Lie to Me Read online

  I swallow as I watch him walk out of the bar. Right. A morning workout. Just like old times.

  Never mind that I am not nearly in the kind of shape that I was in five years ago. Suddenly that matters. Like it’s all I have left to fight with—showing Marcus that I still have the heart to kick his ass in a workout. Of course, that’s ridiculous. It’s just because I need something, anything to defend myself with against the onslaught of emotion, lust, and pain that is Marcus Roma.

  I stagger into Shantha’s office, where she’s not even pretending to go over invoices so much as watching through her cracked office door. We both hear the front door open and close, and as soon as it does, Shantha shouts:

  “That’s the Marcus? Holy shit! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I wince. “Yeah. I know. I really don’t even want to talk about it.”

  Shantha drops her reading glasses down the bridge of her nose and looks up at me like I know I’m being unreasonable.

  “Not an option,” she says.

  “Fine,” I sigh. “I will tell you all about this train wreck right after I tell you how we’re going to save this bar and my house from those freaking developers.”

  chapter 8

  MARCUS

  I know what the call is about as soon as I see who’s calling me. The last thing I want to do is leave Lo, but I can see she’s got whiplash or fatigue or something just from being around me for a little while, and I don’t want to push her too hard too fast.

  So a phone call from Alex Wolfe it is.

  I leave the bar, trying to keep myself under control, but I’m pissed off as soon as I pick up. And he knows why.

  “What the fuck, Alex?” I bark into the phone, storming down Bedford Avenue. I don’t even know where I’m going, I just need to walk.

  “Brison said you were in a bad mood.”

  “This isn’t a bad mood. This is me reacting to a threat.”

  “No one’s made any threats, Marcus.”

  He is one condescending son of a bitch. But I know it won’t do any good to argue, to try to make him admit what he’s doing. The only thing that gets through to Alex Wolfe is consequences.

  “Wrong, Alex,” I say, stopping where I stand like a rock in the stream of pedestrians. I want to make sure he hears this clearly. “I’m making a threat. You do not mess with her, do you understand? No one messes with her. No one.”

  “Don’t raise your voice to me,” he says. I can hear him frown over the phone, and it almost makes me laugh.

  “I’m not fucking joking, Alex.”

  “I can hear that,” he says. “But I’m not seeing any progress, Marcus. We need her house. And approval from the zoning board will depend to some extent on whether the community objects. You know that.”

  And bribes. It will also depend on how many bribes he can spread around. Short of a public relations nightmare, he’s not going to have a problem and we both know it.

  “This is non-negotiable,” I say. “This is a hard line. I don’t want anyone messing with, approaching, or hassling Harlow Chase, and that includes Brison. And no goddamned dirty tricks, or I swear to God…”

  “All right, all right.” He sighs over the phone. “You’ve made your point, you don’t have to get so upset. You know if you have concerns about things like this you only have to call. And I’d prefer that you and Brison try to get along for the sake of the business, at least.”

  I close my eyes and breathe. I should feel bad for Brison Wolfe. It would be hard to grow up an only son with only a sister who is totally uninterested in the business and then find out you suddenly had competition for the top spot. But Brison is just like his father, and I don’t give a damn if I make him cry crocodile tears.

  No. What really bothers me is how important it is to me that Alex Wolfe has put me next in line. That it still means so damn much to me that someone like him would believe in me. I’m still haunted by the fact that my dad didn’t.

  “You know, Marcus,” Alex says. “You will have to make tough decisions if you are to head up the business. Keep that in mind.”

  Asshole.

  I know he’s an asshole. And he’s the only real father I’ve ever had.

  I hang up and start the walk back to my shiny hotel, brand new, right on the waterfront. I tell myself what I always tell myself: when Alex gives me a bigger slice of the pie, I can start to change how we do business. I’ll have more control. I’ll be able to protect people like Harlow.

  The thing is, I need to protect Harlow now.

