Daff was about to respond when the sound of feminine giggling floated down from the loft. Mason’s muted voice muttered something they couldn’t hear, but Daisy’s drunk, slurry voice carried down to them clear as a bell.
“Just let me pet it a little! Please, Mason.”
Daff and Lia exchanged horrified looks. Mason spoke again, his voice low and urgent and unintelligible to them.
“Just a touch,” Daisy purred. “It wants to play. See?” They heard Mason’s low groan and Daff face-palmed—she would rather slice off her ears than hear this. Lia had her eyes closed and her lips were moving. Daff leaned a little closer. Was she praying?
“This can’t be happening!” That’s what Lia was saying. Just mumbling it over and over again.
“Let’s just leave,” Daff urged. “I can’t sit here and . . .”
They heard Mason’s heavy tread on the staircase and froze. He paused on the last step, looking a bit flushed and unable to meet their eyes. He hastened to stand behind one of the conveniently waist-high easy chairs.
“She gets a little . . . uh . . . affectionate after a few drinks,” he muttered awkwardly. “I’ll just send that Uber request and uh . . . yeah.”
“You’ve turned my sister into a total horn muffin,” Daff suddenly said, unable to resist.
“Daff!” Lia gasped, but Daff kept her eyes on Mason, who flushed even more. It was fun making the big, bad special-ops guy blush.
“She was a good girl before she met you, mister!” Daff continued, and Mason suddenly grinned.
“And now she’s a sexy woman. Hashtag no regrets.” He used air quotes as he said the last three words. It was kind of cute how he thought those two things would work together, and Daff choked back a laugh at the pithy response.
“I’m glad she’s marrying you,” Daff said. She had never completely forgiven Mason for his part in Spencer’s stupid wingman plan, and it had loomed between them since then. But she couldn’t deny that he made Daisy happy, and that had softened Daff’s attitude toward him. But she now recognized that she genuinely liked the guy. She hoped that her sincerity was apparent in her voice. Judging by the way he smiled, it was.
“Thanks. That means a lot.” Daff returned his smile. Happy that she and Mason could, once and for all, set aside the past and start anew.
A positive note on which to end an already awesome day.
CHAPTER TEN
Daff watched Spencer approach her shop the following afternoon and wondered if he was bringing lunch. It seemed pointless, since it was Saturday and they would both be closing shop in half an hour. They could go to MJ’s or something instead. Like they had just a week ago. She shook her head, unable to believe how much things had changed, not just with Spencer but in her life over the last seven days.
“Hi, there,” she greeted with a small smile when he finally stepped into the shop. He wasn’t carrying any bags, so he definitely wasn’t bringing lunch. He looked a little green around the gills, and she laughed. “A bit hungover today, are we?”
“Hmm.” He sat down on his favorite chair and folded his arms on the counter, resting his head on them for a brief moment.
“I have some aspirin if you think that will help,” she offered, hoping she sounded sympathetic. She definitely didn’t feel sympathetic—she really just wanted to laugh. The man looked pathetic.
“Had some already,” he grunted, lifting his head with effort to look at her.
“How did you manage to get through the day like this?”
“Claude took care of everything,” he said succinctly. “I hid in my office all morning.”
“For the love of his thighs, give that man a raise. He sounds like a saint.”
“Oh, it’s in the cards. Raise and promotion.”
“Doesn’t he already hold the highest position you can give at your store?”
“I’ve got some stuff in the pipeline. Will tell you when I can think straight.”
“You done for the day?” Keeping her curiosity at bay. What stuff?
“Fuck yeah. I was just dead weight anyway.”
“Lunch?”
“Hmm. Later. Will you go somewhere with me first?”
“Where?”
“Just a place I want to show you. I want your opinion. Please?”
“Yes, of course. I’m closing in twenty-five minutes.” He snorted and looked around the empty shop pointedly.
“Close early. What’re they gonna do? Fire you?”
