“No, he didn’t.” I agreed, ignoring his searching look as I continued to watch the floors count off on the display above the doors.
Finally, we hit the last story and the doors opened.
“Welcome to Colombe Energy,” Beckett gestured wide with his arm as he stepped into the foyer of the company offices.
Immediately before us there was a reception desk backed by a wall of running water, the name Colombe Energy Investments attached to the glass. It was beautiful, the entire space, right down to the stylized dove in a green tree that was their logo.
It was Christmas Eve so the offices were empty as Beckett led me through the space beyond the wall where bull pens were bracketed on all sides by closed door offices. At the very back left corner a door was marked with the name ‘Constantine.’
“We have the money to be uneconomical,” Beckett said with a wry grin as he produced a key and unlocked the door to Lane’s old office.
Unlike Lane’s space at home, this was fairly devoid of his personality. The filtered air held no remnants of his scent and there was no Picasso painting hanging in a position of honor. I was more than mildly disappointed.
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked softly as I walked around the office, ending up at the large glass and metal desk Dad sat at.
There were three frames on the desk, one of Caroline and Lane on their wedding day years ago, both beaming brightly, another of Lane and his sons all in preppy golf clothes on a course by the ocean, and finally, one with his daughters where he sat crouched at a kid’s table pretending to have tea.
None of Brando and me.
Of course, there couldn’t be.
Caroline probably visited him here. His kids. His friends and associates who couldn’t know about Lane’s other life, his mistress and love children.
Still, it burned in me like an untended lit match.
“Lane wanted this office to be yours one day and, if you want it when you’ve finished university or traveling the globe or whatever it is kids do these days after high school, it’s yours if you want it.” His voice was softened by sympathy as he watched me look at those framed photos. “Open the drawer, he left it unlocked the last time he was here.”
I sat in the large leather chair at the desk and bent to open the drawer on the right side. The mechanism was sticky from disuse, but with a firm tug, it pulled out and into my lap.
Photos and memorabilia.
The drawing I’d made of him, Aida and myself for Father’s Day when I was six or seven, the certificate of academic achievement I got in eighth grade, a photo of me on my first day of kindergarten. A photo of Brando in Dad’s arms, his face suffused with tenderness and awe, and another one of him hugging Mum from behind, his hands on her pregnant belly, his lips to her smiling cheek.
When I looked up through tear-glossed eyes, Beckett was sitting heavily in a chair across from the desk, rubbing his hand over his face.
“He loved you so much,” he told me. “Sometimes, I’ve wished that men were taught the same words women seem to have for their emotions.” He sighed and looked out the window at the metropolis spread out beneath us. “Lane wasn’t the father he wanted to be. We both weren’t. Sometimes after a long fucking day at work, we’d have a drink here in the office and lament all the things we should have done differently in our lives. Having you and Brando wasn’t one of them, but not being there for you…it killed him. Living with regret like that, it’s like a knife in the chest every day.”
“You speak from experience,” I croaked through my tight throat, still thumbing through the paraphernalia in Dad’s draw, moved beyond to tears by further evidence of his love for us. There was a little collection of stapled receipts that caught my notice because the first one declared Lane’s purchase of Picasso’s Child with a Dove from a Sotheby’s auction in London. I slipped them into the pocket of my coat when Beckett wasn’t looking.
“I do,” he agreed, slumping in his chair so he could tip his head back as if he needed his words to be closer to God. “Lane and I both made poor choices, Bianca, but at least he made his for love.”
“And you?” I asked, intrigued despite myself. I didn’t know who this man was or why he was helping me. That niggling question of why continued to gnaw at the back of my thoughts.
“I was just an arrogant prick,” he said on a bitter laugh. “Arrogance runs in the family. I thought I could have it all and nothing bad would ever touch me. It was just a one-night stand, but it had been a long time coming. Flirtations for years at functions. A curiosity that ignited one night over too many martinis.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, sitting straighter because I could sense the anvil about to land on my head. “Why are you helping me?”
“I’m helping you because Lane was my best friend, my family, and I’d do anything for him. Even after death.” He heaved a massive inhale then expelled it harshly through his nose. A dark lock of hair fell into his face, over his green eyes, and for a moment, I thought he looked like someone I knew. “I’m helping you because I hope you’ll help me too.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m not sure I have much to offer.”
“I think you do,” he countered, leaning forward with surprising verve, bracing his forearms on his thighs to look me dead in the eye over the desk. “You have the heart of Tiernan Morelli.”
Alarm clanged inside me like warning bells.
“Hardly,” I said, voice cool and easy. “He hates me, but he loves my little brother. I think that’s why he puts up with me.”
“No,” Beckett countered. “I don’t think so. You see, Bryant has been abusing Tiernan his entire life and until recently, Tiernan remained as loyal to him as a beaten dog. Only now, after you were threatened, did Tiernan break things off with Bryant in a rather spectacular fashion.”
“That’s a bit of a leap in logic,” I admonished, channeling my inner Constantine.
“Maybe,” he shrugged. “But the moment I found out, I’ve made a point to watch Tiernan, to be there however I could, and it’s obvious that he cares about.”
“The moment you found out what? What do you want with Tiernan’s heart?”
“Hopefully,” he said, his handsome face broken open with honesty and devastation. “A place in it alongside you one day. I know what it is to be a bad father, Bianca, because Tiernan is my biological son.”
16
BIANCA
I left Colombe Energy in a kind of waking dream. New Yorkers hurried home with the last of their Christmas shopping, bright lights popping brightly in my periphery, seasonal music spilling through open shop doors. None of it registered.
Because Beckett Fairchild had dropped a massive secret on my shoulders and he expected me to carry it without guilt or remorse.
“I’ve wanted to tell him,” he said back in the office when his announcement was met with my shocked silence. “I’ve told myself a thousand times I would but, well, you know Tiernan, he isn’t exactly Mr. Approachable.”
I’d blinked at him, unmoved.
Tiernan was intimidating as hell, but that wasn’t excuse not to tell him the truth. And knowing him as I did, I understand that if he found out I had discovered this secret without confiding in him, whatever tentative romance we were developing would be snuff out irreparably.