So go! It’s early yet; you’ve got the whole day, and there’s nothing here that Kate and I can’t handle, right, Kate?”

“Absolutely.” Kate’s smile was still as bright and cheery as ever. “I mean, come on, I’ve been here over a month and haven’t seen a single salmon hit that kitchen. Now, what the hell is up with that?”

“You heard the woman,” Ronan said. “Let’s have us a good old salmon bake tonight.”

In all his life, Liam had never hesitated when someone suggested they go fishing, especially if that fishing trip included one of his brothers. Why was he hesitating now? Why did it feel off?

“Go,” Jessie prodded. “Get your gear, and Kate and I’ll throw some snacks in the cooler.”

So before he knew it, Liam was standing on the stern of
Fishin’ Impossible,
watching the Buoys fade into the distance.

—

“Are you sure about this?” Jessie asked for what had to be the four hundredth time in the last hour.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“But he’s going to be so pissed when he gets back here.”

Kate nodded as she kept stuffing things into her suitcase. “Maybe, but we don’t have any other choice, do we?”

“I don’t know, because you didn’t give any of us time to think about it.”

“You’re right, I didn’t, because time is the one thing we don’t have, Jessie. Grab my makeup bag, will you please?”

Reluctantly, Jessie shuffled into the bathroom and came out with the little black bag.

“Thank you.” Kate shoved it in her suitcase next to her ridiculous heels, then looked down at it and chuckled softly. “Until I got here, I’d never gone more than a day or two without lipstick, and I sure as hell never left my apartment without a good thick coat of mascara and a layer of foundation.”

“Funny,” Jessie said. “I bought a tube of mascara a couple months after I moved from here to the West End, and I ended up tossing it a week later ’cause I kept poking myself in the eye.”

For some stupid reason, that moment with Jessie shattered a little piece of Kate’s heart, and she had to force herself to choke down the growing lump in her throat.

“Okay, I think that’s it.”

She wouldn’t look back; she wouldn’t give that cabin or that bed a second thought, at least not until she was on the mainland with the stamped paperwork in hand. For now she just needed to get out to the dock before the Helijet arrived.

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay here by yourself?” she asked as Jessie led her in through the back door of the lodge. “I hate leaving you alone.”

“Then stay.”

“You know I can’t do that, but before I go, can I get you to do me a favor?”

“Yeah.”

Kate stopped inside the lobby and pulled Liam’s Verlander jersey out of the suitcase. “Would you give him this please? And this.”

She reached into her bag, pulled out her notebook, and scrawled a quick note that she stuffed inside the jersey.

“Kate, stop. Let’s sit down and talk this over.”

“No.”

And as if to support her decision, the whirring sound of the approaching Helijet made them both look up. They were still inside, so they were only looking at the ceiling, but at least it broke the tension a little and made them both laugh.

With her fingers wrapped tightly around the handle of her suitcase, Kate started for the door, then stopped, turned, and hugged Jessie as tight as she could.

“I’ll call you as soon as it’s done.”

Jessie didn’t answer, just nodded against Kate’s shoulder.

“Stick to the story and everything’ll be fine, okay?”

Another nod, shorter this time, and then Kate let her go and walked out the door. As with her cabin and that narrow bed she’d come to love so much, Kate would not let herself look back at the lodge.

In fact, once she had herself strapped into her seat, she sat perfectly straight until they were halfway to Vancouver. Then, and only then, did she let one—and only one—tear slip out. She was right to do what she was doing, she didn’t doubt that, but she wasn’t sure it was the right way to do it.

As soon as they landed, she hit the ground running, first to her apartment, then to the bank. It was ridiculous to think that in a city the size of Vancouver she’d be seen by Paul or someone else from work, especially on a Saturday, but that didn’t stop her from checking over her shoulder every couple of minutes.

According to her contract, if she got fired for any reason, she’d lose all her stock options with the Foster Group, and she was going to need those to pull the rest of this plan off. That was why she didn’t stop for a cinnamon dolce latte—even though she was almost ready to kill for one—and she didn’t pay any attention to the 75 percent–off sale at her favorite shoe store. She had enough shoes anyway; what she needed was a good pair of work boots.

