Once Upon A Friendship

Half expecting his elevator card to be defunct as well, he was considering taking the stairs to the top floor, when he stepped into the arriving car to find a top-floor aide—Amy something or other—standing there. “Thirty-six, Mr. Connelly?” she asked, naming their destination like an elevator attendant.

“Yes, please.” He didn’t have to fake the smile he bestowed upon her. Amy was...nice on the eyes.

And his split from Jenna had happened over a week ago. Not that that made any difference. Liam didn’t hit on employees.

Or date them.

That was bad for business. Fodder for lawsuits. And made life far more complicated than it needed to be.

Just like he’d never, ever look at Marie or Gabrielle in that way. Not because he feared a lawsuit. No, something far worse. He feared losing them.

It was the worst thing he could imagine. Worse even than catching a deadly disease and being told he only had months to live.

Okay, that was a little dramatic, he allowed silently, as he watched the lit floor numbers climb slowly upward. When the button for floor thirty-six was pressed, the elevator didn’t stop on its way up or down.

Firmly in check, he thought about the imminent showdown with his old man. Pretty Amy was completely forgotten when the door opened, giving Liam access to the sacred top floor. His office was to the right. Though he was curious now to see if the old man had ordered his things to be packed, Liam didn’t bother to check.

Walter might take a hard line and make harsh threats, but Liam wasn’t a kid anymore. And his father wasn’t getting any younger.

The old man needed him.

They’d work through this.

His father’s office door was closed. Meaning nothing. It was always closed.

He didn’t kid himself. The hours, weeks, months ahead were not going to be easy. His father would do anything he could to make him pay for his obstinacy.

But in the end, he’d also acknowledge that Liam had done the right thing. Walter wouldn’t respect a man who didn’t know how to be strong in the face of adversity.

He didn’t knock. And didn’t listen as Gloria, his father’s personal assistant, tried to object to Liam’s occupancy in the private sanctum without an appointment. He wasn’t the least bit intimidated by the woman who was known to many in the company as the battle-ax. She’d been around since Liam was too young to know what battle-ax meant. She liked him.

He liked her, too.

Bursting into his father’s office, Liam was ready for battle.

Or he would have been if the door had opened. Turning the handle a second time, his sweaty palm slipped against the locked hardware.

“What’s going on?” He turned to Gloria. “Where’s my father?”

“He took the rest of the day off.”

Liam glanced back at the closed door. “He doesn’t ever take the day off.” Not even on Christmas—though he did tend to work at home more often than not on holidays.

Gloria shuffled a pile of papers, shrugged and said, “Well, he did.” She was glancing between her computer screen and the file folder she was sliding the newly aligned papers into.

He could try to charm information out of her, but he didn’t. His issues were with his father.

Besides, he knew now where the old man would be. Turning, he left the office without another word and went straight to his own. Where his father would have expected him to go first.

Just as he’d suspected, Walter was there. Sitting in Liam’s chair. Surrounded by...not a lot. Other than the mahogany desk and matching chair Liam had picked out for himself when he’d been promoted to the thirty-sixth floor five years before, the room was stripped bare.

“You work fast.” He leaned against the door he’d just closed. The thirty-sixth floor offices were soundproofed and what he had to say to his father had to stay between the two of them.

“You signed the papers. I told you what would happen if you did.”

“You had a spy at the bank?” Why the thought hadn’t occurred to him before then, he didn’t know. Walter was ruthless.

And Liam felt stupid. Thinking he was going to walk right in and announce to his father that he’d refused to give in to his threat. And then deliver the speech he’d been rehashing for years. The one where he told his father how much he respected and admired him, told him that he’d continue to serve him, but that he also had to have a life, a mind, of his own.

Building up to the part where he told him that while he still planned to give forty-plus hours a week to Connelly Investments, he was also going to more seriously pursue a career in journalism. Pointing out the benefits to the firm if he continued to rise to success in a world of internet information delivery.

“A spy, Liam? You think we’re playing some kind of game here? Grow up, man.”

He listened for the disappointment hiding in the derision in his father’s voice. The seemingly imperceptible note of fear.

And missed them both.

“I want to know about the conversation I overheard in George’s office this morning.” Liam stuck to his plan to fight aggression with aggression if he had to. If reason didn’t work. “Why would our head counsel promise someone an impossible investment return? Even at its best, the holding he mentioned didn’t promise those kinds of returns.”

Liam had overheard just a small bit of the conversation, but enough to know that something didn’t add up. He gave his father the particulars.

George had been on the phone and hadn’t heard Liam wander in. It had been before seven, before office staff started to arrive. Just before Walter had called Liam into his private sanctum to issue yet another threat—the one where he’d be cut off if he went through with the Arapahoe deal.

Otherwise Liam would have asked the question earlier that morning.

“That investment will not be impossible to meet.” Walter’s words were quiet. Deadening. “And you are no longer welcome here.”

Steel could not have been stronger. Or more cold.

“I heard what George said. I know that account. There’s no way it’s going to make that kind of return. I deserve to know what’s going on.”

“How dare you practice duplicity and then stand here and demand answers?”

Liam checked himself against the accusation of duplicity. The pause allowed his father to move in for the kill.

