Underneath It All (The Walsh Series #1) (35 page)

Sam clutched her hand as they walked into the room, but he was yelling within minutes and it took two nurses and a security guard to remove him.

And then she came for me.

She held out her hand and I accepted it, though I never intended to step foot in that room. I looked away when we reached the door, but she wasn’t having it.

“Come on, Matthew. It’s time.”

I looked at our joined hands, her fingers tiny against mine, but knew size spoke nothing to strength. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“I think you do, and I think you want to, but more importantly, you have to.”

I stared at the floor, the clock, the walls—anything but the man on the gurney—but the insistent circle of Lauren’s thumb on my wrist drew the words from my depths. “You were a terrible person, Angus. You did awful, unforgiveable things, and I’ll never understand…” I sighed and turned to Lauren. “Why am I doing this? That’s not even him anymore. What’s the point of standing here and doing this? What did everyone else say that took so long?”

“You know what my father always says?”

“‘I’m going to tear the testicles off any man who has so much as an impure thought about my daughter’?”

She laughed in spite of her best efforts. “Yes, but he also says ‘the only easy day was yesterday.’” Her hand passed back and forth between my shoulder blades as she shook her head. “Today’s a difficult day, but you’re going to make it through. You need to let him go.”

Looking up, I studied Angus under the tangle of tubes and cables. “No, you know what I need to say to him? I need to say thank you. Thank you for being such an evil bastard. Thank you for leaving us to fend for ourselves. Thank you for destroying every good thing we ever knew because Mom’s death destroyed you. And you want to know why we took over the business? Because fuck you. Fuck you, for all of it. I’ll never understand how it was so easy for you to hate us, or why we were the enemy.”

Lauren squeezed my hand, and when she led me out, the rush of emotion that must have hit the others hit me. At once I felt relief, sorrow, hope, but not an ounce of loss. I may have always known we lost Angus along with my mother, but I didn’t realize it until stepping out of that room. We had been orphaned with a living ghost, and that haunting was finally over.

I glanced at Lauren—my force of nature. The warmth from her hand in mine only took the edge off the chill riding my bones, and I fell into her open arms.

“You can hold onto me as long as you need, Matthew. I’m not going anywhere.”

*

Angus died thirteen
hours later with Nick and Lauren by his side.

It wasn’t more than twenty minutes after they insisted we leave for rest, fresh clothes, and food, and I imagine that was how Angus preferred it. There was a time when he loved us and looked upon us fondly, but that time ended decades ago, and even in death, I doubted he could see past his anger to remember it. He needed to be free of us to die, but I hated that he went with Lauren’s goodness surrounding him. She never said it but I knew she held his hand and spoke kind words as he passed, and stayed beside him until the orderlies wheeled him away, and he didn’t deserve that.

Somewhere in my foggy consciousness, I knew she did it for me—and Sam and Shannon, and Patrick and Riley, and even Erin—as much as she did it for Angus. She knew that, in a place far beneath our resentment and hurt, tiny slivers of us still cared about him, and she was taking this one for us.

I dropped to the sofa with a tumbler of whiskey and watched the Coast Guard boats patrolling the harbor. I shouldn’t have felt relief, but knowing Angus was gone left me lighter, and I could relax for the first time in years. The grief I experienced after saying goodbye—or fuck off, depending upon your interpretation—was brief and cathartic.

The wreckage he left in his wake was substantial, and I knew it would take years to put us back together but we knew all about restoration. We knew about picking up the pieces, brushing away the effects of time, and seeing things as they should be.

Lauren came to me, curled herself around me, and we watched in the hazy darkness between night and morning as the storm rolled in from the sea. I didn’t have to request her presence, she just knew I needed it. She didn’t say anything, and there was nothing to say that her loving touch didn’t already express.

There were versions of Lauren, probably too many to count, but she showed me every one without hesitation, and I knew her. I knew her heart and her mind and her love, and I knew that night at The Red Hat that she was rare and precious. And she knew me, all of me.

Despite every mathematical improbability, we had been waiting for each other. Passing each other in coffeehouses, on the streets of Beacon Hill, and on beaches of Cape Cod, waiting for the moment when our universes collided. Until she fell into my arms.

We belonged to each other.

We sat there for hours—maybe it was minutes, I couldn’t tell anymore—and she whispered, “Tell me what you need.”

Five words we knew so well, and right now they meant something else entirely.

I studied her eyes, looking for the flares of gold in the seas of green, and said, “Can I show you a few things?”

She nodded, and I grabbed the items I needed from my home office without giving myself a second of doubt.

“I’ve been drawing this house,” I said, settling onto the sofa with her on my lap and paging through my graphing notebook. “I started it a couple of months ago, and I have some variations here, but it’s the same house at its core. Here’s the great room and the kitchen. The library, the master bedroom.”

“This is remarkable, Matthew.” She touched her fingers to the paper, tracing the lines. “I thought you did this in a computer program. I didn’t know you did it by hand like this.”

“It’s how I learned. This was the one thing my father taught me: how to let the design move from my mind to my hand to the page.” The thought slammed into my chest, more as an unanticipated reminder than stunning grief, and I decided I was all right. Lauren was filling the empty space where Angus usually unloaded his venom, and I knew she’d get me through this. “I took it apart and rebuilt it a couple of times, and I put in a little roof garden, just because they make Sam happy.”

Lauren turned the pages, studying each design and feeling my pencil’s indentations on the paper. “Is this a project you’re working on?”

