Now, looking outside through his bedroom window that I closed, beyond the empty pool, I noticed a pool house. A small, white-planked structure with French windows and flowerpots someone was obviously taking care of. I couldn’t allow myself to live inside his house, but an outside cabana for some time might work.
Chapter 6
Oliver
New York was colder than London when I landed in JFK.
Used to moving—being uprooted, re-rooted, located, relocated, transported between schools, houses, countries, continents—I made sure to never get attached to people, things, or places. A rich nomad.
Sticking out as an outsider everywhere, I never committed to a specific place, not even an office or a coffee shop. My offices were all over, usually in the companies I owned a majority stake in. Bruce sat in one of those in New York. I took a cab there now.
If I had to count how many years of my life I had spent in each place, they’d probably be equally divided between Wayford, Sweden, England, and New York. None of them felt like home.
Maybe if I were a different person, I’d have friends everywhere. But I wasn’t. I was me. I had acquaintances, business associates, fuck buddies.
London was where I had been living whenhe’ddied. Of a heart attack. Alone. In his office. All weekend. His secretary had found him on a Monday morning.
I’d had his body flown to Sweden. His sister and I, and a few distant relatives, had attended his funeral. I had flown back to London that same day and never returned, not even to visit my mother’s grave that was there, too. I had sold everything he had left. Not just the house in Wayford, but the one in Stockholm, too. I had given the money from both to his sister. She wasn’t a mother figure, but she was better than him, and I had lived with her almost as much as I had with him.
“Tack,”thanksin Swedish—a language I never spoke unless I had to—was all she’d said over the phone when I had told her. For a brother and sister who had only had each other, they hadn’t been close. No love or warmth had been lost between them. Or me.
I was likehim.
I couldn’t escape it. Which was why I never wanted to get married or have kids. What for? My father hadn’t hit me often, but when he had, he had given it his all. Then he’d say, “You think this is a beating? My father used to belt me.” For some reason, I had found no comfort in those words. I didn’t need kids just so I could tell them, “You think that’s a smack? You should have seen the black eye my father gave me.”
So, no relationships, except for Blanche, but that didn’t really count.
I climbed out of the cab and went into the Midtown office building, my luggage rolling behind me, its wheels almost silent on the pristine marble floors.
My phone vibrated in my pocket just as I entered the elevator alone with ten other people.
“#0515 Alarm disabled,” the dry, automatically-generated text read on my screen.
I felt the elevator plummet the dozens of feet it had climbed, but everyone else seemed calm. It was only me.
Three thousand miles away, a blue-eyed sunray had punched in the code I had given her and ignited a buried urge inside me, a forsaken desire that I hadn’t felt in years—to cross all those miles to her.
I had to restrain this impulse.
I had years of experience in controlling my instincts, longings, emotions. I was determined to win now, too.
I needed to stall for time before I returned to California. This time, it wasn’t because ofhim. But because of his complete opposite.
Mycomplete opposite.
While her heart, her spirit, not less than mine, had been stomped on and crushed, she had bounced back. I admired her for what and who she was, then and now. She always let light shine in her, like she had from the first day I’d met her.
She let it shine on me, too, dispelling the shadows of my life, even for a little while.
Sunshine girl. January Raine.
But if I let urges, feelings, desires guide me, it would end in disaster. I knew firsthand what could happen if I let my emotions control me. If I gave something like love a foot in the door, who was to say that other, less noble feelings and impulses, such that were embedded deep in me, wouldn’t wedge in, as well? After all, I didn’t know love firsthand, but I knew hate, and wrath, and pain. Those would have the upper hand if I let any feelings in.
For years, I had tried not to think about her, nor say her name. She was the only one who had come close to making me feel like I knew what it was like to love and be loved.
I had offered my house to her because she needed help, even if she refused to ask for it or even admit it. I offered it because I owed her. And I hated debts.
That was all.
