All or Nothing (bad boy romantic suspense) (2 page)

She had to come back down to that front room again, and only
then
was it as simple and spontaneous a thing as picking the receiver off its rest and dialing that number Denny McGowan left.

§

He picked up on the third ring, just when she thought it was going to switch to voicemail and exactly how humiliating would that be?

“Yes?”

His voice was hesitant, wary. She remembered how he’d always been on a tripwire like that: how when the door had gone at Pappy’s Bar he’d suddenly been wary, like a startled animal. With good reason, as she’d later learned.

“So I called.”

A pause, then: “I...” Then silence again.

Not such a good start. “You...?”

“I had it all planned out,” he said, actually finding words this time. “Exactly what I was going to say. How I was going to explain myself. How I was going to win you over and convince you to give me a chance.”

“And you thought rehearsed lines was the way to go? Or was that it? Were those the lines you’d prepared?” Why was she being so confrontational? Had she called him just so she could let off some steam?

“You know how when something matters to you so much your brain won’t let it go and you go over and over it all in your head? Desperate to get it right, but terrified you’ll get it wrong. I didn’t want to spin you a line – I wanted to get it right.
That
kind of rehearsed.”

So they’d hit a tipping point this early in the call. The hostility just seeped away from her as he spoke those words. Cassie wanted him to get it right, too. She so wanted him to get it right.

“So where are you? Where have you been?”

“I’ve been lying low,” he said. “I know Brady wants to kick my ass and I haven’t dealt with that yet. I’ve still got to figure that one out. I’ve been trying to make amends, though. Trying to tidy up.”

He made it sound so easy. He’d racked up debts of ten million dollars, and not just any old dollars but bad money... gangster money. “And did you manage? To ‘tidy’ things up?”

A pause, and she could visualize him shrugging. “I spoke to a few people, for sure,” he said. “Odd thing is, most of those debts had gone. Someone had bought them up. I looked into what had been happening, spoke to a few people, and it turned out Billy Ray Dane had been rounding up our debts.”

Billy Ray... That ghost from Cassie’s past.

“So why would your father be buying up my debts?” Denny went on.

“He wanted a hold over Brady,” she said. Denny’s old business partner, Brady Lowe. “Wanted to use him to get to me.”

Denny let out a low whistle. “You should be flattered,” he said. “That’s some investment in fatherly love.”

“Billy had ground to make up,” she said. “A whole lot of ground, and then some.”

“And did it work?”

“No.” Her answer was quick, and she didn’t want to expand on it. Didn’t want to admit that Billy Ray had wormed his way into her consciousness again, three years after she’d turned her back on him. He was nothing to her, and he’d been less than nothing to her and her mother when Cassie had been growing up. He’d shut them out of his ritzy Wall Street and Hamptons lifestyle, even as Cassie’s mother was dying, even when Cassie was left on her own and homeless at the age of fifteen. He couldn’t just buy his way back into her life now he was out of prison and was trying to convince everyone he was a reformed man. Things didn’t work like that.

“So I’m trying to work out what it means that Billy Ray’s been buying up all those debts and I figured I needed to ask him, so I went to see him and–”

“You did
what
?”

“He has a place just off Bleecker Street. Just a small apartment, quite modest. I was surprised. All those stories about his lifestyle before he ended up in jail – none of that now. So anyway–”

“Anyway...?”

“I called him and he invited me over, and I thought, it’s going to be a trap. It’s
got
to be a trap. But I went anyway. I want to sort all this out, Cassie, you know? But he sat me down and he poured me a Glenfiddich, and he just said that he’d come to an arrangement with Brady. That Brady was helping him with a family matter and that was the end of it as far as I should be concerned.”

“And so what happened then?”

“It was all grand,” said Denny. “It was all cool, until I said, ‘You mean
Cassie
?’ He started to grill me then. Asked me if I knew you, and then
how
I knew you, and pretty soon he’d put two and two together and he wasn’t pleased. He doesn’t think I’m good enough for you. Told me he doesn’t want a low-life scumbag like me sniffing around after you and if I ever did, then he’d... well, he made it pretty clear he wouldn’t be best pleased.”

