Page 2 of Fierce Love (Tucker Billionaires)

Chapter Two

Nathaniel

M y knuckles are white as I grip the steering wheel of my McLaren GT. After Verna didn’t show up for her shift in the kitchen at my brother, Gage’s, catered family dinner, I agreed to check on her.

Stupid, really.

I’ve avoided the woman, the whole family, since Hollyn ghosted me almost fourteen years ago. Once the dirt on the grave has settled, hardened, you don’t fucking dig it up.

The police car pulls out of the parking lot, Stephen waving to me from the driver’s side, and I manage to get one hand off the steering wheel long enough to wave back.

Thankfully, he told me the police are responsible for notifying the next of kin, so my duty here is done.

When I’d arrived, I got the building manager, got into Verna’s apartment, and when I found her collapsed and cold, I called 911. Then I waited until everyone was here to get her out, to clean up the scene. Duty done.

But fuck if my heart doesn’t hurt at the realization of what Verna’s death will do to Hollyn, wherever she is, whatever she’s been doing since I saw her last. Maybe she’s got kids and a husband, a family to soothe the ache that Verna’s absence will leave behind.

If I was feeling generous, I’d want that for her.

But I can’t remember the last time I felt generous where Hollyn was concerned.

I rub my chest and stare into the distance.

There was a time when I could have called Nick or Brice Summerset, the younger princes in the royal family, who had always been up for a good time in years past. We’d have taken a trip to Vegas, sunk any hint of these unstable emotions threatening to float to the surface with the anchors of gambling and alcohol.

But they don’t do those things anymore, and I haven’t needed that type of amusement in a long while.

Thankfully, I’m done caring about Hollyn and her family problems, so I don’t need that type of distraction either. If Verna’s death causes Hollyn to crumble, those aren’t my pieces to reassemble.

After starting the vehicle, I steer it toward the one place where I know I’m always welcome, no matter the time, the one person who’ll understand why I’m so thrown by tonight’s events. Finding a dead body is one thing—having that body be Verna Davis is a total mind-fuck.

Cal steps out of his cottage and onto the porch, which rests on the edge of the campground. While his father still technically owns it, Cal is the one who takes care of the day-to-day. Tourists always assume he’s just a worker, and he lets them.

“You hear?” he asks. “That why you’ve come?”

“Hear what?” I ask.

“Verna Davis. Passed away tonight.”

“Jesus, the gossip travels fast,” I say, taking the glass of gold rush he offers me before sitting in one of the rocking chairs on his porch. “I didn’t need to hear. I was there. I found her.”

“Fuck off,” Cal says, slumping into the chair beside me. “Are you kidding?”

“I wish.” I take a deep drink and stare out at the smattering of trailers that are here year-round. Spring isn’t exactly high season. With my free hand, I’m flipping my phone from front to back, over and over.

Cal stares at the motion for a beat and then takes a long drink. “Tell me you don’t still have it.”

“Of course I still have it,” I say. “I paid the phone company to let me keep it forever. It doesn’t expire.”

“Tell me you’re not still listening to it.”

“Not in years.”

“But you’re thinking about it now, right? I’m your Hollyn Davis sponsor. The one responsible for keeping you from torturing yourself over things you couldn’t change then and can’t change now. Just delete it, man. I get that it helped at first—fueled your anger—but that’s not what it became, is it?”

No, it’s not. Her final voicemail pissed me off for a long time. Made me furious. After everything we’d shared, promised each other, for her to leave me that message and vanish was unacceptable. Still is. But later, listening to it just made me depressed and so fucking sad. Unbearably sad.

I really thought we were something. Everything, actually.

We drink in silence for a while because I’m not willing to admit anything more out loud. Seeing Verna threw me, but I’ll recover, and then life will go back to normal.

“Hollyn didn’t want the relationship the way you wanted it.

And I know that’s really fucking hard to hear, man, but I don’t want you getting sucked back into this vortex, you know?

Where you think if you’d only been a bit better, a bit more, she’d have stuck around.

We’ve talked it out. You know what it was. ”

She was never all-in like me, and where I thought it was just the social-class stuff, it clearly wasn’t.

I wanted forever, and she was content with a fling.

In hindsight, it felt like maybe I should have seen the end coming.