“I’ve never closed early,” she huffed. “Not once since I’ve been the manager here, and I’m not about to ruin my perfect record now.”
“Fine. Wake me up when you’re ready to go.”
“God, you’re such a baby. I drank last night, too, you know? You don’t see me whining about it.”
“Ten-minute nap. It’s all I need . . .” His voice trailed off and the last word was followed by a light snore. She gaped at him, unable to believe that he’d fallen asleep just like that. She’d pay money to have that talent.
She shook her head and went back to her seat next to the till, digging out her romance novel—which she’d made very little progress on since Monday—and tried to concentrate on her reading. It was a lost cause. All she did was contemplate the top of his head and marvel at how shiny and silky that mane looked. Her eyes trailed down to the side of his face, the only part visible to her. The way his narrow, neatly trimmed sideburns met the line of stubble that darkened the lower half of his face. All uniformly short except for the ever-so-slightly darker patch beneath the center of his bottom lip, where his razor hadn’t done as meticulous a job. Her eyes lingered on his mouth. He had the most beautifully shaped lips she’d ever seen on a man. Gorgeous, sulky curve on the bottom lip and the deep, shadowed groove of his pronounced philtrum with its accompanying thin Cupid’s bow upper lip. Her eyes moved up from his mouth over the sharp, straight blade of his nose, that dimpled, lean left cheek—the only one visible to her—to his closed eye. His thick lashes were so long they cast shadows over the blunt curve of his cheekbone.
For a man who looked half-savage most of the time, he had surprisingly refined features. His heavy brows and deep-set eyes were what gave him that intense, untamed look, and when his hair was longer it definitely added to the image.
His eye cracked open, and he pinned her with a penetrating look. His gorgeous green eye looked somewhat bloodshot.
“I can feel you staring at me,” he accused.
“Just wondering if you shaved this morning. This stubble is out of control.” His eye slid shut again.
“Hmm.” For a moment she thought that was all she would get, but he continued, “My five o’clock shadow tends to make an appearance at about nine thirty every morning. I should probably just embrace the beard.”
“No, don’t,” she said so quickly she nearly sprained her tongue, and his eyelid lifted with seemingly great difficulty.
“Why not?”
“You’ll look completely primitive with a beard, Spencer,” she began derogatively, before stopping herself and adding honestly, “and you have a great jawline. Why hide it?”
“You think so?”
“Definitely.”
“Stop interrupting my snooze.”
“You only have fifteen minutes left.”
“I’ll make it a power nap.”
“So where are we going?” she asked twenty minutes later. They were in his truck. He looked surprisingly refreshed after the short nap he’d taken at the boutique. Daff was still confounded by his ability to fall asleep seemingly on command. Who did that?
“I’ll tell you when we get there,” he said, and she huffed impatiently. Three minutes later they turned in to the woods just outside Riversend, and shortly after that, Spencer slid the truck to a stop outside a dilapidated old house. It was in the middle of a fairly large clearing in the woods, but the clearing was overgrown with weeds and long grass. The picket fence was rotted and falling apart, resembling crooked, broken, and yellowed teeth. The front yar
d was scattered with random debris: tractor tires, a rusty old mattress frame, a stack of rusted hubcaps piled in a heap. She could see glints of broken glass strewn all over. There was an old, rotten, and moldy sofa in the middle of the path leading up to the rickety porch.
Spencer stood at the crooked iron gate and simply stared at the house for a long moment before removing his sunglasses and meeting her questioning eyes.
“It’s in worse shape than I imagined,” he said, his voice wobbly and his eyes haunted.
“This is where you grew up, isn’t it?” she asked softly, and he swallowed a couple of times before nodding.
“I haven’t been back here in years. Not since I left for college.” Not for sixteen years, then. He stepped through the gate and stopped. His reluctance to proceed was palpable.
“I left him here to fend for himself,” he said, his voice virtually breaking.
“Who?”