The only stop she made was at the corner store, where she ducked in to grab a few bare necessities to get her through the next few days, then she locked herself in her apartment and waited. And waited.

She had shut her phone off but didn’t stop checking her email until finally, just after seven, the one she’d been waiting for, the one she’d been dreading, showed up:

From: Jessie Todd

To: Kate H

Subject: bad

I don’t even know what to think. Usually when one of them gets mad, they yell and carry on, and that’s what he was doing right up until I gave him the jersey. I don’t know what you wrote in that note, but as soon as he read it, he walked out and I haven’t seen him since. The boats are all still here, so it’s not like he’s gone far, but Ro and Finn have been out looking for him for a while now and none of them are answering the radio. I sure hope this works.

—

“So do I,” Kate muttered. If it didn’t, she’d just made the biggest and worse mistake of her entire life.

It was what kept her up long into the night, well after Jessie’s next email assured her that all three O’Donnells were back in the lodge; there’d been no bloodshed and no more yelling. Liam had simply walked in, picked up the phone, and scheduled a Helijet to pick him up in the morning.

Knowing he’d be on a flight the next morning brought some relief, but it wasn’t until Tuesday morning, when Robyn emailed from the bank to tell her the transaction had cleared and the funds had been deposited to the assigned account, that she felt she could really breathe. Half an hour later, Kate was standing in that same bank, with both the Buoys’s tax bill and the check she’d already filled out.

As she left the bank, Kate turned on her phone for the first time in days, and, grinning down at the screen, she fired off a one-word email to Jessie:
Done.

It didn’t seem right to waste a second of such a gorgeous day sitting inside a cab, so Kate set out on foot, turning right off Georgia Street and heading up Burrard with her phone pressed against her ear. After clearing the myriad of security questions with Phyllis in the human-resources department, Kate was assured that her resignation had been logged into the system and all outstanding wages, bonuses, et cetera, et cetera, would be paid out by the end of the week.

Beautiful. And just in time, because twelve stories up from where she stood was her office—the nine-by-nine room she’d been working her ass off in for the last eight years. What a relief it was to know she’d never spend another day there, she’d never get stuck riding the slowest elevator in the Western world, and she’d never have to listen to that god-awful pan-flute music Paul had piped through the whole office.

“Hi, Lorraine,” she said, breezing up to the woman’s desk. “Is Paul in?”

“Kate! What are you doing here?” A twenty-plus-year employee of the Foster Group, Lorraine probably knew more about the internal workings of the company than Paul himself, and Kate knew for a fact that every time someone was hired or fired, that information was immediately sent to Lorraine for her records.

“I’m here to see Paul.” Unlike every other time she’d stood at Lorraine’s desk, Kate didn’t wait for permission; she headed straight for his door.

“He’s in a meeting!” Lorraine cried, tripping over the corner of her desk in her hurry to run blocker.

“That’s okay, this won’t take long.” And before Lorraine could get anywhere near her, Kate pushed open the door to Paul’s office and stepped inside. He was in a meeting, all right: with Josh. Big surprise.

“Kate.” The splash of surprise that washed over Paul’s face was but a tiny ripple compared to the one that hit Josh’s.

“Good, you’re both here.” She didn’t bother closing the door, and when Josh made to push out of his chair, she froze him with a pointed finger. “Sit down.”

“I was just about to have Lorraine call you,” Paul said. “There appears to have been some movement in our project.”

“Some movement?” Kate’s snort was neither ladylike nor polite. She wasn’t surprised he had someone watching the Buoys’s accounts, but she was surprised he had the information already. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“I hope you can explain it, because Josh was telling me about your conversation the other night where, unless I’m misunderstanding, you were pretty certain that they wouldn’t be able to meet their obligations.”

One more thing she wouldn’t miss: Paul’s business voice.

