Page 204 of Boyfriend of the Hour

My sister sighed. “It’s Mike. He’s been acting off. Got really mad when he found out about the video and told off Antoni for even asking about you. He came home one night with bruised knuckles and blood on his shirt and wouldn’t tell me what happened. Just said, ‘it’s been taken care of.’ Whatever that means.”

As I heard the story, something in me cracked.

“Why would Mike care so much?” I wondered. “It’s not like I’mhissister. I figured I drove him nuts as much as I did you.”

Lea gave me a look. “Of course, you’re his sister, Joni. You and all the others. Mike didn’t have a family until we got together, remember? And he’s about as loyal as it gets. You mess with one of us, you mess with him too.”

I blinked. I had never really thought of Mike that way, but it made sense. He’d been my sister’s shadow since I was little. Stalwart and patient. Always there.

“Anyway, it’s fine,” she said as she turned to a mirror on the far side of the room and fluffed her hair. “Now, what’s this I hear about Virginia?”

FORTY-TWO

THINGS I LIKE ABOUT HUNTWELL FARM

#8 the colums at the house are really pretty

“That’s the duck pond. We have two resident swans who come back every year.”

As Nathan pointed out familiar sights, I gazed out the passenger window of the large black Mercedes.

A few days after my surgery, we had flown into Dulles International Airport, about an hour from where Nathan’s family lived in the country. Just as Dr. McAndrew had said, I’d been able to walk out of the hospital unassisted and had started basic physical therapy the next day. I didn’t want to think about how much all of this had cost Nathan. Frankie had called me as soon as Xavier had arrived home to offer to pay it all back on my behalf, but I’d turned her down. A debt was a debt, whether I owed it to my sister or my roommate-turned-boyfriend.

For whatever reason, I was more comfortable owing it to Nathan. It felt more like mine that way. And maybe, like I knew one day, I’d pay him back.

It wasn’t my first time to the DC area. Once I’d been part of a dance troupe that toured through a few theaters in Philadelphia,Baltimore, and Washington, DC. In between shows, I’d walked around the Washington Mall but mostly saw the inside of the theater and whatever I could glimpse on the bus ride home.

Nathan’s family lived about an hour from the city, outside a small town called Warrenton, on a fifteen-hundred-acre property twice the size of Central Park. One of the last surviving land grants from George Washington himself, according to Nathan, who had been drilling me on the estate’s American history as a means of courting his mother, who was apparently a nut for it.

It was one of the things that made me very attuned to the differences between us. Nathan’s family had been in this country for at least four hundred years, with ancestors whose names were literally on its founding documents. Nonna and Nonno had come over from Italy sometime in the fifties. Any farther back than that, and every ancestor I had was either in Italy or Puerto Rico.

“So, your parents have the house out here, the townhouse in Georgetown, and another house in Westchester?” I asked, trying to remember everything he’d listed so far.

The sheer amount of real estate these people owned was beyond my scope of imagination. In my neighborhood, owning even one crappy little house was considered a big deal.

“On this coast, yeah. Dad bought a house in Del Mar when I was in college. Plus, there’s a villa in Tuscany and apartments in Hong Kong, London, and Dubai.” Nathan frowned. “It’s possible Carrick talked them into a Tokyo residence too, but I’m not sure.” He took my hand. “But this is their favorite.”

More importantly, Huntwell Farm was the place where Nathan and his brothers had primarily been raised. For that reason alone, I was looking forward to seeing it. Anything that told me more about what made Nathan into Nathan was worthseeing, even if I knew I was driving right into the belly of the beast.

We passed through a set of looming iron gates topped with golden bald eagles, following a neatly paved road through the property. Under early the May sunshine, it was admittedly breathtaking. Rolling green hills were split between acres of forest, meadow, and wildflowers, broken occasionally by things like paddock fences, stables, gatehouses, and staff homes.

It wasn’t really an estate. Huntwell Farm was a village in and of itself, eons away from the urban jungle I’d always known.

“Do you miss it?” I found myself wondering as I took everything in. “This is the polar opposite of New York.”

Nathan seemed to think about that for a bit. “I miss some things. The space, for one. I’ve gone riding in Central Park, but it’s not the same. Everywhere is still full of people. And sometimes, it would be nice to have space to be alone.”

“Why did you come to New York, of all places?” I wondered. “It’s a terrible place to be alone.”

It had never bothered me. My natural state was one of chaos, growing up in a house full of people. Being alone always felt uncomfortable to me.

Nathan shrugged. “Well, at first, it was because I was matched to a general residency program there. And then accepted to the fellowship at NYU. But in general, I like the city. I like its energy. And since my parents wanted one of us to live in New York to manage Huntwell’s financial sector, they didn’t fight it either.”

He turned to me then and cupped my face with one hand. “I’ve developed my own methods of finding peace,” he said before delivering a quick kiss. “Right now, they involve a lot of this.”

He kissed me again and didn’t stop. Not when the car rounded a circular driveway and stopped. Not when the drivercame around to open our door and waited patiently for us to finish.

He only stopped when I pulled away, feeling a bit drunk from the effort.