  Man, I did not plan ahead. This one time, I did not plan ahead. I got one look at Harlow’s face by the bridge and it became clear to me that all my previous plans were ashes. I don’t even have a plan to win her back, to make it all right, without telling her the truth about why I left the way I did.

  If I told her, she’d go ballistic. And Alex Wolfe would destroy her and Dill.

  So that’s right out. But how the hell do you show someone you always loved them, you always had them on your mind, if you can’t tell them the reasons why you left?

  It’s while I’m staring at the clock by the side of my hotel bed, counting down the minutes until I can see Harlow again, that it comes to me.

  ***

  I get a few hours sleep. Enough. I’m so bright-eyed and freaking bushytailed at the idea of working out with Lo again that I might as well have gotten the full eight. I end up jogging over to her house from the hotel in the murky gray light, smiling the whole way.

  Walking up those stairs to ring her bell is a trip. She was always waiting for me back in high school, didn’t want to wake anyone up. And then when she was living with the Mankowskis, well, that was more of a sneaking sort of situation for a while.

  I don’t know why this feels momentous, but it does. I ring and go back to wait for her on the sidewalk, bouncing up and down on my calves, happy as hell.

  I have to remember she’ll probably be pissed to see me. But I don’t care. I'll take whatever time with her I can get.

  She opens the door, wearing those tiny running shorts I remember, her hair tied back and her expression grim, like she’s going to fight me the whole way. And then something amazing happens.

  After her parents died, it was bad. It was bad for a long time. I did anything I could just to try to keep her going, and one of the first things I did was get her back out to train with me in the mornings. She wasn’t sleeping much anyway, so it was at least something better to do. And just to mix it up, we started going to McCarren Park to run sprints on that track they have.

  So this one morning, gray just like this one, we go over there, and the high school track team was setting up a bunch of hurdles. Or they were going to, because the hurdles were all just bunched together kind of close together right in the middle of the green. Lo sees them there and she just takes off in a sprint headed for that first hurdle.

  You gotta understand, she had been so quiet those first few months. She didn’t talk much to anyone but me. I could barely get her to eat, to work out with me, to go to school. She did all that stuff only when I asked her to. She was like a shadow of a person. And then all of a sudden she’s in a dead sprint for a hurdle?

  It took me by surprise, I will admit.

  I wasn’t the only one watching her, either. Bunch of sleepy track and field kids were just as confused.

  So Lo tries to jump that first hurdle at an angle, kind of lengthwise, so she misses the rest of them, since they were all kind of bunched together. Don’t ask me why. I doubt she even knew why. But she tried to clear that hurdle at a weird angle, and she clipped it.

  And every single one of those hurdles fell, one by one. You know the kind that collapse when they fall? Some kind of safety thing? All of ‘em, down, like collapsing dominos. Right in front of the entire confused track and field team.

  And Lo takes the fall, rolling in that green grass, and just starts laughing at herself. I don’t mean normal laughing. I mean, it was funny, but not, like, the funniest thing
you’ve ever seen. But Lo had tears coming down her cheeks she was laughing so hard, and as soon as I figured it out, I was, too. Because she ran at the hurdle like she’d just decided to start feeling things again, and then she’d messed it up anyway and embarrassed herself, and the absurdity of it, like she finally got the courage to take a step, and tripped over her own feet anyway…

  I don’t know how to explain it. But that was the day that Harlow laughed again, and she did it laughing at herself. Believe me when I tell you that I’ve never been more relieved in my life.

  So today, right now, as Lo starts to walk down those steps looking all proud and defiant, like spending time with me is going to be something difficult and terrible, something she has to conquer, she trips coming down the stairs and falls right into me.

  She crashed into me.

  Her body pressed against mine, her hands on my chest, her breath on my neck—damn. Instantly I feel myself start to get hard, and I have to put that on lockdown. Not easy when I can feel how breathless she is, too.