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s what I told him. Were you concerned about your good friend Jimmy’s family, Paul? Worried they’d all find themselves out on the street after you screwed them out of their home?”

Josh’s tanned face blanched even before Paul rolled a warning look at him.

“Kate,” Paul said, his calm, smooth voice dripping with condescension, “you’re letting your emotions control what you say right now, so, because I like you, I’m going to give you a minute to gather yourself before this conversation goes any further.”

“Thank you,” she said, blinking steadily at him. “But I’m as ‘gathered’ as I’m going to get. If anyone in this room needs to gather themselves, it’s Josh, because he’s the dipshit who forwarded your email to me.”

“That was—”

Kate didn’t even look at him. “Shut up, Josh.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Foster?” Lorraine tiptoed into the room behind Kate. Clutched in her hand was a single piece of paper, which Kate immediately snatched away. “That’s—”

“I know what it is,” Kate said. “And I’ll give it to him, so thank you, Lorraine, that’ll be all.”

Wide gray eyes stared at her, then shifted to Paul, whose brief nod sent Lorraine backing out of the office.

“Why’d you do it?” she asked. “You said Jimmy was your friend.”

“He was. But as I have repeatedly told you over the years, Kate, one can’t mix personal feelings with business. It doesn’t work that way.”

“That’s such bullshit,” she muttered. “But I guess it explains why you used me, doesn’t it? All this time I’ve believed that if I worked hard for you, it would pay off, that one day you’d appreciate it and I’d be rewarded. But that’s not what happened, is it? Instead, you went digging around in my past and used it against me.”

It took him a second but he finally sighed, leaned back in his big leather chair, and folded his hands over his stomach. It was over; he’d lost the property, so there was no reason to hide anything anymore.

“Come on, Kate, you know how this works. Before we agree to anything, we do background searches on everyone involved. Nothing out of the ordinary showed up on the initial check, but my guy wanted to do a little more digging because, let’s face it, pro athletes are no strangers to scandal and we needed something to help motivate the O’Donnells to sell.

“When it didn’t look like we were going to find anything, we were all set to go with our original plan. Josh was packed and ready to go and then”—he lifted his fingers in a “there you go” kind of way—“there it was. You were our ticket in, Kate. You’d never breathed a word about the ball player, so he was obviously something you wanted to keep secret.”

“Oh my God. You knew I wouldn’t say anything.”

“Of course I knew. You’d been wanting a chance to prove yourself for so long you could almost taste it; everyone here knew that. I admit I was surprised that you didn’t seem to know what the Buoys was, and I had no way of knowing how your ball player would react to having you there, but it seemed to be working out pretty well.”

He’d played her, plain and simple.

“And so what?” she asked. “What did you think would happen?”

“That’s what was so beautiful about this, Kate. I knew no matter what happened, it would be because you let your emotions get involved. Yes, I was rather hoping you’d get up there and turn into a crazy ex-wife, wreak some havoc, make their lives so miserable and cause so much damage that they’d never recover. But you didn’t, and while that surprised me a bit, it wasn’t a complete shock, because I know you, Kate. You went in there and worked because your heart was set on making it yours. From the second I called you about it, I knew you would do everything you could, whether it was because you wanted to make your ball player suffer or because you wanted to prove you could do it; either way it was a decision you made based on your emotions, and either way we were going to get that place.”

“All that work we did, the repairs, the rebuilding, it would have been for nothing.”

“Not at all,” he said, smiling at her as if she were six years old. “You know how long it takes for construction permits to come through, so while we waited for those, Josh would keep the place running and keep the clients coming back. You, Kate, made that possible for us.”

“Josh. You were going to give the Buoys to Josh to run.”

“Of course.”

“Because I’m too emotional with my decisions, is that right?”

“Exactly.” He might as well have been discussing how many times his coffee should be stirred for all the sentiment he showed.

“I see.” Despite what Paul said, Kate thought she was doing an amazing job of keeping her emotions in check as she stood there running her finger along the edge of the paper in her hand, the one that confirmed her resignation. “So what will you do now?”