Brides, Babies And Billionaires. Rebecca Winters
be wise, considering that she was on a boat with men who would probably think she was crazy if she did. Instead she pushed a hand through her hair, resisting the urge to pull at it.
‘You know, Blake, sometimes we do things for our family that go against what we believe in.’ She cautioned herself against the fury she felt behind her words, but it didn’t work. ‘I know your family wasn’t like that, but in mine we did things for one another. Helped each other. Supported each other.’
She rubbed her hands over her face and almost immediately her anger fizzled out.
‘I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.’
Blake’s face had blanched at her words, but he nodded. ‘It was.’
Callie bit her lip, and hated herself for lashing out. ‘It’s just that Connor saved my life with this job. No, he really did.’ Tears pricked at the backs of her eyes but she forced them back. ‘My parents’ deaths nearly destroyed me.’
There—she’d said it. The words she’d never really said aloud to anyone else. She was afraid to look up, to see the pity she knew would be in his eyes. She didn’t want that. It would remind her of how almost everyone had treated her after her parents had died. As if she was something to be pitied.
She looked up at him when she felt his hand gentle on hers, and there was no pity in his eyes. Just compassion. And she felt the coldness that had started to chill her bones thaw.
BLAKE KNEW HE shouldn’t have pushed, but he’d wanted to know. He’d needed to. Callie awakened desires in him that had been dormant since...well, since Julia. And even then, he hadn’t needed to know her this badly.
Ever since Callie had told him about her parents’ deaths Blake had wanted to ask her about it. He wanted to know how she’d handled it, who had been there to support her. The information he had gathered from Connor after she’d mentioned it and the little he had shared with Callie a few moments ago had only made him more curious. Especially since he knew that her specialist job wasn’t something that existed in any of the other hotels.
But now, seeing her anguish right in front of him, he felt like an absolute jerk.
‘I’m sorry you had go through that,’ he said, wishing there was something more he could say.
She slid her hand from beneath his and laid it on her lap. ‘I am, too.’ She attempted to smile, but her sadness undermined its effect.
‘Well, you don’t need to talk about it.’ He gestured to Rob, the man who had been serving them all night. ‘Could you bring some tea for Miss McKenzie, please?’ Rob nodded, and Blake turned his attention back to Callie. ‘I figure you could use something a little more soothing than champagne.’
‘Thanks.’ She smiled again, and this time it wasn’t quite as sad. And then she took a deep breath and said, ‘Blake, I...I want to tell you what happened when my parents died, okay? But only because I need you to understand why Connor did what he did. And then can we pretend this conversation never happened?’
She looked at him with such innocent hope that he nodded, even though he knew that pretending it had never happened would probably—well, never happen.
She angled her head, and didn’t meet his eyes as she spoke.
‘My parents were on their way home from a weekend away. It was their anniversary, and every year they celebrated by staying at the hotel where they’d had their wedding. They’d been married twenty years.’ She cleared her throat. ‘A drunk driver overtook when he wasn’t supposed to and crashed into them. They died instantly.’
She looked up at him.
‘I was nineteen. Old enough to survive.’
But still young enough to need them, he thought, but didn’t say it in case it interrupted her.
‘My parents meant the world to me. We were incredibly close, and losing them...it felt like I’d lost a piece of myself.’
He reached for her hand again when he saw she was fighting back tears.
‘I was incredibly depressed. I couldn’t go back to university. I shut my friends out. I shut Connor out. I just felt like I was in this dark room and I was flailing around, trying to find a light.’
She paused when Rob, the waiter, returned with a pot of tea, but barely waited until he’d left before she continued.
‘My friends couldn’t deal with the morbid person I had become. One by one, each of them disappeared. Until even my best friend—well, I thought she was—couldn’t do it any more.’
She lifted her eyes to his, and gave him a sad smile.
‘Death is one of those things that you can only truly understand when it affects you. Sure, people are there for you at the funeral, and sometimes a few weeks after. But when you realise that this is your life now—that you have to live without the family who were so integral to your existence—even those people fade away. Because how can they understand that the life you knew no longer exists when theirs is going on as normal? Connor struggled too, but he had his job. Something that gave him purpose. I think that’s probably around the time he started climbing the ladder at the Elegance. But when I didn’t go back to university I think an alarm went off for him and he realised how lost I was. So he pitched up at my house one morning and forced me to go to work with him.’
She smiled at the memory.
‘I hated him for it, but he just told me to start shadowing the concierges. He did that every day for two months. And then one day I realised that I wasn’t walking around in a coma any more. I found myself asking questions and engaging with the guests. And that’s how the tours came about.’
Blake had known that it would be something like that. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Callie he knew Connor pretty well, and the man he knew would have never given his sister a job just because he could. But the truth was he didn’t really care why Connor had done it. He was more interested in Callie, and in the events that had had her starting at the hotel. That now had her desperate to save it. All of a sudden, it made sense to him.
‘I wondered why you wanted to save the hotel so badly.’ He looked at her and wished he could do something about that wounded expression on her face. ‘I knew it was because of Connor. And, of course, your job. But now I understand that the reason behind it is because they saved you. Connor and your job helped you cope with your parents’ deaths.’
‘Yes,’ she said, surprise coating her features, ‘that’s exactly it.’
He drank the last of his whisky and put the glass down with a little bit of a bang. ‘I’m definitely glad I listened to you, then.’
She laughed—a husky sound because of the emotion she had told her story with. ‘I’m glad you listened, too. Or I might be out on the streets and not out on a boat.’
Blake grinned, and slowly began to realise that he believed what he’d said. He was glad he’d listened to Callie. If he hadn’t he would have had to let staff go and face another example of his own poor judgement. He would have had to tell his father what had happened and face his reaction. And all the hard work he had put into building his own legacy—not merely being a part of his father’s—would have been for nothing.
As he asked Rob to bring him coffee he realised that Callie’s ghosts weren’t the only ones that had been stirred that night.
* * *
‘What’s wrong?’ Callie asked, holding her breath at the expression on Blake’s face.
Emotions she couldn’t identify flashed through his eyes, but then he shook his head and smiled at her.
‘Nothing. Just thinking that it’s been a tiring day.’
And