Page 13 of Fierce Love (Tucker Billionaires)

Chapter Ten

Hollyn

“ J ust drive,” I say to the cab driver, barely able to get the words out around the constriction in my throat.

Part of me knew Nate would be angry with me.

Our meeting at the funeral home hadn’t exactly been sunshine and roses, but it hadn’t been terrible either.

Then when he’d come to Aunt Verna’s funeral, when I’d felt so much inner calm at his presence, I tricked myself into believing he would have felt that way too.

That maybe, despite what I did, how things ended, we could be okay.

That meeting in the boardroom just now was the opposite of okay.

I dig around in my purse until I find my phone, and I call Shannon. But it’s not Shannon who answers the landline. It’s Kinsley.

“Did you get the job?” she asks, her voice brimming with excitement. “It sounded like you were going to get it.”

“I can’t take it, Kin. It’s not a good fit.” My voice is husky with regret.

“ Can’t take it?” Her anger pokes through. “I can’t go back to New York. Not if things are going to be like they were. I hate it there. I hate everything about it there.”

“Kin,” I say, trying to suppress my own scattered emotions to reason with her. But I don’t get the chance to say anything else when the phone goes dead in my ear.

A dropped connection, or did she hang up on me? I’m not sure it matters. Calling her back will only escalate the fight. We’ve been in enough of them lately that I know that much.

Even if I wanted to take the job—and I’d been prepared to accept it until Nate walked in the boardroom door—Nate made it clear he didn’t want me hired.

The bank account always gets what it wants, no matter what anyone else in the room thinks.

Before he arrived, Posey and the other producers told me the third producer was the one covering the majority of the shortfall from the government, the one who’d been so adamant about giving lower-income families this opportunity at no cost. I’d been touched that someone had considered the impact on families and used their own money to solve the problem, and I’d been feeling a little bit of pride that I’d be involved in an initiative that would make a difference for neighborhoods like the one I came from.

I will never admit it to Kinsley, but staying here seemed possible, at least in the short term. Then it all collapsed around me when the boardroom door opened. One way or another, Nate was always going to be one of the reasons that staying on the island didn’t—couldn’t—make sense.

“Have you decided on a destination yet?” the cab driver asks, eyeing me in the rearview mirror. The meter ticks over at the front of the vehicle. I’m wasting money I don’t have to spare.

The last place I want to go is to Shannon’s to pick up Kinsley and have her either give me the silent treatment or try to attack me for not doing what she wants.

“Yeah,” I say, and I give him the name of the last place I ever thought I’d want to return to.

When I open the door, stale beer and spilled tequila greet me like an old friend. It’s strange to hate a place and love it at the same time. The months I spent working here when I was eighteen were some of the best of my life, but the job had very little to do with my intense happiness.

I avoid making eye contact with the few people in the bar, and I head for a table near the window. It’s too dark to see the ocean view, but knowing it’s out there brings me a familiar comfort.

It’s only after I’ve set my purse on the table that something inside me pricks to attention, as though an invisible tuning fork has been hit, sending out pitch-perfect vibrations meant just for me. Years have passed since the last time I felt this sensation, but I’d recognize it anywhere.

Nate Tucker is here somewhere.

My skin tingles with awareness, and I stare at the scarred tabletop, afraid to look anywhere but down. What are the chances I came here on a whim and he is here, too, hating me with enough force that I can feel it?

With a shake of my head, I grab my purse, and I’m just about to leave this table, exit the bar—god help me, exit the island—when a thick glass slides onto the table’s surface. Cold strawberry-mint tea, a favorite when I worked here, sloshes over the side, creating a little puddle on the wood.

Startled, I glance up, and my gaze connects with Nate’s.

“Hi,” I breathe out before I can catch myself, realizing how silly I sound.

For a long beat, he searches my face, and I can’t help categorizing his, wishing he’d somehow gotten ugly with the years instead of more handsome.

The boyish fullness of his face has been replaced with rugged angles that only seem to highlight the pretty color of his eyes.

Eyes that no longer have the teasing, playful glint I once loved.

He yanks out the chair across from me and sits in it, as though I asked him to and he resents it. “Painfully long day for you, I imagine,” he says, his speech thick with alcohol.