Her head was a raging mass of emotions, most of them contradictory. How
dare
Billy interfere with her life like that? Since when did he have any say in, or even influence over, who she saw and what she did with her life? If he wanted to play the protective father, how about he’d tried playing that role ten years ago when Cassie’s mother had been bed-ridden with her MS and Cassie had been skipping school and working God knows how many jobs just to keep things together?

“You don’t want to mess with Billy,” she said. “He’s never been one of the good guys.”

All those thoughts in her head, and being protective of Denny was the one that had risen to the top first. She hadn’t expected that.

“I know,” he said. “I knew his reputation when I took his money, but I’m not the guilty party Brady makes me out to be. Yes, it was me who brought in Billy and others like him. Our business was sinking, and Brady had been hiding it from me. When I realized how bad things had gotten I stepped in. I should never have brought Billy in, but I was only trying to save something Brady and I had set up when we were still in college.”

So that was somewhere halfway between what Denny had first told her, and the way Brady had subsequently spun things. Maybe she’d never know just who was to blame for their company sinking and bad money being sucked in, but that halfway story was as good as any version she’d heard yet.

“You know Brady’s jealous of you, don’t you?”

“Jealous? Of
me
? Brady was the one who made things happen. I’d have got nowhere without him. He was a brother to me.”

“That night at Saco Cabins, when Brady and his thugs caught up with us and you slunk off with your tail between your legs...” She had to dig. Why did she always have to keep poking at him like that?

“Oh,
that
night. Yes?”

“He said something. Said you always got the girl, but pretty soon they would see through you. There was a lot of anger in that. He was fit to explode. I’d say years of resentment. You were the one with the charm and the ideas, the one who got the girls and created multi-million pound software products that had Facebook and Google banging on your door. Is that right?”

“For sure. But–”

“And Brady was always there in the shadows, picking up the pieces.”

“He was the fixer. We used to joke about that all the time. He even called my office the Playroom. I could just play around with ideas all day long and he would turn it into product. He was the real brains behind it all. Sure, I made the sparks, but he was the one who discovered fire and learned how to exploit it.”

“And did you ever tell him that?”

The silence said it all.

“Like I say: jealous.”

“He’s really that pissed at me? I mean, I know he’s pissed about the money, but... it goes back further than that? I mean... how did I not see that?”

“Maybe you never moved beyond seeing the two of you as you’d been, and so you couldn’t see how you’d become?”

More silence.

“Maybe,” he said, eventually.

“Maybe you should talk to him, Denny.”

“Maybe you should talk to Billy.” And he didn’t have to add that perhaps she’d never moved beyond seeing Billy as he’d been, and so was unable to see what he’d become. Didn’t have to say that at all.

“You want to meet up sometime?”

“Sure,” he said quickly. “I’d like that more than anything.”

“Then maybe we should.”

T
urned out Denny had been holing up in a motel just outside Portsmouth, on the New Hampshire coast. Just an hour out of Boston, where Brady and Billy Ray were based, and maybe an hour and a half from the White Mountains. Out of the way enough to make it hard to track him down, but not far off an equal distance between the two places he had unresolved business. It was almost as if he’d been just sitting there, waiting for her to call him.

She sat in the window seat of a coffee place at Attitash Mountain Resort, just a few miles down the road from Saco Cabins. The place was just starting to come to life for the coming winter. At the moment it was still hikers going up on the ski lifts, but there was snow already higher up the mountain, and everyone was saying it wouldn’t be long before the slopes started to open.

She’d got here early, and taken up residence in this seat with the view out over the parking lot and the highway. She’d see Denny coming long before he saw her. She didn’t know whether that was simply to give her the upper hand with him or because trouble always seemed to follow closely on his tail and at least here she’d have a good chance of seeing it coming. Maybe some of both.

She cradled a large latte in both hands, occasionally dipping her head to let the steam warm her face.