  No matter how angry she is at me, no matter how much I deserve it, it won’t change how we feel together.

  Her hands linger on my chest just a second too long and her hips melt into me just enough to make me want to groan, and then she pushes off of me, and I can see her laughing at herself. Laughing at me, too, laughing at how dumb and awkward we are.

  She looks at me, her eyes these dancing blue points in the morning gray, crinkling at the corners while she smiles.

  “So,” she says, exaggerating the word, “I won’t do that again.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Suit yourself.”

  But I am just so damn happy to see her laughing again. Smiling.

  There’s another one of those moments we have. When it’s just electric between us, when I know she’s looking at me just like I’m looking at her. Wanting it to be so much more. Except this time, when she looks back into my eyes, I see more than lust. I see hate. And hurt.

  What did I expect?

  I start to jog down the street, loping slow and easy, and find that she settles in with me just fine. Like old times. Like old times, except I’m carrying a secret, and I might be the worst thing to ever happen to her.

  Because even with what I just saw, I can’t bring myself to stay away.

  chapter 9

  HARLOW

  Working out for the first time in months on no sleep sucks, believe me. But that is not the worst of it.

  I was up practically all night. Restless. Mind churning, sifting through memories of Marcus, always shying away from the worst, the day that’s at the core of so many of them. That’s not unusual, though. The only thing I’ve ever remembered about the day my parents died is Marcus.

  Days after that?Nothing, except Marcus being there. I mean, I must have done things. Talked to people, dealt with responsibilities, spoken to my bitchy Aunt Jill when she arrived to take Dill, even though she wouldn’t take me. (I was “too much.” Whatever. She just wanted control of the trust, and the house.)

  I mean, I still existed during those days, but all I remember is the time I spent with Marcus. Weirdly—and I used to feel guilty about this, because I thought it meant I was incredibly shallow—I remember thinking how much it no longer mattered that he had gone and slept with Rosa right as I thought he was finally getting interested in me. I mean, of all the things to be preoccupied with when you’ve just been orphaned, right? But I think that was just the level my brain could handle. Strangely satisfied that he was hanging out with me instead.

  Not just hanging out. I don’t actually remember him leaving my side. The Mankowskis were super tolerant, come to think of it, maybe because Marcus was the only one who could get me to go to school. Or who could get me to sleep, eventually.

  So my jerkwad brain is tossing these gems up all night while I’m thinking about what it’s going to mean to spend all this time with Marcus again. And whenever I get too close to what happened later, to what Marcus became for me, I shut it down as much as I can. I can’t deal. I can’t deal, and I shouldn’t be thinking about that, because he is not that anymore.

  It’s the emotional element that’s pissing me off. It’s the emotional element that makes me feel weak. I have to keep reminding myself: I don’t want him to love me, or try to win me back, or any of that bullshit. I don’t want to feel safe with him again. I mean, I can’t want that. I want validation. I want an explanation of why he rejected and then abandoned me.

  And God help me, I want him inside me.

  This is the last place I find refuge. The only place I find refuge: thinking about Marcus taking me, turning it into something purely physical, rather than emotional. Taking me hard, taking me in the way he never quite did when we were sweet, relatively innocent teenagers in love. I want to hate fuck him. I want to put him in his place, and make sure that that is all he’ll ever be to me again.

  Or maybe I just want him. Maybe it’s just chemical between us and I need to accept that.

  Yeah, so this is everything that’s going through my head as I walk down my front porch steps and trip into Marcus’s arms.

  Not even a little bit on purpose, I swear. Not consciously, anyway.

  So of course I laugh. I mean, of course I laugh; I just made an ass out of myself, again, and there is nothing else you can do but laugh in that situation. Because the second he touches me, I’m wet, and my body comes roaring alive with wanting him. The second he puts his arms around me to steady me, I feel his strength, feel him holding me up the way he used to, and I remember how incredible it was to have Marcus Roma in my corner. And everything in me crumbles.

