Page 22

22

KIT

I ’m dead asleep on Miller’s chest and his arms are wrapped around me tight when my phone starts beeping. Reluctantly, I climb off him to reach toward the nightstand for it.

Maren

I’m sorry about yesterday. You were totally right. I had no business being resentful. I’m on my way over—just dropping off the puppies at the groomer first. What do you want from Zuri?

Shit. I know my sister, and there will be no dissuading her. I could make something up. I could claim that I’m not here, but then she would just insist on meeting me wherever it is that she thinks I am, and it would turn into an escalating series of lies. Still, I’ve got to try.

Me

It’s all good. You don’t need to come over. I’m in bed.

Maren

I’m not going to feel as if you’ve forgiven me until I’ve fed you something with a lot of sugar. What do you want?

“Dammit.”

Miller raises his sleepy eyes to mine and raises a brow. “What’s the matter?”

I swallow. “Maren’s on her way over, and she’s not taking no for an answer. I’m gonna have to meet her out.”

Let’s meet at that breakfast place near you instead. Give me thirty.

His mouth presses to my neck. “How long do we have?”

“Ten minutes, tops.”

He rolls me beneath him. “I can work with that.”

I’m stretched and a bit bruised from last night, because if he wasn’t waking me up to go again, I was waking him—but that only makes me crave it one more time.

“You’re like a mosquito bite,” I say, clenching as he pushes inside me.

“Not what a man loves to hear when he’s just started fucking you,” he grunts.

My laugh is slightly breathless. “I just meant that I’ve scratched it once and I want to keep scratching.”

His generous mouth curves upward, just a hint of a smile. “Good. Because I want you to keep scratching for a long, long time.”

* * *

I’m five minutes late. Maren is sitting at the table with her chin in her palm, watching the people outside pass by with a wistfulness that makes my chest ache. I don’t think I even realized how deep her unhappiness was until Miller came into my life…because I was so unhappy too.

Maren jumps to her feet and throws her arms around me when I approach the table. “I’m sorry, pumpkin,” she whispers. “You were absolutely right yesterday.”

“I’m sorry too.” Even if she was in the wrong—and I’m not sure she was—I’m unable to hold a grudge against Maren for long. “I was mostly mad at Mom, not you, anyway.”

The women beside us huff in irritation—apparently we’re in their space. I ignore them, shrugging off my coat, while Maren returns to her seat with an apologetic smile.

“I should have given you more of an update,” she says. “It’s not like you to just…shut me out like that, and my feelings were hurt. I didn’t put it together until Charlie gave me one of his lectures.”

I grin. “Since when is Charlie the emotionally healthy member of this family?”

“Right?” she laughs, sliding a latte my way—oat milk and cinnamon. Maren, like my mom, has often asked insane things of me, but she also cares enough to remember exactly how I like my coffee, to worry that my nails aren’t done just before I’m wearing an engagement ring for the first time. Even my mother’s obsession with my weight is a bizarre form of care—she wants me to be her idea of my best self: extremely thin, extremely spray tanned, perfectly made up. She just wants me to get the attention and accolades she got at my age, and she’s never been able to understand the fact that I don’t especially want them.

I don’t need accolades. I just need Miller saying ‘ You looked beautiful there, and you look beautiful here .’

“Anyway, I wasn’t trying to shut you out. I was trying to shut everything out. I had a million messages from Mom, and Blake’s mom and sister, and Blake himself, who I blocked when he called me a whore and?—”

Maren’s brows shoot skyward. “He called you a whore ? How dare he? I’m going to hand him his ass the next time I see him.”

I laugh. Apparently, my sweet, gentle sister turns into me when the occasion requires.

“But anyway,” I continue, “everyone was acting like I’d just bombed an orphanage, and I couldn’t deal.”

She sighs. “I’m so sorry. I asked you a million times if you were sure about Blake and you said you were so I just…respected your decision.” She grins. “I promise never to respect your decisions again.”

“That’s probably wise.” Wiser than she knows, since I seem to be making some bad ones lately.

A toddler walks past us and Maren stares at her longingly for a moment before returning to me. “So where did you go?” she asks. “Obviously someplace with better weather than we’ve got here.”

Fuck. I’m not great at lying to people other than myself. I’m not going to mention Starfish Cay—with as much cyberstalking as she’s done of Miller in the past, she might know he has a house there. Hell, she might remember him talking about wanting a house there when they were dating.

“I, uh, was with Mallory. Down in Mexico.”

Maren laughs. “That’s incredibly vague. It’s a big country.”

I blow out another lying breath. “Los Ventanas.”

“Oh, wow, you know who was staying there last week? The Donovans. Their baby is only nine weeks old, too. I’m not sure what you do with a nine-week-old on the beach. Did you see them?”

