Off the Hook (3 page)

Jessie’s whispers, on the other hand, weren’t quite as quiet as his.

“You and your brothers jumped at the idea when Foster offered to send Josh over here to work; remember that conversation? Free help for us, which is all we can afford right now, and lodge experience for his people. You agreed to it, Liam.”

“Yeah, I know,” Liam said, obviously forgetting to whisper. “That was when they said they were going to send Jack. Josh.
Whatever
. Not…
her
!”

“What’s wrong with her?” Jessie growled. “And God help you if you even think about saying something stupid like she can’t do the job because she’s a woman.”

Kate twisted her mouth tight, but the snicker still escaped. She knew that wasn’t what Liam meant, but it sure was fun watching him squirm a little. And this Jessie woman—if that was how she spoke to Liam all the time, then, oh yes, she and Kate were going to get along just fine.

“That’s not what I was going to say,” Liam said, his voice a harsh whisper.

“Good, then what’s the problem?”

“She and I—” His broad shoulders heaved. “There’s history.”

“Noooo! You don’t say.” Jessie’s mocking made it nearly impossible for Kate to keep a straight face. “News flash, buddy. We’re not in the eighth grade, so whatever history you have, get over it, because we need her.”

A loud sigh, then Liam turned and took a couple of steps back toward Kate, indicating Jessie should follow.

“Look, I know we had an agreement with Foster.” He stopped, cleared his throat, and inhaled slowly. “But I think Kate’ll agree with me that this isn’t going to work, am I right? Kate?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kate said, blinking up at him with a straight shot of passive aggression. “Were you talking to me?”

“Uh, yeah!”

“Well, you can understand how that might be unclear, since you’ve pretty much done nothing but talk at me, about me, or around me until now. But if you’re asking me how I feel about working here
with you,
then my answer would be simple. I don’t have a problem with it, because even I made it out of the eighth grade.”

Kate tipped her head a little to the left and waited him out. Given the financial state the Buoys was in, he’d be stupid to send her packing, and yet Kate wouldn’t blame him one bit if he did it anyway. She would if she were Liam. In fact, a tiny part of her kind of hoped he did send her away, because then there’d be absolutely no chance of her making the O’Donnell mistake again.

The other part of her, the part that knew she needed to nail this job, was already kicking and screaming and begging her to keep her mouth shut before Liam got on the phone and called in a Helijet to pick her up.

She wasn’t going to let him think she cared either way, though; better for him to believe she was indifferent to the whole thing and that by sending her packing he’d be the one losing out, not her, that he needed her more than she needed him.

The moment dragged on until Jessie finally huffed out a sigh and moved so she stood between them, with her back to Kate.

“Clearly I don’t know what the hell’s going on here,” she said. “What I do know is that we’re out of options. We’ll never get an operator’s permit with this place in the shape it’s in, and without that permit, we can’t open. If we can’t open, we can’t raise the money to pay the taxes, and if we don’t pay the taxes—”

“I know,” he said, his voice hard and tight.

“Good.” Jessie nodded. “Then you also know it’s just you, me, and Finn, unless Ronan can score some time off to come help, and with opening day a little over six weeks away, there’s no way the three of us’ll get everything done before the start of the season. Truth be told, we’ll be damn lucky to get everything done even
with
her helping. No offense, Kate.”

“None taken.”

“Jessie.” Her name came off Liam’s tongue in a long, low growl. He’d growled Kate’s name a couple of times back in Vegas, too, but there’d been none of that anger in those growls, just a low, sexy—
oh, stop it!

“Finn will be back from the mainland tomorrow,” Jessie said. “Should we call him and Ronan right now and tell them to forget all this because you want to turn away the free help we need?”

She gave him almost a full second to answer, and when he didn’t, she kept right on going, and once she got rolling…wow.

“We don’t have time to go ten rounds on this, Liam, because I just walked away from my paying job—which came with some pretty great benefits, I might add—to come back here
on a freakin’ float plane
to do this with you guys.”

The way Jessie tipped her head at him made Kate think that must have meant something huge.