Tears spring to my eyes. Despite his body posture, those words are the Nate I remember.

The one who’d been able to read me so much better than anyone else, who seemed to understand me in ways no one else did.

The reminder that I walked away from that, from him, makes my chest feel like it’s on the verge of caving in.

“Yeah,” I whisper, barely able to get the single word past my lips. I take the glass he set on the table, and I hold it between my palms. “Thanks for this.”

“Probably not as good anymore,” he says. “Apparently, Elmore sold this place a few years ago.”

I take a sip, and I try not to think about why Nate decided to sit with me, why he’s acting like him being at this table isn’t weird and uncomfortable despite how comforted I actually feel. My subconscious that took over at the funeral is doing it again. Nate is safety .

“It’s not the same,” I admit. “A bit more minty than before. But it’s just as good.”

He lifts his glass to his lips and takes a long draught of his gold rush. Some things don’t change. At seventeen, that was his drink of choice, but I’m surprised he’s still drinking it at thirty-one, that he didn’t outgrow the taste.

“You live in New York now? Work for Reyes and Cruz?”

“Yes.”

“You’re raising Kinsley there by yourself?” he asks.

I let out a shaky laugh. “Raising? I’m pretty sure she’d tell you I’m ‘ruining’ at this point.”

“Why’s that?” Nate takes another long drink, and then he lifts his hand, and a waitress materializes out of nowhere, another glass of gold rush at the ready. Another indication of the man he’s become, the attention he draws to himself without even trying too hard.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, running my fingers through the condensation on my glass. We’re not old friends, and it’s weird that we both seem to be trying to act as though we are.

“Looking after a sibling. Not a job you ever wanted,” he says.

“And yet one I would not change.” I struggle to hide my frown. “Not enough hours in the day, that’s all.”

“Posey tells me your sister was really set on you getting the network job, on staying here for a while.”

I tear my gaze off my glass to meet his. This version of Nate, the one who’d throw himself on the sword to make my life easier, is still recognizable, familiar. Tears threaten again. What did I do? I don’t understand how I ever found the strength to not just walk away but to stay away.

“You don’t want to work with me, Nate, and I don’t blame you.”

“It’s Nathaniel,” he says.

“Nathaniel,” I whisper. “Sorry.” I clear my throat. “I just… I have to say that I think what you’re trying to do is… it’s admirable.”

“Some experiences, some people , change you, and no matter how much you might wish to be unchanged, you can’t go back.”

“Still no time machine,” I say, though his words are both a painful stinger and the calamine lotion to soothe it.

His comment is loaded, which makes me believe it’s about me, but if that’s true, it’s hard to be hurt if the change is him caring about the class divide on the island, him actively working to make people’s lives better.

“Not even sure what I’d reverse time for anymore,” he says, setting his empty glass on the table.

Ouch . That comment lands, as I’m sure he intended.

His efforts to make my life better when we were teenagers were the first time anyone had ever put me first. Aunt Verna took me in as a kid, but I always felt like I was competing for her heart with my mother.

Aunt Verna could never let Mickie go, and even though I understand that sisterly bond better now, part of me resented her for it back then.

Mickie could have led Verna straight to hell, and she’d have gone if it meant Mickie suffered a little less.

“Your resume says you went to the East Coast School of Interior Design, but that summer before you left, you had a scholarship at Pratt for art?” He raises his hand, and another drink appears, as though the waitress is waiting for her cue to deliver.

I was never that attentive to anyone in this place. She must make a killing on tips.

“I got a last-minute offer from ECSID which included my housing, so I took it.” The half-truth rolls off my tongue, practiced and familiar.

“How last-minute?”

“Very.” There’s nothing I can say to him that’ll change what I did, the choices I made.

At eighteen, I did the best I could, and I’ve tried to make peace with that.

Rehashing anything when I’m going to be leaving the island in a few days is pointless.

Our wounds might have become uncovered in the boardroom, but I’m not going to pick them until they bleed.

“You were going to California for a business degree, but you’ve ended up in television?”

“Cut my producing teeth in documentaries.”