Hollyn wanted to keep us a secret, never wanted a soul to know.

Never even said she loved me out loud in the few months we dated. But I felt it. I know I felt it.

“I got knocked back a step tonight,” I say. “Seeing a dead body—the body of someone you once knew quite well—tends to do that. Doesn’t have anything to do with Hollyn.” Lies. Big fat fucking lies.

“Right,” Cal says, dryly. “Absolutely nothing.”

After I leave Cal’s, I drive around the island aimlessly. It’s not until I’m an hour into my mindless turning that I realize I’m retracing my steps from the night she left, driving past all of Hollyn’s old haunts.

Disgust at myself claws at my throat. Pathetic .

Wherever my man card went, I need to locate it and brandish it with pride. Drink a beer. Find a woman to fuck. Gamble part of my inheritance. Go shoot something in the woods. None of that’s me—not sure it ever was—but I tried on most of it in college. An ill-fitted mask.

I don’t fucking care if she’s out in the world, hurting at the news of her aunt. My fucks to give expired when Hollyn went out of her way to get rid of me from her life. A conversation was all she would have needed.

Another lie.

Back then, I was obsessed with her. Out of my mind in love.

If she’d said no to my proposal, I don’t even know what I would have done.

Probably worked triple time to convince her we could make a lifetime work.

But my love for her couldn’t make up for the shortfall of emotion she must have felt in return, and I couldn’t wrap my head around that at seventeen.

I thought I could love hard enough out loud for both of us.

As it was, I spent a small fortune on a private detective who couldn’t find her.

At the time, he told me he had a few less-than-legal methods he could go down if I wanted to pay him twice his rate, but I was angry by then and told him not to bother.

She didn’t want to be found, so fuck it. I’d stop looking.

My phone pings with a flurry of text messages from my sibling group chat, and I realize they’ve all found out. Other than a tentative text from Sawyer encouraging me to let them know if I found Verna, none of them had messaged me again until now.

In the parking lot of the bar Hollyn used to work at, I open my phone.

Maren: Nathaniel, I just heard. Tell me you didn’t find her.

Ava: He found her. Heard from Stephen.

Sawyer: A little compassion, Ava.

Ava: Sorry for Hollyn’s loss.

Sawyer: I meant about Nathaniel finding her.

Ava: Oh, right. Sorry you found her, Nathaniel. Would not want to be you tonight.

At least that makes me chuckle. Ava, my youngest sister, is so completely oblivious to how anyone but her feels, and it’s oddly charming sometimes. My brother, Gage, used to be like that, too.

Gage: We’re on the jet. But I’ll head back to the island once I have Em and Nova settled in LA. I can fly Michelle out to pick up the slack. You need me, bro? I’m there.

And that’s who he’s become. The guy who shows up.

My throat tightens at his text. We’ve never been close, at least, not until recently, and I would have said it didn’t matter because I had Maren and Sawyer.

I’ve never wanted or needed to lean on him the way he’s leaned on me the last few months, but the realization that I can lean on him is a strange comfort.

My little brother is finally growing up.

But I don’t need them all coddling me. I really don’t need some sort of sibling intervention.

Me: I’m fine. Stand down. It was a shock. But I’m handling it fine.

I almost write that I knew Verna in another life, but I know at least Maren and Sawyer won’t buy that I feel that much indifference toward finding her dead. If I oversell, I’m fucked.

Maren: I’ll be stopping by in a few days to make sure that’s true. I’ll let you know if you need to come home, Gage.

Me: You won’t need to come home.

But that night, when I crawl into bed, emotionally and mentally exhausted, I sleep the sleep of the dead, except I dream. Vivid lies. Surreal memories. Hollyn and me. Happy. Together. In love during an endless spring and summer that ended far too soon.

When I wake up the next morning, instead of being angry or upset, I just long to go back to sleep, to live it all over again, one more time.

Two days later, I arrive back from watching a cut of the documentary project I’ve been producing, on Prince Nicholas and his wife, Julia’s, Tanzanian school initiative, to find Maren and Sawyer have made themselves at home in my kitchen.

A pot of coffee has been brewed, and they’ve raided my freezer for the chocolate chip cookies Michelle, the family housekeeper, makes—my favorite.