Fuck. Fuck. This is why I don’t lie. Especially to Maren. Because I could have told her I was trafficking minors in Antarctica and she’d have known someone else who was trafficking minors there and would then be astonished we hadn’t run into each other.

The waitress delivers Maren’s green juice. I order a muffin, and then my sister is looking at me, waiting for more lies about Mexico.

“I don’t know the Donovans.”

“Yes, you do. Eliza? She’s the one who was sleeping with that hot coach in high school. But anyway, what’s going on? Why do you seem sad?”

Jesus. For someone who so frequently seems clueless, Maren has certainly turned into fucking Scooby Doo.

I consider just blurting out the truth: I think I may be falling in love with your ex-boyfriend. I think it’s possible I’ve been in love with him since he was with you, and that I was so awful to him because I didn’t want you to have him . But what good would that accomplish? She’d feel betrayed, and it’s not as if anything could move forward with Miller anyway. Is he somehow going to slide back into our family dinners with Maren across from him, openly pining? And who knows if he even wants that? Sure, it’s all very intense right now, but maybe he’s a Charlie…only in love until he’s had a sufficient number of orgasms, then ready to move onto a newer model.

The only solution is to reveal a tiny bit of the truth—though not the important part of it.

“I don’t think I want to take over the company,” I tell her. “I thought about it a lot when I was on my climb, and someone pointed out that I talked about health stuff constantly but never mentioned my job once.”

Her eyes widen. Fischer-Harris has been our family’s business since the 1920s. My dad would have been happy to bring Maren into the company, but she never had a moment’s interest. If I’m leaving too, it means it won’t stay in the family when my dad retires.

Maren waits until my muffin has been placed in front of me to continue. “Have you told Dad?”

I shake my head as I dump sugar packets into my latte. “I’m meeting him for lunch Monday. Maybe then.”

“I’ve never seen you put that much sugar in anything,” she says. “Anyway, I can tell how worried you are, but honestly? He’s going to be okay with it—he just wants you to be happy. Will you go back to medical school, then?”

I shrug. “I hope so. I don’t even know if they’ll let me in.”

She rolls her eyes, smiling. “You are Henry Fischer’s daughter. I’m pretty sure you could have burned the school to the ground and they would still let you in. But before you work on that, you need to deal with Mom.”

I sigh heavily. “Is that why you got me here? So you could convince me to go make up?”

She squeezes my hand. “We’re your family, whether you like us or not. And even if we make mistakes, you know me and Mom would never do anything to hurt you, which means you’ve got to forgive us when we do.”

The guilt hits hard. I think a part of me enjoyed resenting them because it made what I was doing with Miller seem almost justified.

But it wasn’t. And with Maren sitting across from me now, so worried and kind and unhappy, my disloyalty seems even worse than it already did.

* * *

I dutifully put on an outfit slinky enough that my mother won’t criticize it and head to her home that afternoon, though I know how it will go: she’ll be snippy; I’ll be snippy back. I’ll make several good points and she’ll make several nonsensical ones, and in the end—questioning how I could share half my DNA with someone so illogical—I’ll apologize just to make it stop.

A maid smiles as she lets me in. It’s undoubtedly the last pleasant moment of this visit.

“I couldn’t believe how you behaved at the hospital yesterday,” my mother begins when I walk into the kitchen.

I go to the Keurig and open the cabinet for the coffee pods only I use. “You let me fly all the way home, panicking, knowing you were fine. It was shitty and selfish.”

“Your coffee pods were moved to the drawer on your left,” she says. “And I didn’t know I was fine, or I wouldn’t have stayed at the hospital. You act as if I just love drama.”

I arch a brow at her.

“I don’t ,” she insists.

“You should have told the hospital about the diet pills, Mom.”

She shakes her head. “I couldn’t. I’m pretty sure they’re not legal.”

I groan. “You weren’t being interviewed by the FBI, Mom. No one was going to raid the house for your ephedra or whatever it is that you don’t actually need.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” she replies. “You’re still thin.”

Like I said…nonsensical. There is no point in arguing.

“Did you solve the IRS thing?”

My mother’s shoulders sag. “No thanks to you. Roger is so mad at me.”

It’s Miller’s voice I hear in my head. “Your mother is a fifty-five-year-old woman who’s been working since she was sixteen. She didn’t need you to fix anything.”

I press my hands to the marble island between us. “Mom, don’t you think we’re both a little too old for me to be fighting your battles? That was crazy. I mean, I was hours and hours away, enjoying a much-needed vacation?—”

“You’d just returned from a vacation!” she cries.

I frown at her as I go to the fridge for oat milk. “You go sleep in twenty-degree weather on the ground for a week with no showers and tell me how much of a vacation it feels like to you.”

“I’ve done plenty of things like that and loved it. I went to that place in Italy where they made us hike every morning and?—”

I shut the refrigerator door with a laugh. “Are you really going to tell me that your room with a private plunge pool and daily massage was the same as sleeping outdoors for a week with no shower?”

