Page 1 of Canvas of Lies (Spruce Hill #3)

Kat: Then

I knew, as earnestly as any ten year old girl could, that I was destined to fall in love with Nicolas Beaumont.

At thirteen and more than a head taller than me, he was already handsome in his long-limbed, adolescent way, with curling black hair and soulful brown eyes.

Nico’s father, Pierre Beaumont, was a famous French chef who’d come to Spruce Hill, New York, to work for my family when I was still in diapers.

Nico and I became fast friends not long after.

Though I kept my infatuation with Nico firmly under wraps, knowing he’d either tease me for it or look at me with that pitying smile I’d seen on some of his friends, I could never resist a chance to be around him.

Nico avoided the main house whenever possible, but to me, the Beaumont cottage was practically my second home.

We spent our free time together, whether we were exploring the woods at the back of the property, inventing games to play, or sitting quietly in a hidden section of the house—Nico with a book, me with my tools and whatever electronics I’d decided to take apart and put back together.

On the night that changed everything, not long after my tenth birthday, my parents threw a party for a bunch of their rich friends, the kind of party children were never welcome at.

I knew that my father was a hotshot lawyer with rich, powerful clients, and my mother had told me very sternly that the children were to stay away from the party.

Some of the guests had deposited their own kids in the playroom where a handful of nannies were chatting about celebrity gossip, but the oldest of us had snuck out an hour earlier to entertain ourselves.

The other kids wanted to play pirates, but I refused. I was forever forced to be the princess captured for a hefty ransom, never a pirate myself. Nico assured me it was because they were afraid of my swashbuckling skills and convinced them hide and seek would be more fun anyway.

It was my fault we’d ventured into the most dangerous territory in the house.

Nico wanted to hide in the library, but I’d grabbed hold of his hand and bolted down the hall.

It wasn’t the first time we held hands, but creeping through the dark and breaking all the rules gave the brief trek an air of danger that made everything feel sharper, more important somehow .

He and I were curled up into tight little balls under the massive desk in my father’s office, our legs pressed together from knee to shin.

“Do you think they’ll find us, Nico?” I whispered.

He gave me a stern look and held a finger over his lips. “If you keep talking, they will. Hush, Kitten.”

We were never allowed in my father’s office.

In reality, we weren’t even allowed in this part of the house.

Though no one had come right out and said it, not yet anyway, I was almost certain that my father didn’t want Nico anywhere near me.

Even if Nico had wanted to obey that unspoken directive, I made it impossible, because I couldn’t imagine life without him.

I followed him everywhere, dogged his every step, inserted myself into every game and adventure that he and his friends arranged.

In the end, he had to either take me under his wing and keep me safe or leave me to storm off and get myself into even worse trouble on my own. I was plenty capable of that, and he knew that perfectly well .

No one got into trouble quite like I did, and somehow, Nico always ended up getting busted right along with me.

Only another minute or two passed before we heard footsteps from the hall outside, then a hushed giggle that had Nico’s eyes gleaming at me in the dark.

The party tonight was way on the other side of the house—it was the only reason the two of us had dared to sneak into this wing during our game.

If we were caught by a grownup instead of the seeker, we were in for a world of trouble.

When the office door opened and light spilled across the room, Nico clasped my hand and squeezed, shaking his head to remind me to stay silent.

We couldn’t see anything but the wall of windows behind my father’s desk chair.

The glass reflected a flash of light from the hallway before darkening again when the door closed.

For a second, the room was silent and I prayed that whoever had opened the door had simply turned around and left.

“Are you sure no one will come this way?” asked a breathless woman.

“No one would dare,” the man answered smoothly, then the woman giggled again.

Though I didn’t recognize her voice, the one who responded was clearly my father. I jerked in surprise and Nico squeezed my hand again.

“At least we don’t have to worry about my husband. What exactly did you do to him?”

My father’s voice was a low growl when he responded, “Nothing you need to know about.”

“You are so bad.”