“I don’t give a flying rip if you don’t like her or if she doesn’t like you; we need her help to avoid having this place go up for auction. Like it or not, all that matters right now is getting the work done, so unless she’s some kind of serial killer who’s going to hack us all up with a chain saw, she’s staying.”

Jessie had him and they all knew it, but at least she gave him the courtesy of waiting for him to blink before she turned to Kate.

“What do you say?”

Kate took her time before answering.

“Well, for starters, I’m sorry to say that in my rush to pack last night, I forgot to throw in my chain saw, so there’s no worry about me lopping off anyone’s appendages, though I will admit it was something I considered a few times back in the day.” Kate looked straight past Jessie and locked her accusing gaze on Liam. “And besides that, I committed to doing this job, and I, for one, don’t walk away from my commitments.”

“Oh, for—” Liam stopped, ground his jaw tight, then shook his head.
“Whatever.”

“Great! Then let’s do this.” Jessie’s grin wasn’t all relief; there was a good dose of caution in it, too, as she started toward the lodge again, indicating for Kate to follow. “So do I want to know what the history is between you two?”

Giving Liam a not-so-friendly clap on the shoulder, Kate laughed right out loud as she moved past him. “You want to field that one, Sporto?”

The look he gave her was almost as comical as it was venomous.

“According to the Clark County recorder’s office in Las Vegas,” he said, his voice tight, each word dragged from his tongue, “she’s my ex-wife.”

Chapter 2

It was all I lived for, to play baseball.

—Mickey Mantle

Ten years, that’s how long he’d gone without saying a word about Kate or what had happened in Vegas, so Liam didn’t wait around to hear what Jessie had to say about the bombshell he’d dropped. He and Kate had made a huge mistake back then and he’d corrected it.

He’d been right to do what he did—he never doubted that; he’d just done it the wrong way, is all. And then he’d made it worse by never working up the balls to call her after it was all done. Not even once.

The sound of Jessie’s too-big boots made him glance up from the rotting deck he’d been ripping apart on the front of the Orange cabin. This late in the day, the weak spring sun was already behind the mountain; he should have waited until tomorrow to start this job. But the indoor jobs all required more of a gentle hand, and all he wanted to do right then was smash things.

“For the love of God, woman, are you ever going to get boots that fit you?”

“What for?” Jessie frowned as if she didn’t understand why he’d even suggest such a thing. “These are fine.”

They weren’t fine—they were an old pair left behind by either a former guest or an employee—but Jessie had never been one to waste money on anything when she could make do with something else. Standing there in what used to be Da’s old black-and-gray wool sweater and a tight black toque, she looked a damn sight more at home than Kate did in that ridiculously thin raincoat and red dress. He hadn’t even seen the whole dress, just the hem poking out below the jacket, but going by the shoes she had clutched in her hand, he’d given his imagination free rein on what the dress looked like, and, well…
whew
.

And as for those yellow gum boots…he should have thought they were as ridiculous as the raincoat, because they obviously weren’t built for work, and yet on her,
shit,
they added a huge layer of cute to a look he already knew was sexy as hell.

Clearing his throat, Liam tossed one of the spindles from the railing into the growing pile to be burned. “Don’t suppose she had a change of heart and called in a Helijet?”

“Nope, but she did opt to stay in one of the A-frames, I’m guessing so she won’t risk running into you every five minutes.” Her response didn’t overly surprise him, but he could have lived without the derisive snort that followed. “So are you going to fill me in here or what? I mean, jeez, Liam.
Married?
How did I not know this?”

“It was a long time ago,” he said, suddenly tired. “We were young.”

“I’m guessing stupid, too. Do Ro and Finn know?”

“No.”

“God help me.” Lifting her face skyward, Jessie gripped her head between her hands and sighed, long and loud. “Start talking, because I need to know what I’m working with here.”

Liam swiped his sleeve across his cheek, a habit he’d picked up standing out on the mound when he needed a second to catch his breath. From the second he’d realized it was Kate walking toward the lodge, he’d been fighting to breathe normally, and it was getting harder by the minute.

“It was like ten years ago,” he said slowly. “A couple guys on the team and I took a road trip to Vegas at the end of the season, and she was there with some friends.”

He could still see her standing at the far roulette table inside the Bellagio, cheering on her friend, who was being incredibly unimaginative by betting red twenty-one over and over again.

