Off the Hook (19 page)

“Okay,” she muttered. “I was just trying to help. Go if you want to; waste the fuel.”

When she slowed near the new fish shack, Liam and Finn kept going down to where
BoB
was tied up, Finn’s voice floating back as they walked.

“Prescription, my ass. If you’re looking for condoms, there’s a box in the bottom drawer of my dresser. Help yourself.”

“Is that what—oh my God!” Kate cried. “It was one kiss! I am
not
having sex with your brother!”

Finn didn’t even turn around; he lifted his hand and dismissed her with a wave while Liam, grinning like an idiot, shrugged again.

“Of all the…ugh!” She jerked open the door and stepped inside, ready to swing the hell out of that hammer, only to come face-to-face with Jessie. “Oh! Hmm. Guess there’s no chance you didn’t hear that?”

“Hear what?” Jessie asked, her smile cheeky. “That you’re sleeping with Liam or Finn?”

“Liam—I mean no! I’m not!”

“You sure about that?” Jessie laughed, raising her hands and retreating a step. “Hey, you’re the one who looks like her face is going to burst into flames, not me.”

Slapping her hands over her face, Kate finally gave in and laughed, too. “Oh God. Can we get back to work please? These shelves aren’t going to hang themselves.”

“Absolutely.”

And they did, for about twenty-three seconds.

“Can I say one thing?” Jessie asked, then of course didn’t wait for Kate to say yes. “You could’ve come in here and wreaked havoc on us, you could have caused all sorts of problems that would have cost us a fortune and made it impossible for us to make this happen, but you didn’t, and I respect that, Kate. So as much as I love Liam—and I do; he’s like a brother to me—and as much as I know whatever’s going on between you two is none of my business…”

She trailed off, chewing the inside of her cheek for a few seconds.

“Oh, please,” Kate scoffed. “Don’t stop now.”

“Be careful.”

Careful?
Just thinking the word made Kate laugh. If there was one thing she’d mastered over the last ten years, it was being careful; thinking before she acted and watching what she said had become second nature to her. And then she’d stepped off that damn plane a couple of weeks ago and all that went right out the window.

How was it being careful when she let herself get pulled into that argument with Finn? Instead of keeping her cool, she’d let him goad her into it. And how was it being careful when she told Liam she liked it when he looked at her?

She did like it, that wasn’t a lie, but telling him that was neither smart
nor
careful. It was just plain stupid. Not nearly as stupid as kissing him, but stupid nonetheless.

And for the love of the sweet baby Jesus, how was it being careful when she climbed into that damn rowboat with Liam and fell in love? Not with him…No…No…
Not with him!
It was more than him. She’d gone and fallen in love with this whole damn place and everything that had gone into building it—and
that
was extraordinarily stupid.

It was also reckless and idiotic, because while loving the Buoys would make running it easier, loving the history of the place was going to make it hellishly difficult to run after Liam and his family cleared out, because without them it was…what?

Nothing but a handful of buildings that nobody else would truly appreciate. Would anyone even care that Liam had taken his first steps on the big front porch? Or that Jimmy had carved all of their names into the top beam in the lobby? Would anyone care why they’d rebuilt the fish shack or how much the O’Donnells respected the land and water that supplied them with this life?

No. Nobody else would know or care about any of that, certainly not Paul Foster. In fact, if the email from Josh the other night was right, Paul was already planning a massive rebuild. A rebuild he wouldn’t touch himself but would hire a contractor to take care of. So while the finished product might be gorgeous and attract a higher class of clientele, there wouldn’t be a single thing about it that was personal anymore.

That thought sat like a rock in the depths of Kate’s conscience. Feeling the way she did about the place—and Liam—could she take over running it, knowing that it would be a completely different place once Paul got finished with it?

But if she let her heart take the lead on this and focused on everything sweet and sentimental about the Buoys, where would that get her? Brokenhearted and unemployed, that’s where—and those were two things she had no intention of ever being again.