“We weren’t allowed to drink the entire time. No coffee either.” She nods at the oat milk in my hand as if it’s proof of her personal fortitude. “It was incredibly hard. If you were going to go anywhere, that’s where you should have gone. I lost ten pounds.”

I fight a grin and take a sip of my coffee. “Everyone else told me I came back from Kili too thin, while you’re trying to say I should run off to fat camp.”

“It wasn’t fat camp ,” she says. “It was a resort devoted to the fitness journey. And I’m not saying you need to lose ten pounds, but my God, think how thin you’d be if you did. I still don’t understand why you’re not modeling. You’d be just as successful as Maren, but the clock is ticking.”

I shake my head, carrying my coffee over to the table. I’ve never wanted my entire life and income focused on something I won’t be able to hold onto…because that turns you into my mother: diet pills from China and plastic surgery she will lie about when people ask. “I don’t want to model.”

“You don’t want your father’s job either,” she says, which is perhaps the most insightful thing that’s come out of her mouth in a long time, “but you’re still pursuing that. Not that I’m complaining. You’ll be the one who can afford to buy me a private plane when I’m retirement age.”

Possibly not, Mom.

“That doctor sure was cute yesterday, wasn’t he?” she asks changing the topic.

I sigh. I like Roger—he’s kind to my mother and puts up with her bullshit—but what my mother likes is excitement. She wants a man who will worship her, then treat her like shit, then apologize with jewelry. She confuses emotional upheaval with passion, and she’s had just a little too much stability with husband number five.

“I thought he was a condescending dick, actually.”

“Only because you baited him,” she argues. “He was lovely. He stopped by to see me this morning before I left.”

I don’t know if I want to cry or laugh. But as I leave her house, I know the person I most want to discuss it with is Miller.

I shouldn’t reach out to him. If this morning proved anything, it’s the impossibility of this continuing. But my fingers twitch impatiently until I’ve written him.

Hey, are you around?

Miller

I can be. Want to come over? I’ll cook.

It’s not avocado toast, right?

Keep it up. I’ll definitely have something to put in that smart mouth.

Is it soft and green?

I haven’t looked in a few hours, but I certainly hope not.

I run a few errands and I arrive an hour later at the address he sent with a bottle of wine, which feels oddly formal and also insufficient. The man gave up his trip to Kilimanjaro for me, then gave up his safari, then took me to his cottage in paradise and shepherded me home.

That probably deserves more than a nice Malbec.

The doorman leads me to the elevator and pushes a button for the twelfth floor. When I step out, Miller is opening his door—barefoot, shirtless and sweaty—and walking into the hallway, as if he was so excited to see me he couldn’t wait until I reached him.

His abs gleam, tan from Starfish Cay. I picture him beneath me the way he often was there, looking up at me from under heavy-lidded eyes.

“I sort of thought you’d wait to look all sweaty until after I’d had my way with you.”

His dimple flashes. “I just got back from the gym. And I intend to look exactly like this again in an hour or two but let me shower first.”

He leans down as I reach him and gives me a chaste kiss. Only Miller could manage to sweat like that and still smell good.

“Don’t shower for my sake,” I reply, my voice a little raspy.

He glances at the outfit I wore to my mom’s. “I don’t feel worthy of defiling you in my current state.”

He pulls me into his apartment, which reminds me a lot of his place in Starfish Cay—the same cathedral ceiling, the same modern wood. I would like to stay here and never leave. “Make yourself at home,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

I walk toward his bookcase and thumb through a massive book about management. “I’m going to go through all your things,” I warn.

He laughs. “I assumed nothing less.”

When he’s gone, I go to the window, which looks out over Central Park.

That’s the first place I took Rob after he came here to visit me. He was supposed to be in California, with his parents, and got a flight here instead. I’m not sure why, but those memories of him seem more distant now. I don’t want them to feel distant because it’s as if I’m giving him up, giving him back to the world, but, perhaps, they should .

Maybe I’ve been clinging to those memories because it’s the last time I was truly happy and I didn’t want to forget what it felt like—and that it was possible.

I go into Miller’s bedroom, which is as spotless as the rest of his place. There’s a wide dresser that isn’t piled with clothes the way mine is. A closet holds only a few of everything—a couple suits, some shirts, some jeans. I’d like to think that I’d be similarly spartan were I a man, but I seriously doubt it. I take a seat on his bed and glance at the nightstand. And stare. There, next to a glass table lamp, sits a woman’s ponytail holder. Tossed there casually by someone who forgot her hair was still up until she climbed into bed. My stomach sinks. I have no right to be bothered—I was, after all, about to get engaged. But that ponytail holder is a small wound, one that reopens a little when he walks out in nothing but a towel and gives me that dimpled smile.

I don’t want anyone to see him like this but me, and very recently someone did. And probably will again.