The Good Chase (28 page)

“You know”—he shifted a little to face her—“I've watched you working before. I've seen you in action, so to speak. You are absolutely justified in feeling what you do, but I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit to rise above it. Or to power through it.”

Pierce had said much the same thing.

She flopped back into the embrace of the cushions. Slowly, slowly, they swallowed her until all she could see was the set of shelves on the opposite wall.

“I just want what I want,” she said. “No matter which way I turn, I can't help feeling like I come up against huge roadblocks. And they're not something I can mentally get over. It'll take time and a completely different route that I just can't see yet.”

Byrne leaned over, around the pouf of cushion, until he filled her vision. He kept licking his lips, kept shifting his eyes over to the right.

“What?” she asked. “What's that face for?”

“What if,” he said carefully, “you
could
get what you want?”

Embarrassingly, she had to struggle to sit back up; the couch practically had her down its throat. “What do you mean?”

“The distillery up in Gleann.”

Grinding fingers into her eyelids, she let out a huge sigh. “I told you. The cost is prohibitive right now. It would take some serious capital to even get the down payment for that place, not to mention all the remodeling and start-up costs for the distillery itself, and the fact that I couldn't even make a dime until years out. It's a pipe dream, Byrne. I thought I could do it if I stuck with the Amber and squirreled away any money I made with Whitten, and then I'd be able to
think
about shopping around for a mortgage and business loans in maybe another five years or so—”

“But what if you didn't need Whitten to get started?”

Was he not listening to her? “But I do.”

“What if you didn't?” He reached over to his bag, slipped his hand between the open zipper, and pulled out a large brown envelope. One of those big ones with the flap and the string that looped around two attached cardboard circles. He looked at it for a moment, then placed it on her lap.

“What's this?” Her mouth went bone-dry.

“Open it.” His knee bounced a little. His big shoulders rounded forward, and the corners of his mouth ticked up, as though the crooked smile couldn't decide if it wanted to make an appearance.

Shea's hands curled on her chest as she stared down at the heavy brown envelope. The window air-conditioning unit kicked on, spewing out a much-needed cold blast.

“Open it,” he said. “Please.”

Slowly she unwound the string and lifted the flap. Inside were several sheets of paper, fastened with a paperclip. She flipped through them, but they were full of tightly spaced, itty-bitty legalese.

“I don't understand. What am I looking at?”

He reached out and set the first page on top of the stack again, then tapped a finger on a line. Suddenly it became clear that she was reading an address. An address in Gleann, New Hampshire.

Her head snapped up. “What is this? What did you do?”

Oh, the smile. That brilliant, slanted smile.

He said, “I bought you the farm.”

If she weren't already sitting, she might have collapsed. “
What
?”

His eyes positively twinkled, the creases deepening at their outer corners.

“I bought you the farm. The one you showed me, the one you want. The house, the barns, the fields. Everything.”

“I know which one,” she whispered, blinking hard at the paperwork. There it was, the address of the rural route outside of Gleann. The purchase price with all those zeros. And Byrne's name. His
full
name.

“Well, it's not final yet,” he amended, “but they've accepted my bid. As of yesterday. I signed the papers overseas and put up the earnest money, and now it's in a period of attorney review. That'll end probably at the end of this coming week. Then all you have to do is set a closing date. It could be yours in another month.”

“My God, Byrne.” Her voice rattled like she was driving over railroad tracks. “You
bought
me all this?”

“I did. Well, I want to. There are still a couple steps to go through.” He reached for her hands where they rested on top of the papers, and her reaction was immediate and instinctual.

She jumped up, the envelope and its contents sliding to the rug.

The enthusiasm and joy dissipated from his face. He drew his hands back in. “That wasn't exactly the reaction I thought I'd get.”

She didn't want to know about his expectations for something this huge. Something this full of meaning. Something this one-sided. “But . . .
why
?”

With a firm nod, he looked her directly in the eye and replied, “Because I have the money. Because you deserve it. Because I know you're devastated about the mess this fucking picture-website thing made, and that makes
me
sad. Because I want to help you, and not remotely in the way Lynch has. I'm no angel investor. This is your business. I don't want a thing to do with it.”

She couldn't find air.
Overwhelmed
didn't even begin to describe the way she felt.

All those zeroes . . . “You have this kind of money?”

Another nod. “I do.”

Or he had it, anyway, if she actually let him go through with this.

“But that was for your land. Your parents' land and the house you wanted for them.”

He stood up, too. “I have plenty more. Enough to do something else for my family when the time is right, when they let me.”

She looked at the papers strewn under the coffee table. “Maybe they never let you because it's simply too much.”

A deep groove divided his eyebrows.

“Byrne, I . . . I can't let you do this.”

“It's done. Didn't you see my signature on the end of the bid, my initials all over? I could stop the attorney review and get back my earnest money, but I really don't want to.”

Still no air came to her. Her chest pumped, her lungs worked, but it didn't feel like she was taking in any oxygen.

He inched closer, but it seemed like he crossed a great chasm to get to her. “The money is mine. I want to give this to you. I want you to have that distillery, and if you truly don't want to go into business with Whitten right now, this is the way you can begin. I don't want you to have to settle for anything. I want you to have that farm. The first step is done. You have the space. Now go out and find the capital to start everything else you said you wanted.”

Pressing a hand to her forehead that felt terribly damp, she turned away and went over to the table where Willa had been working. Shea replaced and straightened the centerpiece of eclectic vases, and when that was done she went to her shelves, where she adjusted every wineglass and snifter so they were perfectly even.

“You can pay me back,” Byrne said behind her. “If that's what you need, if that's what will make this all right to you. But I really do want to give it to you as a gift.”