No, she needed to be Strong Kate, Resourceful Kate, Get-the-Job-Done Kate, because, at the end of the day, whatever Kate thought she might feel for Liam again wouldn’t mean squat. It was a lesson she should have learned from watching her mom follow her heart into one disaster after another, but instead of learning, Kate had done the same thing.

It wasn’t until she’d woken up that morning in Vegas that the lesson finally sank in.

Like her mother, she’d let her heart lead her from one bad relationship to another, from one bad life choice to another. The only time anything turned out the way she thought she wanted it to was when she let Strong Kate make the decisions, because Strong Kate didn’t give a shit about anyone but herself.

Strong Kate made things happen; she was active, not reactive, because she didn’t think with her heart, she thought with her brain, and that’s what Kate needed to do now.

Even if it hurt just thinking about it. And even if she really didn’t like how Strong Kate sometimes turned into Bitch Kate.

“Kate?” Jessie’s hand waved in front of Kate’s face. “You okay? You got a little pale there all of a sudden.”

“What?” Flustered, Kate blinked hard, forcing her focus onto the fish shack. “No—I mean, yeah, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.” Jessie held out the next shelf to her, but when Kate didn’t take it right away, Jessie shook her head and set it down. “What do you say we leave the rest of this for them to finish and you and I get back to my list?”

“Yes!” Kate cried, then took a breath and tried again, calmer this time. “Yes, let’s do that. You, me, and the list. Let’s go.”

She must have looked like a bobblehead the way she was nodding so fast, but she didn’t care. The farther and faster they could get away from that bloody fish shack and Liam, the better, so without a second thought to anything else, she jerked the door open and ran smack into Liam, whose hand was out as though he’d been reaching to open the door.

“Oof.” Stumbling a step, Kate was caught and steadied by Jessie, who came out right behind her.

“Good,” Jessie said, all businesslike. “You’re back. Kate and I are going up to the lodge to work on the list; you can finish this up by yourself, yes?”

“But—”

He’d barely sputtered out that much before Jessie nudged Kate past him.

“If you need help with something, call Finn. Oh, and remember it’s your turn to make dinner. Come on, Kate.”

Gaze averted, Kate shuffled past him and up the path after Jessie. With each step she forced another wisp of fog out of the front of her mind and into the back corner of her brain, where she could trap it and control it. Or at least try to ignore it.

“Unless you need my help with something,” she said once they were back in the lodge, “I’ll head over to the cabins. I finished the Green cabin before Liam and I went to Port Hardy, but the other two still need to be cleaned out.”

As she spoke, she pulled supplies out of the cleaning cupboard and stacked them on the kitchen counter.

“You sure?”

“Yes!” Kate didn’t mean to answer so quickly or so forcefully, but hells to the yes, she was sure. Scrubbing those damn cabins was time-consuming and labor-intensive—two things that would be the biggest help to her right now if she had any hope of straightening herself out. And, as an added bonus, it was work she could do alone, instead of being stuck in confined spaces with any of them—something that was proving detrimental to Strong Kate’s resolve, because the more she learned about each of them and the Buoys, the more she wanted to know.

And that had to stop.

“Might take me a day or two,” she said. “And when I’m done with those, I’ll do the A-frames so they’re ready, and by then hopefully the weather will have warmed up a little more and I’ll start on the yard work.”

“Uh, Kate, you don’t have to do everything, you know.”

“I know, but you need to be here in the office and they’re doing their things, so this is what I’ll do.” Loaded down with the big jug of vinegar, a bucket, cloths, and a pair of rubber gloves, she lifted one of the radios off its charger and waved it in the air. “Call me if you need me.”

And without so much as a hesitation to see if Jessie had anything else for her to do, Kate marched out of the lodge and down to the White cabin, where she set to cleaning the bathroom first, all the while trying desperately to remember the real reason she was working at the Buoys.

It wasn’t so she could get to know and like Jessie better, or so she could get addicted to those Caroline Linden books on Jessie’s shelf, and it sure as hell wasn’t so she could get all mushy and soft around any of the O’Donnells. That wasn’t so much a problem when it came to Finn, but his brother…ugh.

