I jump at the sound at my back. So lost in my own thoughts over the man who made the sound, that I didn’t notice him.
“Sorry. I didn’t know you were in here. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says distractedly.
“You okay?”
“Yes. Yeah. Sure.” He opens the refrigerator then closes it. Does the same to the freezer before sitting and then standing back up and going to the window to look into the darkness outside.
“Can’t sleep?” I ask.
“Kind of. I don’t know. I . . . I just don’t know.”
Something’s wrong. Is it what Ledger was talking about? I wish I knew. Clearly Ford is distracted and unsettled.
Just like that first night we met.
It feels like a lifetime ago, but the expression on his face and the discord in his eyes are so much the same as back then.
I want to help him, but I’m not sure how to.
That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.
“Ford?”
“Hmm?” He keeps staring straight ahead as I rise from the seat, all thoughts of having a second ice cream gone. Without thinking, I move through the darkened room to him, slide my arms through his, and wrap them around his waist.
The kiss I press to his shoulder blade is so unlike me and yet . . . strangely, it feels so right, like something he would do to help comfort me.
“Tough day?” I whisper against his back. He shrugs in return. “When I was little and had a tough day, my mom would let me sneak into her bed. She’d tell me there’s nothing a good cuddle can’t fix.”
The memory hits me out of nowhere. My mom’s huge bed. My head on her chest with her steady heartbeat beneath my ear as she played with my hair. The soft melody of her voice as she told me silly stories about me as a baby. About her childhood. About my dad. The muted laughter we’d share. The calm I felt as I drifted off to sleep to the quiet lilt of her voice.
He slides his hands over mine where they encircle his waist. I’m jolted back to the here, to the now, but my mom’s warmth is still wrapped around me, still cocooning me when I haven’t felt it in so very long.
“Wanna come cuddle with me?”
Ford’s body tenses momentarily. Almost as if he knows how much that question just cost me. As much as I’ve enjoyed—and, oh, how I’ve enjoyed—the sex with Ford, I’ve yet to stay overnight in his bed with him. Or let him stay in mine. Because that just seems too . . . intimate. That makes things too real. So my offer even surprises myself. “You sure?”
“Mm-hmm.”
We make our way through the inn toward my room. We don’t speak. Not as we brush our teeth. Not as he strips down to his boxer briefs and me to my tank top and panties. Not as we slide into my bed. Not as he rests his head on my stomach, arm heavy on my thighs, and I toy absently with his hair.
This feels . . . dare I say, normal?
Even the silence that settles around us isn’t awkward. I’m not sure why I thought it would when we’ve lived day in, day out, with each other for the past two months, but it clearly doesn’t.
Ford’s breathing slowly evens out to the point that I think he’s fallen asleep.
“My brothers are pissed at me,” he says quietly, jolting me back from the beginning stages of sleep.
“I’m listening,” I say.
“The biography about our dad. They want me to support the book. To participate in the promo tour and press junket for it like they are. I don’t want to.”
“Is there a particular reason why you don’t want to?”
His sigh weighs down the room. This is what Ledger was talking about. Ford’s lack of participation and his possible regret.
What the hell do I know about giving advice about this?
“Truth be told, the biography is great,” he says. “The author did an incredible job bringing my dad to life. He was often misconstrued by the public as is often the case when someone finds success like he did. Rumors and gossip and supposition. But the author was able to weave together everything he learned from his interviews with my dad to show him as the man that Callahan, Ledger, and I knew him to be.”
“What an incredible gift to have a piece of your dad alive in a sense.”
He mutters something incoherent, but I get the gist that he’s struggling with something more.
“There are things in the book I never knew about him. Stories about him and my mom that I’m so grateful to know. More about events we only knew bits and pieces of.”
“Then why are you so upset by it? Is it because you’ve lived with him in the public eye your whole life, that you wanted to keep those last, new things you’ve learned about him as private?”
“I never thought about it that way. But no. Our lives under the microscope and in the spotlight is all we’ve ever known. Every success, every failure, has been documented on some society page somewhere. Hell, there are pictures of us at our mom’s funeral out there. It’s a big montage of the grieving triplets that some paparazzo sold for a ridiculous amount of money. Nothing seems to be off limits.”
“I’m sorry. That had to be rough trying to cope and grieve and be in the public eye at the same time.”
“It is what it is. What we didn’t get in privacy we had in privilege. We know that. We’ve come to terms with that.”
“So what is it, then, about the biography that’s upset you so much?”
“There’s a chapter dedicated to our dad talking about us. I’m not a fan of what is and isn’t said. Callahan and Ledger don’t understand why it upsets me. They think I’m being a pussy and should get over it.”
I want to ask so many more questions but don’t. Clearly he’s telling me an abbreviated version of what he wants me to know, of how it’s made him feel. If I were in his shoes, the last thing I’d want is to be given the inquisition over it.
“Your feelings are your feelings regardless of what others think. You don’t need to justify them to anyone. I know for me that when someone tells me I shouldn’t be one way, it only pushes me further the opposite way.”
“You buying this inn is case in point.”
“Very true.” I laugh into the silence as I twirl a piece of his hair with my finger.
I can still recall very vividly Gregory and Joshua’s reactions when I met them after signing the papers at the auction house. The disdain and disbelief that etched in the lines of their faces when they’d learned I’d unexpectedly partnered with Ford, a man they were clearly jealous of.
When I’d taken something for myself, with someone else, and their say would no longer matter. Not that it did anyway, but in their own heads it did.
“It’s laughable if you think that Fordham Sharpe and his egomaniac brothers will accept any of your ideas on that godforsaken inn. He won’t take you seriously, and where will that leave you? Broke and at his mercy? A fucking laughingstock of a failure?”
Being backed in a corner is all I’ve ever felt before I took on this project. Before I took this leap. I know what it feels like to have your back against the wall, knowing the only way to step forward, to be heard, is to come out swinging.
That was my life. Is my life.
And maybe knowing intimately how that feels will allow me to comfort Ford some.