  So when I look back at him, I remember to hate him. I remember to hate him for leaving me, for making me feel like nothing. I remember to hate him for making me weak.

  And I remember to hate myself for not being able to get over any of it.

  He sees it. I know he does by the look that passes across his face like a shadow. And that both elates me, in a sick way I’m not proud of, and breaks my heart, in a way that frightens me.

  I am so, so relieved when he just starts running.

  I don’t even care when I catch myself falling into old rhythms, bantering with him, teasing him about how he’s so out of shape. He’s not out of shape, obviously; he’s a Greek god. But I have to say something to cover up the fact that I haven’t had a decent workout in months.

  “McCarren Park?” he says, looking over his shoulder.

  I smile and nod, and tell myself I’m not just playing it cool. I am cool. Because watching Marcus Roma build up a sweat is not going to get to me.

  Or, rather, it will get to me, but only in one very specific way.

  We hit the track and I start rehearsing the stuff I’d thought about yesterday. So, first of all, it’s clear I’m not going to get answers from Marcus right away. He taught me all about this, after all. If you attack directly, your opponent instinctively blocks. You have to feint.

  So I’ll have to work my way around to explanations. It will probably involve lots of conversations about things I would rather forget, or at least not dwell on, but whatever. This was never going to be easy. But I’ve convinced myself I can handle it.

  I have to. Besides the fact that this is an unconventional way to send Dill to the most emotionally expensive computer camp ever, I need to be sane and functioning when he gets back, not just a shapeless, emotional blob covered in chocolate and tears.

  And, on top of all that, there’s the project I outlined for Shantha yesterday. I’ve decided to go on the offensive where this development is concerned. I know they still need zoning approval, and I know they’re trying to buy the building where The Alley has a lease and Shantha is totally on board to hold fundraisers for opposition at the bar. First step is that I need to canvass the neighborhood for support.

  What’s left of the neighborhood, anyway.

  That is what’s on my agenda for today, and I haven’t decided if I can trust Marcus with the information. We
ll, that’s not exactly true. I haven’t decided if I want to trust him with the information before I have to. I mean, it’s not like he won’t figure it out when we start putting posters and stuff all over the place.

  It’s just pride. And spite.

  I never knew spite could be such a motivating emotion, but hey, I’m keeping pace with Marcus Roma and I haven’t passed out yet, so it obviously works pretty well.

  I make the mistake of looking up at him, and just…Christ, he is gorgeous. The sun is higher in the sky, and that warm morning light is hitting him just right, setting off that golden skin and those light eyes. For once I’m thankful that he hasn’t taken his shirt off.

  He slows to a stop in front of me, running a hand through his hair, taking a deep breath and touching his toes once.

  “Ok, warm up’s over,” he says.

  I want to sit down and take a nap already. I can’t believe I used to do this every morning.

  “Tabata sprints?” he says.

  I groan. Tabata intervals of anything are evil—it’s twenty seconds of going all out, as hard as you can, then ten seconds of rest, and repeat until…well, if I remember correctly, until you pass out. At least that’s the way Marcus used to do them. I think fighters who were less badass about it did a finite number.

  But Tabata sprints? Today? Oh God.

  “Did you turn wussy on me, Lo?” he says with that evil grin. He knows that he can get me to try any insane workout by telling me I can’t do it. It’s just straight up wrong.

  “Oh, you are evil,” I say. “Fine. Ten Tabata sprints.”

  Marcus looks slightly surprised. “We don’t have to.”

  “You have a stopwatch?”

  I’m determined now. I have to win at something out of all of this. I need one thing in my column.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then call it,” I say, and shake my legs out.

  I’m suddenly determined to show Marcus Roma just how far I can push myself. Just how much I can fight. I bend one leg as if I’ve got a block behind me and zone in on his starting mark. I relish this moment, always have. I love the still, quiet fury of anticipation. Of knowing everything’s about to…