“Mason. I left him alone in this fucking pit.” He sounded disgusted with himself, and Daff very carefully—as if handling a wild animal—took his hand in hers.
“It couldn’t have been this bad sixteen years ago, Spencer.”
“It was a cesspool. Most of the broken glass in this yard came from Dad’s rum bottles or Mom’s crack pipes. Malcolm, Anita”—his parents—“and their friends did so enjoy their creature comforts. Malcolm and his cronies would sit on that sofa all day, just drinking and shooting the breeze. All things considered, they were okay parents. Didn’t ever hit us or allow their friends to get handsy with us. Malcolm stuck around long enough after our mother died to give us a fighting chance at life. Left the day I turned eighteen. Happy fucking birthday to me, right?”
He ran his free hand roughly over his face and shuddered. Daff’s hand clenched around his, and she just ached for the boy he’d been. The kid who suddenly found himself sole guardian to his underage brother, who worked several jobs just to get by. The boy she—Daff—had treated like dirt just because his scrupulously clean clothes had been threadbare, his shoes had been scuffed, with worn-down soles, and his hair had never been touched by a barber’s scissors. While this was his home life, she’d made his school life hell of a different kind, and he’d never once had a bad word to say about her.
Her eyes flooded with tears, and she strove not to let him see them, knowing it would demolish his pride. He would misinterpret them as pity when all she felt was regret and shame.
“I’m sorry, this isn’t why I brought you here,” he said, his hand tightening around hers. “I wanted to see if the place was salvageable or if we’d be better off razing it to the ground.”
“Why?” she asked hoarsely.
“I’m considering donating the land and everything on it to the town, on the condition that it’s used to build a youth center. The main aim of the center should be to provide a safe haven for at-risk kids to come and play sports, learn skills, new hobbies. I was imagining a library, a gym, a sports field, tennis court, maybe a swimming pool and a cafeteria . . .”
“It’s ambitious,” she ventured cautiously.
“Unrealistic?”
“No, I just wonder where the funding would come from. Not just to build the place but to maintain it afterward.”
“I spoke with Mase last night—before the drinking started—since he co-owns the house. Both he and I are willing to donate enough to kick-start the project. But we agree that the community should chip in as well, as this is to the town’s benefit.”
“That’s where you’re going to run into obstacles—a lot of the townspeople would be happy to help, but there are always a few who will be vocal about using the town’s money to build something so expensive for kids from the poorer areas.”
“Assholes, you mean?”
“Yes, but some of those assholes are pretty powerful,” she reminded him, and he grimaced, acknowledging her point.
“This benefits everybody—if we make these kids feel valuable, give them something to do, keep them off the streets, there’ll be less petty crime. And petty crime can lead to much worse.”
“Did you ever . . .” Her voice trailed off; it wasn’t her business.
“Yes,” he said in answer to her incomplete question, and her throat went dry at the thought. Whatever he’d done was for survival, but she shuddered at the thought of what would have happened if he’d been caught. “After our mother died, our dad stuck around and sometimes threw money our way for food. Other times he used it for alcohol. At first we hung out behind MJ’s a lot. Like hungry dogs. Occasionally, Janice Cooper . . . remember her? Played the piano a lot and then married that dentist and moved to Durban? Anyway, she used to sneak a few bread rolls and leftovers out to us. But she was terrified of getting caught and losing her job. I didn’t want to put her in that position, she was nice. So I started shoplifting. I tried to keep Mase from figuring out where the food was coming from—I knew he’d follow my lead and I didn’t want him to get caught. But of course he worked it out and took it upon himself to ‘help’ me. We only took food, nothing else. We knew people already thought we were troublemakers, and if we were caught stealing—” He shook his head, no need to elaborate. “So, yeah, I know what I’m talking about. I know what desperation can drive a kid to and how lethal boredom can be as well.”
“So how do you start something like this?”