“No,” I said, resting my chin on her shoulder and letting my lips brush against her neck. “But I kept going back to it, over and over these past few months. Every time I made it a little different, adjustments here and there, but it was always the same house.”

She nodded thoughtfully, and I knew she was entertaining my ramblings with extreme patience. I hadn’t seen a single eye roll from her yet, and I wanted her to stop worrying that my father died tonight and argue with me again. I was finally free to live, and I wanted her alongside me for the journey.

“I realized this morning I’d been drawing it for you,” I said. “This is for you, and part of me has known that for months because it’s all the little things you like, the things you need. Built-in bookshelves, a claw-foot tub, a big kitchen island, plenty of windows in the master bedroom. This is yours. And mine, I hope. Some day.” Her eyebrows winged up, and I laughed, my first genuine laugh today. “It’s our house. The one I want to build you.”

She stared at the design for long, excruciating minutes, and when she finally glanced up, I saw that familiar grin, that naughty schoolteacher smile, and I could breathe again. “Is that all? I recall there being multiple items on your punch list, Mr. Walsh.”

“Do you remember how you came home with me after one kiss, Miss Halsted?”

And then she gave it to me: the eye roll I’d been craving for days. “I think there was more to the story than that, and I think it had something to do with your growls and panty-dropping stares.”

“So that’s a yes,” I laughed. “Do you remember how I asked you to marry me the next day?”

“Yeah, after all my friends rubbed up on you like desperate, skanky housewives. It was lovely to watch.”

“You said no that night.” Plucking the ring from my pocket, I slipped it over her finger, and placed her hand on the drawing of our home. “Say yes.”

Lauren stared at the diamond solitaire, and there wasn’t much I wouldn’t have given to crawl inside her head and hear her thoughts.

“How can you be sure?” she whispered.

“You take me as I come, ugly parts and rough patches and my insane family and everything. I love you, and you own me. Completely. You have since that first night.”

“I love you,” she said, her hands flying to my face, her thumb brushing back and forth over my lip.

“Oh yeah?” I whispered.

She nodded, and sucked my lip into her mouth, biting. I pounced, crowding her against the sofa and savoring her. Her scent saturated my senses, and I could think of nothing other than sinking into her wet center and losing myself in her. She rubbed her cheek against the stubble on my chin and pressed a biting kiss to the corner of my mouth.

Pulling back, she cupped my face and arched an eyebrow. “Why do you have an engagement ring lying around your apartment?”

I leaned into her embrace and my eyes drifted shut. “Because I picked it out after we sold the brownstones,” I said against her lips. I inhaled her scent, laced our fingers together, and wrapped our entwined arms around her waist. “Don’t freak out. Before you say no—”

“Yes,” she sighed.

She dragged her teeth over my lips, and I needed her soft and pliable beneath me. I needed her yielding to me. I just needed
her
. Clothes started flying off around us, and soon I felt the heat of her skin.

“Yes? I don’t even know what that means, Miss Halsted. I’ve only heard you saying yes when my head’s between your legs. Yes
yes
, as in…
yes
?”

“Yes.” She smiled up at me, and my brain was on an infinite loop of
mine, mine, mine.
I wanted to devour her. “But I need you to meet my parents first. Maybe…you could come with me next week, after the funeral, and we spend Christmas with them in Mexico. Wouldn’t that be a nice break from all of this?”

I dropped my head between her breasts—my favorite place in the universe—and groaned. “Your father is going to murder me.”

“I’ll protect you,” she whispered. “He talks a tough game, but never says no to me.”

“I can sympathize with that sentiment.”

My tongue surged into her mouth while my hands gripped her hips, my erection rocking into her with enough force to shift our bodies across the sofa and onto the floor.

“You’re such a fucking caveman,” she laughed.

I felt the cool metal of my ring on her finger as her hand trailed over my shoulder and up the nape of my neck. The primitive sensation of knowing she was mine far outstripped anything I ever experienced, and I brought her hand back to my chest.

“I love you,” I panted. “And you did wait for your husband.”

“I know, I know, I know,” she replied, her words drawn into a moan as I wrapped her legs around my waist and drove in deeper. “I think I’ve always known. It’s always been you.”

I was lost in her. But on nights like tonight, it felt a lot like being found.

Kate Canterbary doesn’t have it all figured out, but this is what she knows for sure: spicy-ass salsa and tequila solve most problems, living on the ocean—Pacific or Atlantic—is the closest place to perfection, and writing smart, smutty stories is a better than any amount of chocolate. She started out reporting for an indie arts and entertainment newspaper back when people still read newspapers, and she has been writing and surreptitiously interviewing people—be careful sitting down next to her on an airplane—ever since. Kate lives on the water in New England with Mr. Canterbary and the Little Baby Canterbary, and when she isn’t writing sexy architects, she’s scheduling her days around the region’s best food trucks.

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Coming November 2014

THE SPACE BETWEEN

Some lines are meant to be crossed.

Patrick

That hair.

That fucking hair.

It was everywhere, always, and I wanted to tangle my fingers in those dark curls and
pull
.

And that would be fine if she wasn’t my apprentice.

Andy Asani was nothing like I expected. She was exotic and scary-brilliant, and the slightest murmur from those lips sent hot, hungry lust swirling through my veins. Outside my siblings, she was the only person I could name who shared my obsession with preserving Boston’s crumbling buildings.

Andy

My wants were few: good eats, tall boots, hot yoga, interesting work. One incredibly hot architect with the most expressive hazel eyes I ever encountered and entirely too much talent in and out of the bedroom wasn’t part of the original plan. Apparently he was part of the package.