I frowned at Nico in the dark, wondering why she said it like it was a good thing, but he just shook his head at me. His expression shifted as I tried to identify the sounds coming from the other side of the desk—like sloppy, wet kisses, interrupted by an occasional grunt.

When the giggles turned to moans and the whispered words grew increasingly explicit, Nico clapped his hands over my ears. It wasn’t enough to muffle the sounds completely, though, and he dropped his forehead against mine, squeezing his eyes shut until I did the same.

Suddenly, loud voices echoed in the hall outside the office and the door flew open, sending another flare of light across the room.

“And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where the magic happens,” my mother announced.

Everything went silent, then someone smothered a laugh and said, “Apparently so.”

My mom’s shrieks pierced the air. There was no way not to hear her, even through Nico’s palms. Though I wished he’d kept them pressed over my ears for protection from it, my mouth dropped open and he let go to cover it before I could make a sound that might draw attention to us.

The adults were all talking at once: screaming outrage from my mother, deep-voiced protests from my father, the fascinated chatter of the audience just outside the door.

It felt like hours, huddled there together under the desk, but eventually the sounds faded and the intruders left amidst a good deal of shouting about alimony and prenups. We waited until the footsteps faded, then waited some more, just to be sure, before Nico took my hand to draw me out after him.

We shook out our legs, weak and quivering from holding still for so long, slipped carefully out of the office, and sprinted for the stairs at the far end of the hallway .

Over the years that followed, I tried hard to forget about that night.

My mother, thanks to her own high-priced lawyer, walked away with enough money to move to St. Croix—with said lawyer in tow—and left full custody of me to my father, which boiled down to being left mostly to my own devices.

It didn’t matter that she’d had affair after affair throughout my childhood, only that he got caught doing the same.

Publicly. Very publicly.

Since their prenup was ironclad, he didn’t bother to fight her on anything, not even to push her to keep me in her life. On one of the rare occasions he actually answered instead of brushing me off when I asked why, he uttered the only words of wisdom he ever gave me.

“You can’t fight fair with someone who has no sense of fairness.”

It seemed rich, coming from a man who fought with strangers for a living, but it never quite left my memory bank.

My friendship with Nico seemed as altered by that one segment of time as my relationship with my father, though in the opposite way.

I could barely look my dad in the eye after that night, not that he ever seemed to notice.

My continued existence was a mild annoyance to him, at best, a serious inconvenience at worst.

It stung, realizing how disposable I really was to both my parents, but Nico was there to cushion the blow.

We were bound together even tighter afterward, well beyond the friendship that had existed between us beforehand, beyond even my childish crush.

Something akin to adulation filled me when I thought about how he’d cupped his hands over my ears, rested his face against mine, and held my hand for the rest of the night.

Even after one of the other boys made a kissy face at us and teased Nico about it, he didn’t let go.

That hopeless devotion lasted right up until the day Nico left for college, bidding me farewell with a jaunty grin and a quick, “See you later, Kitten,” that forced me to accept he’d probably only ever viewed me as a friend, or maybe—even worse—as a tag-along little sister.

I swallowed my humiliation and tried my best to move on.

Life without Nico around lost a bit of its shine, but high school swooped in to fill the gaps left by his departure. I did see him a few times over those years, usually from a distance, but gradually the infatuation faded, even if the old affection lingered.

Once, when I’d hacked my long, honey-blonde hair into a short pixie cut and gone running down the front walk to hop onto my boyfriend Zeke’s motorcycle, I caught a glimpse of Nico standing around the side of the house with his dad, staring after me with a forbidding expression that rivaled my father’s.

Read it and weep, I thought, pulling a helmet over my cropped curls.

As we pulled away from the house, a sharp twinge of regret stabbed through my chest, but I forced it down—forced myself to ignore the hurt that built up during those years .

If I’d known what was to come, I wondered if I might’ve turned back, let Zeke ride away without me, and taken the time to run to Nico as I always had when I was younger instead of fleeing from him.

Hindsight was, in fact, a bitch.