“Well, we’ll have a look through this dump to see if anything’s worth saving. Then I’m going to have to figure out how much it will cost to renovate this place versus just razing it completely and building from scratch. Once we know exactly how much everything will cost, we’ll have to figure out where the money will come from.”
“And you brought me because—”
“Because I value your opinion, and because—” He sighed before slanting her a quick look. “Mason bailed on me. Apparently Daisy’s completely useless today after you guys got her drunk last night, and that means Mason has to sort out the cooking for the dinner party tonight . . . and I didn’t want to come alone.”
Daff felt warm and gooey inside—okay, so she was his second choice, but she understood why Mason was his first choice. They had history with this place and maybe a few ghosts that needed to be laid to rest. But Spencer thought enough of her to bring her in his brother’s stead. And he valued her opinion. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before.
“So let’s have a look at this place,” she said, and, still holding her hand, he tugged her toward the raised porch. He stopped at the steps and winced.
“I’m not sure how safe this is,” he muttered, assessing the broken slats in the steps.
“Just be careful,” she said and gingerly stepped onto the first step. It only barely held her weight. Spencer decided to skip the stairs completely and climbed straight onto the porch. The boards groaned beneath his weight, but held.
The front windows were all shattered, and the walls—which had once been white—were covered with mold and years’ worth of graffiti. The front door was nonexistent.
She watched him square his shoulders and take a deep, bracing breath before moving over the threshold into the gloomy interior.
Spencer was only dimly aware of Daff’s hand tightening as his childhood came flooding back. There, that was where he had once found his mother passed out in a puddle of her own vomit with a needle sticking out of her arm. All of six years old, he’d been terrified that she was dead. Over in the corner was where—when one of his parents remembered to feed them—he and Mason had eaten. Here’s where the TV had stood. Mason and Spencer had sat for hours just staring at the screen, flipping between only three channels and fantasizing about the glamorous lives those rich soap opera people led. Pretending to be them and learning from them. Of course, one day they’d come home to find the TV gone, sold for “Mommy’s medicine.”
It seemed like a lifetime ago, and yet he could still remember everything so vividly. The fear, the hunger, the sadness, and the uncertainty. It had been no way to grow up, and he wanted this
place to become a symbol of hope rather than of poverty, desperation, and fear.
He clung to Daff’s hand, his only lifeline in this turbulent tsunami of memories, and continued to walk through the nightmare that was his childhood.
Daff trailed behind Spencer; she wasn’t sure he was aware that he was quietly narrating as he went along. Just little snippets of information, like finding his mother passed out with a needle in her arm when he was six. God. It was horrible to imagine him growing up like that, to imagine any child growing up like that, and she was beginning to understand his need to offer help and guidance to as many at-risk kids as he could.
It was a pretty big house, all on one floor, and when they reached the last room, he stopped before going inside and looked at her.
“Mason and I shared this room. Malcolm said we didn’t have to share, but I liked to keep Mase close to me. He was a scrawny kid, and while our parents kept their shadier friends away from us, I still didn’t trust them not to hurt my brother. So we shared a room until the day I left.”
“It must have been hard leaving him here when you went to college.”
“He was only sixteen. I was going to stay. Or try to figure out a way to take him with me. But he was stubborn. Insisted he’d be fine, said that me getting a degree would eventually improve both our lives. I would have lost the scholarship if I got caught sneaking him into student housing with me. It would never have worked.
“By then he was already working at MJ’s and had a few other jobs, so he’d have money for food and stuff. I sent extra money every month. It helped that the house was ours. And we both knew that nobody cared enough to check how Mason was getting along after I left. He just kept telling the teachers, when they bothered to ask, that Malcolm was back.”
“But why not ask for help?”
“They would have shoved him into foster care. We were taken into care for a time after my mom’s overdose when I was six, and it wasn’t ideal. The older kids were bullies; the adults were bigger bullies. He was two years away from being a legal adult. We figured we could make it work. I hated it, worried about him every single day, and then, when he was eighteen, the little asshole went and joined the fucking army. In another country.”