She would be calm. She would resist that destructive urge to start picking away at him as soon as they started to speak.

She was here to give him a chance.

He pulled up in the Lexus convertible, right next to the station wagon Cassie had borrowed from Sally to get here. Was he aware he was parking next to her? She knew far better than to see it as an omen: that the two of them would always be irresistibly drawn together. The guy had just picked a space close to the coffee place so he wouldn’t have to walk far.

Stupid thoughts. Why was she thinking like this, picking everything apart? How was it that he could unsettle her so much, without even trying?

He was wearing skinny jeans, a brown leather jacket artfully distressed around the collar and cuffs, and wraparound shades to cut out the winter glare and look cool in equal measure.

When he reached the entrance to the coffee-shop he paused and surveyed the tables until he spotted Cassie. He even had the decency to look a little nervous as he approached.

She looked up at him, coolly, and indicated the seat across from her with a nod of the head. No kiss or hug; only a brief half-smile in greeting. As he sat, she moistened her lips, and then said, “So tell me, Denny. That night... were you going to kidnap me, or were you just going to rely on your smooth-talking charm to deliver me up against my will to my father?”

He did that thing. The thing where his jaw sagged and his mouth fell open and Cassie could almost hear the workings of his brain as he realized that whatever he said now he was only ever going to dig himself in deeper. How was it so easy to talk circles round him before he’d even said a thing, and why – God,
why?
– did she always have to start out so aggressively?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Really. I’m nervous, and I don’t quite understand why I’m meeting you here and giving you another chance, and so I’m doing that whole starting out defensive thing before you’ve even had a chance to say a damned word, and I’m... Well, I’m still doing it. Or a variation of it. I–”

He was smiling. Laughing even.

“I’d forgotten just how beautiful you were,” he said. “Which isn’t to say I’d forgotten what you look like, before you say anything. But memories... you don’t always believe memories when you’re clinging to them and reliving them over and over, do you? You think memory is exaggerating, dressing things up. And–”

“And
you’re
doing it now,” she said. “That talking thing, where you just babble on like I was. Why are we like this?”

“Because it matters.”

She took a sip of her coffee. “Shall we just be quiet for a minute?” she said. “Imagine we’re still doing the nervous small talk thing, but in reality just skip it. That kind of thing?”

He nodded, said nothing, and when the waitress came over he pointed at what he wanted and smiled.

Outside, a big SUV had pulled up and now a family piled out, all clad in Day-Glo puffer jackets and beanies and big hiking boots. The sky was a soft, powdery blue with a dusting of white clouds, and the waitress came back with Denny’s coffee and Cassie realized she was still doing it, the nervous jabber, even if it was confined to her head for now.

“So,” said Denny, eventually. “I’m glad you called.”

“Do you know how you make me feel?” She seemed physically incapable of just giving a guy a break today.

He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. This was sensitive Denny, the one who
got
her. Not the smartass swindler and conman he could sometimes be.

“That night when you just showed up at Pappy’s Lobster Bar out of nowhere. You looked like you’d stepped out of a movie screen and then it turned out you didn’t just have the looks but you had the charm and the brains, too. And what I thought was, He’s just too good to be true. Why would a man like that even look at me once, let alone twice?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, taking advantage as she paused for breath. “I walked in that night out of the storm and as soon as I saw you, my breath was taken away. You’re beautiful, for sure, but pretty quickly I discovered also that you’re smart and funny, and you have more balls than anyone I’ve ever met, and I mean that in the best possible way. You want to know why a man like me would look twice? A man like me is nothing in comparison, not even worthy to stand in your shadow. A man like me had fallen head over heels in love in that very first instant.”

In love
... her brain skipped that bit for now. Filed it away for future reference. She couldn’t deal with that right now.

Instead: “But it
was
too good to be true, wasn’t it? You didn’t just turn up from nowhere by chance, did you? You knew I was there. You’d come looking for me so you could turn me in to Billy Ray to try to make up for your bad debts. So what was it to be? Kidnap me, or just lie to me until you could trick me into meeting up with him somehow?”