She was supposed to be getting to know the Buoys, to learn how it ran, what the day-to-day operations were like, while at the same time getting herself and the Foster Group ready to just walk in and take over. And yet every minute spent near Liam lately was another chink out of that plan.

Sooner or later, something was going to go sideways. Either Liam was going to find a way to keep the Buoys and she’d be right back where she was at the Foster Group, getting ogled by creepers, or the Buoys would be bought by someone (probably Paul) and instead of her leaving, it’d be Liam.

Neither result was going to be fun, but she wasn’t going to screw up this time. She was going to put what she wanted first and everything else would have to sort itself out. The fallout would
not
be her problem.

So why did she feel so crappy?

Liam might be working his ass off to get the Buoys up and running, but she’d heard enough conversations between him and Finn to know that if his agent called with an offer, he’d be gone again.

“And when that happens,” she muttered, lifting one of the three little ceramic leprechauns off the mantel to dust it, “where’s that going to leave the rest of us?”

Whoa!
Kate set the leprechaun down and inhaled slowly, her fingers still wrapped around the ornament. There was no
us,
there was just
them,
and she wasn’t part of them.

As she forced the truth of that statement down deep inside, she stood in the middle of the main room, taking a long moment to roll her shoulders and stretch out her neck, as if that would somehow help straighten her mind out.

She needed to start looking at this place the same way Paul did—as a project, not as someone’s home. She could do that, couldn’t she? Sure she could, and she’d start right there in the White cabin.

Aside from the name and bedding colors, this cabin was almost identical to Green, with the small bathroom in the back and the rest of the space being one large room divided into both a sitting area and a bedroom. A large, heavy green-and-brown couch sat directly in front of the rock fireplace, flanked on either side by a couple of chairs. Here in the White cabin, both those chairs were overstuffed monstrosities that matched the couch, but over in Green, one was a hard-backed rocking chair and the other was a well-worn black leather recliner.

Had the O’Donnells picked out every rock in that fireplace? Probably. Did she care? No, no, she did not.

Yes, damn it, she did.

Shaking it off, she kept her gaze moving. A burl table sat in the space between the couch and the hearth, its polyurethane finish not quite as shiny as it probably had been back in the day. Another one of Liam’s woodwork projects, maybe?

Stop it. Look at something else.

In the Green cabin, there’d been pictures of the almost unimaginably lush rolling hills of Ireland’s County Wicklow—a place she’d immediately added to her travel wish list.

Here in the White cabin, though, the pictures were all about the Buoys. There was an aerial shot of the lodge on what must have been the most beautiful summer day ever; bursts of color filled the front garden and both sides of the path, making the grass seem greener next to all of it. The three boats sat tied to the dock, all lined up in a row, and though it was impossible to tell for sure, Kate had no doubt who the four men were standing on the front steps of the lodge.

So what? Lots of businesses had photos of their people on the wall. Paul had one taken of all of them every Christmas, and yet for the life of her, she couldn’t remember last year’s.

She moved on to the next frame: a five-picture collage of what looked like the O’Donnell family in the early days of the Buoys. Kate recognized Jimmy from the other pictures she’d seen in the lodge, and it was easy as pie to pick out which boy was which, even though she’d never met Ronan.

There was a shot of Finn in nothing but his diaper and gum boots, dangling his fishing rod off the edge of the dock; there was one of Ronan holding up a fish that had to be at least half as big as he was; and then there was Liam. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, rod in his right hand, ball glove on his left, sitting in the middle of the little rowboat.

The picture on the bottom left showed a laughing Jimmy behind the wheel of one of the boats, his hat pushed back, as relaxed as could be, something Kate couldn’t say for the person in the last picture in the frame.

Fascinated, Kate leaned closer.

With her red hair pulled into a loose knot and a large bibbed apron tied around her waist, the woman seemed to be in mid-turn from the stove when the picture was taken. Maybe it was that—the fact she’d obviously been caught unawares—that caused her to appear so unhappy, so tired. The frown, set deep across her forehead, seemed to have settled in her eyes and around the edges of her mouth, and her shoulders slumped forward a bit, almost as if she’d tripped as she turned.