We stare at each other across the table, and I wonder if he’s slotting all the ways we’re the same and different the way I am.

“When you graduated, you went after custody of Kinsley?”

“Yes,” I say, though the answer is a little more complicated than that.

“Your aunt didn’t want to raise another one of Mickie’s kids?”

The way he says it is a poke in my side, but I ignore it. “She would have,” I say, “but I didn’t want Kinsley growing up here.”

“And now?”

“I still don’t,” I say. “Kin seems to think the grass would be greener here, but I suspect the grass is exactly the same as it’s always been.” Burnt.

“You were going to turn down the job?”

I let out a little laugh, realizing how contradictory I’m going to sound. “No, I was going to take it. She hates me right now,” I say, and I fight back the tears that come into my voice, “and I’m not sure I’ve been a better parent than Mickie and Niall would have been.”

Nate’s expression softens, and he leans his elbows on the table, invading my personal space in a way that should bother me.

Intimacy, warm and familiar, seeps across the space between us.

Gone is the edgy, angry man, and in his place is the Nate I remember, and god, my fucking heart crumbles into dust, flies away on the thin breeze between us, and reassembles at his fingertips, whole and needy.

“I guarantee you’re better than Mickie and Niall. You were better at eighteen, and I know that any mistakes you’ve made would have been done with good intentions.”

“Good intentions don’t make people hurt less,” I say, and my heart pounds at the double meaning in my words. “Doesn’t make Kin hurt less. Good intentions haven’t tucked her into bed at night or gotten her to dance classes when I was too busy working.”

“New York is an expensive city,” Nate says, his words laced with kindness.

“Your childhood here was a hell of a lot worse than some missed dance classes and some late nights.” His thumb skims across the scars on my wrist, and I shiver at the contact.

“If those are her biggest complaints, I think you’re doing okay. ”

Every single fiber of my being is focused on the brush of his thumb against my skin, the rhythmic comfort that’s blossoming into something fuller, heavier.

When we were younger, it was like this—the briefest, gentlest touch could inspire a storm of lust that clouded and obscured everything else.

Franny called me “dickmatized” that summer—so enamored with Nate that I couldn’t see or hear anything that didn’t have something to do with him.

I would have gladly spent the rest of my life lost in that haze. It was the sole reason I couldn’t let myself see him the night I left. If he’d been within fifty feet of me, I never would have been able to get on that plane. Never.

Right now, the idea of ever leaving this bar is holding less and less appeal. The longer he touches me, the less anything else matters.

When I glance up, our gazes connect, and I see exactly what I’m feeling reflected in his expression. Desire. Confusion. Longing.

He lets go of my wrist like it’s burned him, and he leans back in his chair, runs his hands along his face in quick motions that look almost painful.

“I have to go.” He stands, a little unsteady on his feet, and makes his way with intention toward the exit.

I rise from my seat, grabbing my purse off the table.

“I hope he’s not driving,” I mutter as I make my way through the bar.

“He’s not.” An older man is hovering near the exit door, the waitress next to him with a pay machine. “I’m driving him. Not to worry.”

“Oh,” I say, stopping abruptly. “I guess it… I mean, it wouldn’t have been like him to drink and drive.”

“One of the more reasonable and responsible Tuckers,” he says, glancing over his shoulder before shifting his attention to me. “Usually.” He holds out his hand to me. “I’m Bill, one of the drivers the Tuckers employ.”

“Hollyn Davis,” I say, taking his hand.

“Oh,” he says, and the edges of his lips tilt into something that’s not quite a smile.

It’s pretty obvious he’s heard of me, and I’m not sure what to make of that, but it also means that Nate is outside, waiting in a car.

I stand for a beat, unsure of what I should do.

There’s still something there between us, and I want to seek it out like a source of heat in the dead of winter.

The intensity that unfurled between us when he touched me feels necessary and real, unavoidable.

As though the string connecting us is made of the strongest steel, not delicate and fragile like I assumed.

Despite the years, despite how badly I let him down, Nathaniel Tucker is under my skin, nestled in so deep that I didn’t even realize he was still there.

But tonight has made it even clearer that I can’t stay on this island for even one more day. Tomorrow, I set everything in motion to get us back to New York.