Page 14 of A Family Affair: The Cabin
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How the hellhad she gotten him to talk so much? With the exception of the creditors and the banks, he hadn’t told anybody about the sorry state of his life. Talk about a cluster, it had been all of that—one grand tsunami, disrupting whatever life he’d thought he’d had, which had pretty much been built with too much money and too many fake friends. Even the girlfriend he’d thought would become his wife had dumped him when the trouble started and the money ran out.
“So, you were in real estate and you bet all your money on a high-risk deal and lost?”
“Pretty much.” Hearing the words spill out of the woman’s soft lips like she was trying out cuss words was a real eye-opener. Not in a good way. The truth was he’d been so damn arrogant, so full of self-importance and the desire to be number one, that he hadn’t thought hecouldfail. The riskier the investment, the better. When the “wins” toppled his competition, it made him more untouchable, more sought after, more “godlike.” Only he wasn’t, and he’d found that out the hardest way of all—self-destruction. No one questioned the business deals that included acquiring distressed commercial real estate, pumping money into the buildings, and selling them off at a huge profit. There was one particularly high-risk project he should have avoided, but who was going to warn him against it? Nobody warned a king. Not business associates or banks, not friends or a girlfriend. Would he have listened to them if they’d expressed concern about leveraging so much when he already had more than enough?
Of course not.This deal was personal. This deal was about who would rule commercial real estate: Pete Finnegan or Marcus Attican, his nemesis and main competition. It was all or nothing and they both knew it. When a person believes he’s invincible, he’s going to jump off the building, right? Because he’s not going to get hurt. Hell, he won’t even get a scratch. So, Pete jumped—and fell—hard, fast, and with such force that all he had left after the destruction was a narrow escape from bankruptcy, a disgraced name, and a ton of regret. No business associates, no friends, no Heather.
Pete shared this story with Elissa, all of it, though later he’d wonder why he’d done it. Maybe it was the way she tilted her head and listened with what looked like complete interest, rapture even. Nobody had done that in a long time, unless he’d been talking numbers and bottom line. But Elissa, whose last name he didn’t know, acted as if she cared. Or maybe it was just another part of the pretending they’d agreed upon earlier—pretend the outside world didn’t exist—just for a little while. He hoped it wasn’t that, hoped maybe one person in this screwed-up universe actually cared about what he said.
But who the hell really knew?
“Why didn’t you stay in California? I’m sure you could have found something else to do while you built up your business again.”
She said it with such sincerity that he told her the truth. “I torched my career so bad I had to come this far to get away from the fallout. Besides, it was time to head back this way.” He shrugged, toyed with the frayed edge of his jeans hem. “California didn’t feel like home anymore.”
“Of course it didn’t,” she said, her voice soft and comforting. “Home is the only place that feels like home.” She paused, her eyes bright. “Unless you find someone to share your life. Then anyplace that person is feels like home.”
Pete cleared his throat, looked away. “I guess.” Heather had a lot of ideas about what she thought home was, but he doubted they were as simple as “wherever he was.” They were wrong for each other on so many levels, and it took his business and his life to explode for him to understand that.
“So, tell me about the place where you grew up.”
He slung an arm across the back of the couch and smiled at her. He could get used to the comfortable conversation and the curious interest. And he could certainly get used to looking at the attractive woman at the other end of the couch. “I grew up in a small town where everybody had an opinion about everything and they didn’t hesitate to offer it, whether you asked or not. The older I got, the more it bugged me. I mean, really pain-in-the-ass bugged me to the point where I’d do stuff just to get the rumors going. My old man was furious when he found out I was doing it to torment some of the busybodies. He said it was immature and disrespectful.” Pete shook his head, recalled the days when he and his father had shouting matches that could be heard all the way down the street. “I was a jerk, but I never saw it that way. They sent me off to college and I made it through half of the second semester before I flunked out. You have no idea what it’s like to come home to a place where everybody knows you flunked.”
“I can’t imagine.”
The faint pink on her cheeks told him she’d probably never jaywalked or gotten a speeding ticket. Well, he’d done both and a lot more back then. “It wasn’t pretty, neither was the six o’clock start time in the cabinet factory where I worked because my father said I wasn’t going to lie around like a cat all day and prowl all night.”
She hid a smile. “I guess you’d call that tough love.”
He raised a brow. “Yeah, something like that.”
“Did you make amends with your father?”
Pete shrugged. “It’s a work in progress. He’s a no-nonsense kind of guy. Doesn’t go in for deep thinking or fancy words. Don’t kid yourself, though. He’s one of the wisest men I ever met and it took me a lot of years to realize that.” Actually, he hadn’t figured that out until he was close to thirty, and when the business went belly up, he’d thought about his father’s comments regarding true friends versus the ones who’ll only show up as long as you’re paying.
“What will you do when you finish here?”
Now that was the fifty-million-dollar question. He’d given it a lot of thought, but for a person who’d once believed he only had to blink to make money, he didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know. I’ve spent the last few months doing manual labor and I have to say, there’s a certain reward that comes from creating and fixing things.” He grinned, saluted her with his wine glass. “I’ve also mucked out my share of stalls and that would not be on the list of my life’s ambition.”
“So…” She tilted her head to one side, her long hair brushing her shoulders. He bet her hair was silky-soft, wondered if it smelled like the flowery scent in the bathroom. “You like creating and fixing things, you don’t like mucking out stalls.”
He nodded. “Right.”
“Would you ever get back into real estate?”
That was a question he’d asked himself several times a day, more so in the beginning, and not so much these past few weeks. Even if he were to consider it, there would have to be so many conditions, and the scenario would have to be perfect. “I really don’t know. I was very good at it, but I wasn’t a nice guy. I was a jerk who thought he couldn’t lose.” His voice dipped with remembering. “I made a lot of money, a sick amount, and I surrounded myself with people I thought were my friends, but they weren’t. Friends tell you when you’re screwing up and when you’re full of yourself, but nobody ever did.” He rubbed his jaw, met her gaze. “I don’t want to be that guy anymore; that’s what I do know.”
“I’m glad.”
Shit, had he just admitted he was a loser-asshole? Not exactly. He’d admitted he’dbeenone, as in past tense. That was different. Wasn’t it? Pete clamped his mouth shut. He needed to cool it with the confessions for a while and get Elissa talking, but it was so damn easy to open up with her.
Why? Oh, right. Because they werepretendingthe outside world didn’t exist. That’s why. It wasn’t like she had some special hold over him. He never let a woman close enough to get inside his head—not even Heather, and he’d thought of marrying her.
This whole “open up and share” had to do with the pretending stuff they’d decided on over dinner. He was cool with that. Very cool. As long as he understood what was happening and could control it. Pete blew out a sigh. “Your turn. What are you going to do when you leave here?”
“I’m a nurse. I worked in a hospital for a few years on a post-surgical floor, but what I enjoyed most was being a companion to a woman dying of cancer.”