Shea choked out a laugh as she whirled around. “That kind of money?”

He opened his hands, looking so very reasonable, and shrugged. “Then don't worry about paying me back. Just take it. Start your dream. It would make me very happy, Shea. Very, very happy.”

“You don't get it. I would have it hanging over my head. Every single day I went to work. Every day I slept in that house or walked across the fields to the barn. I would know what was given me and not what I earned myself.”

He frowned. “Hanging over your head? No, that's not what I intended at all.”

“Did you listen to anything I had to say in Gleann? Or by that lake in my hometown? After everything I went through with Marco? I got out from underneath him because I had to be responsible for myself. I wanted my own life. And while I'm grateful to Lynch for helping with that, for getting me going with the Amber, right now I feel like I'm owing yet another person. That I'm beholden to him. My immediate reaction to this is that I would be escaping that cage only to jump into another.”

He came over to the table and gripped the back of an end chair. “I listened to you, Shea. To every word. And I just told you that in my eyes, it's completely different from your position with Lynch. I just thought I could help—”

“There are so, so many similarities to what happened before my divorce. And directly after. I'm having a hard time accepting this.”

“Now wait a minute. I am
not
that asshole. Do
not
compare me to Marco.”

“I'm not comparing you to him. Just . . . you need to stop thinking that everything can be fixed with money.”

Darkness swept across his face. “That's not what I think. At all. Do not go mistaking caring for egotism.”

She glanced at the pile of papers once more. When she looked back at him, his frustration had grown, not diminished.

“Good point,” she said. “That's a very good point. I'm sorry.”

The crunch of his shoulders relaxed some.

She pressed a hand to her chest. “But I am not your parents, Byrne. I know you're dying to help them, to know that all your hard work and saving and such added up to the thing you wanted most, but I can't be their replacement.”

“You're not. You're not at all. I believe in this project. I believe in you, Shea. I think you're going to fucking kill in the whiskey world outside of New York.”

She would have to leave New York. The place she'd called home for a decade. She would have to leave Byrne. A year ago, when she'd concocted the dream of Gleann and the distillery, he hadn't even been a blip on her radar screen. Now? She wasn't sure what he was, but his mere existence made her want to stay.

“Don't get me wrong, I love having you in my arms,” he said, as though he were reading her mind, “but I hate seeing what I saw on your face when I walked in here. I
hated
having to leave the country when you were going through that shit. I hated watching you think it signaled the end to everything. You told me before that maybe the blow to my family was a new beginning for me, and I think you're right. It was my new beginning and it's yours, too. Because when I was overseas, it became clear what I wanted to do, and that was to help you.”

Her head swam with thoughts. Only there was no surface to break, no clear revelation, just a murky, swirling, pressurized mess between her ears.

“This gift, Byrne . . . It's so much. It's
too
much.”

“Not to me.” His conviction spoke volumes.

“It is to me. What if I refuse it?”

His lips parted. A little sound leaked out before he asked, “You'd do that?”

“I don't know. Maybe. To be honest, it's my gut instinct.”

His cheeks puffed out as he scratched the back of his head.

“You didn't even consider that,” she said. “Did you?”

“My turn to be honest: no.”

“What would happen, if I turned you down right now?”

“I'd get my earnest money back. The bid would die.”

“And after the attorney review is over at the end of next week?”

“That money would be gone, but so would the sale.”

So she had a week to make a decision, or else Byrne will have lost a good chunk of cash.

She swung out a chair and flopped into the seat. Instantly Byrne fell to his knees in front of her, and the position caused all sorts of flip-flops in her belly. All sorts of twisting in her heart.

“I know you want this, Shea. I know you do. If only you could've looked in a mirror when you were telling me about the distillery, about your dreams. I loved seeing that in you, because I recognized it. It's why I went to school, why I moved here, became what I did, so I could have my dreams. I
know
dreams. They are powerful, powerful stuff, and they don't ever go away. Not ever. I want to see that look back on your face, the one from that night in Gleann when you told me all about it. This is it. Let me do this for you. We can talk about the details later.”

“I can't. I just can't.”

He took her knees, rubbed them lightly. “You can. All you have to do is say yes.”

“And if I don't? You just bid on a multimillion-dollar abandoned estate in the middle-of-nowhere New Hampshire.”

“I'll figure it out. I'm kind of good at things like that. You know, with money and such.” He grinned.

She covered her face with her hands, bowed her head. Too much. Too much . . .

“Listen.” He pried her hands away. She wasn't crying, but his gorgeous face was blurred because of the buzzing in her head. “All this shit that happened with the photos? The crap that is still sticking around even after the divorce? Why don't you use this opportunity to finally get rid of Marco and that Lynch guy? Show Marco that you truly can stand on your own. Show him how much you're worth in a way that has nothing to do with revenue. Or give him a virtual ‘fuck you' and just erase him from your consciousness. Show the rest of the world how resilient and strong you are. Do this. Go after your dream. Start your own distillery. Take this gift. Please.”

Her hands were wrapped in his now. Big and warm and so utterly generous—

“Wait.” She narrowed her eyes. “Did you do this because of Marco?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know. Like some sort of multimillion-dollar penis measurement thing.”

“No!” He really did look horrified at that. Whereas Marco likely would've shrugged and nonverbally admitted to as much.

Byrne was absolutely right. She had to stop assuming that every guy was trying to keep her under his thumb. “I'm sorry.” She gave him a wavering smile. “I didn't really think that, but I felt like I had to ask.”

The papers drew her attention again, like they were doused in glowing neon paint and smelled like red velvet cake.