She looked great—Kate, not the friend—in those skintight jeans and black lacy tank top, which he later discovered had two rips in the right seam, both of which were held together by strategically placed safety pins. He’d watched her for a couple of minutes, fascinated by the way she moved and the sound of her laugh, before he finally went over to talk to her. They were both Canadian, both from B.C., and both single. She was gorgeous and funny and he’d been instantly smitten. Wasn’t a word he’d ever use outside his own head, but there really was no other way to accurately describe her effect on him.

Smitten
. It had never happened before that night and it had never happened since.

“Okay,” Jessie said, waving her hand in a circular motion as if that would hurry him along. “And?”

“Her friends ditched and went home early, so she and I spent a few days together and ended up married.”

“Ended up married,” Jessie repeated, her voice flat. “You O’Donnells sure are a romantic lot. How long did it last?”

“The marriage?” Liam exhaled slowly. “Most of the night.”

“Most of the—”
Jessie gaped. “One night? You were married less than a day? What are you—a Kardashian?”

“I know, all right? But I’d just turned twenty-one and I was still fighting to get my shot in the big leagues.”

“Yeah? So?”

“So I wasn’t moving to Vancouver, Jess. I had a career going in Detroit.”

“Ohhh,” she said, drawing the word out over a slow “you’re such an idiot” nod. “Right.”

Anyone else who talked to him that way probably would’ve wound up on the business end of his boot, but this was Jessie. She’d worked at the Buoys for so long they considered her more of a sister than an employee. Even when Liam, Ro, and Finn left, she’d stayed; she’d put up with the old man’s bullshit and black moods, she was the one who got him into AA, and she was, without question, the only reason the lodge had continued running as long as it had.

They owed her. It was that debt, on top of the debt he owed his brothers, that made him agree to stay at the Buoys. Growing up, Ro and Finn had been forced to pick up the slack every time Liam was off somewhere playing ball. Sure, they’d bitched about it, and you could bet your ass there’d been a few punches thrown, but they’d still done it.

And as much as Liam wanted the Buoys to reopen, he wasn’t ready to give up his career. Sure, he’d been out of a contract for over a year, and, sure, his arm wasn’t what it used to be, but his agent wasn’t trying to sell him as a starter anymore. He was just trying to get Liam a deal as a relief pitcher, but so far every nibble they got turned out to be a dead end. If—no,
when
—he got another offer, he’d be on the first Helijet out, debt or no debt.

Until that happened, though, he’d do his level best to get this place in running shape again, because at the end of the day, it was home. Always had been.

“Earth to Liam.” Brow raised, Jessie wiggled her fingers in a “come on come on come on” way. “Vancouver? Detroit? Let’s hear it.”

“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “I’d worked too damn hard to get where I was and I wasn’t about to change for her or anyone, especially when it was probably going to end in disaster anyway. I mean, shit, Jess, look what Mandy did to Ro, making him give up everything and trying to turn him into something he didn’t want to be. The guy’s as miserable as a guy can be and it’s all because he bent to whatever Mandy wanted, and if he didn’t, she cried until he finally gave in.”

“Hang on a second.” Jessie lifted her hand and squinted back at him as though trying to work out what he’d said. “You and Kate got married ten years ago, that’s what you said, right? Were Ro and Mandy even married by then?”

“Just.”

“So how in that screwed-up mush of a brain of yours did you think it was reasonable to use her as an example of what your ten-minute marriage might turn out like?”

Liam didn’t have a good answer for that, but if he didn’t say something quick, she’d probably figure him out.

“Finn and I knew Mandy wasn’t right the first time we met her. Shit, Ro’s the biggest carnivore this side of Medicine Hat, and she wouldn’t even allow meat on the table. What the hell? And then he traded in his truck for a MINI? I mean, come on.”

“I don’t see how any of that is Mandy’s fault. Maybe your brother did it of his own accord; maybe he was being considerate, did you ever think of that?” It only took a couple of seconds of Liam blinking back at her before she conceded. “Okay, that would have been completely unlike him, especially since he’d never driven anything smaller than a crew cab before that, but it’s not completely impossible.”