“I thought you’d learned your lesson freshman year, Liam. Today you have proven that you did not. We cannot be a team, you and I. I can no longer trust you. If you will go behind my back, keeping pertinent information from me because your two harlots call your name, there is no end to the possibilities of other ways you could betray me.”

“Buying that building had nothing to do with you, or with Connelly Investments. It wasn’t a lucrative purchase. Or a building you’d have any interest in. And they are not my, or anyone else’s, harlots. As I’ve told you before, they are family to me.”

More family to him than Walter was.

“You moved trust monies behind my back.”

“My trust money. I’m a man, Dad. I have to be able to do some things on my own.”

“But not behind my back. That trust money was yours, but it was family money.”

“From my mother’s family.” Walter had met Margaret, Liam’s mother, after he’d scratched and clawed his way to his first million. She’d been born into the privileged life.

“It was our money, your mother’s and mine, when we opened that trust for you.”

Technically. It had been given to them at his maternal grandfather’s death, with the express wish that if they didn’t need it to secure their own futures it be put in trust for Liam.

“If I’d told you about the building, you’d have done everything in your power to block that sale.”

“It’s a stupid purchase. Those old folks are paying far below average rent. You’ll never be able to turn a decent profit.”

“They’re paying all they can afford on fixed incomes.” Liam stated the more pertinent truth. “And we aren’t going to lose money on the deal. We didn’t go into it with an eye to support ourselves. Marie has her coffee shop. Gabrielle’s a lawyer. I told you that.”

“And you, Liam? While you’re so busy exerting your manhood, you still expect me to support you?”

“I earn every dime you pay me.”

“You say you’re a man, but you didn’t tell me about that old apartment building because you were afraid.”

The little bit of truth that lurked in the ugly words spurred Liam onward in a battle he didn’t want to fight.

“I’m standing up to you now.”

Going into business with Gabrielle and Marie...it had been his way to solidify his place in their future. To make the three of them, their little family, a brother and his sisters, legal. He’d done what he had to do.

“You are standing only because you don’t have a chair to sit on.”

The old man was sitting in the only chair left in the office. “What’s going on, Dad? What deal did I stumble on this morning that you don’t want me to know about? Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? This has nothing to do with a loser apartment building I sunk my own pittance into.”

“You stumbled onto nothing more than a joke, Liam. A joke.” Spittle sprayed on Liam’s desk as his father repeated the word. “George was on the phone with Bob Sternan. They were mocking Senator Billingsley and his promises regarding the Indian land he recently purchased.”

Land that his father had purchased, with a signed agreement from the tribe, and developed several years before. A development that he’d since sold and which was for sale again. A development currently owned by Senator Ronald Billingsley—the immoral man whose campaign Liam had once thought his father had supported. He’d later found that neither his father nor anyone closely associated with Connelly Investments had been listed as campaign contributors.

And his father had told him to his face, looking him in the eye, that he’d never support the crooked politician.

Mock him, though, yes.

George had been on the line with Bob Sternan. A senator who’d proven himself trustworthy again and again. A family man who chose to serve his state without lining his own pockets.

Jenna’s dad.

Another man he respected whom he’d disappointed. Jenna had broken up with him. But Liam had agreed to take the blame so she didn’t have to face her father’s lectures. They hadn’t been in love. Nor had they relished the idea of a match made for business or the sake of the public good. They hadn’t wanted to marry just to bring together an appearance of money and morals that would instill public trust in their families.

Liam had asked her to marry him because he was thirty years old and the old man had been ragging on him constantly about his duties to provide a Connelly heir.

And Jenna had agreed because she hadn’t had the gumption to stand up to her father.

But when the wedding date started to get closer and neither one of them had been able to see themselves married to the other...

Liam had told himself he’d go through with it out of duty. He’d given his word. And because the idea of a kid of his own someday was kind of growing on him.

He’d have been faithful to Jenna.

He just wouldn’t have been happy with her.

So when she’d begged him to dump her, he had.

Liam was batting a thousand here at striking out.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Because it was the right thing to do. “I should have told you about the deal. I am grateful for all that you’ve done for me. I just need to be my own man, Dad. Surely you can understand that.”

His father’s steely blue gaze didn’t warm a bit. “I understand only that I can no longer trust you.”

“Of course you can. You know me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, son. I would have bet this building, my entire empire, on the fact that you would never be duplicitous with me.”

He’d needed to make the deal on his own. He needed Marie and Gabrielle solidly in his life. To have something, someone, to call his own. Someone he could trust with his inside self.

“It’s a worthless apartment building.” By Connelly standards.

“Then you’re stupider than I thought, trading your future for a worthless piece of real estate.”

The old man was testing him. There was a way to turn this around. He had to know his father well enough to find it.

“Get out.”

He wanted to speak, to come up with the right words.

“Dad...”

“Get out, Liam. I’ve had George remove you from my will. You are no longer my son.”

He was bluffing. It wasn’t the first time Walter had said such a thing. And he’d done worse. Walter had once likened Liam to a terminal disease. He’d called him a fool. Told him time and time and time again that he’d never make it in the world.

And then he’d buy him a new car. Give him a promotion...

“Anything personal you had in this room has been relocated to your apartment. You have twenty-four hours to get that cleared out. Anything left there at this time tomorrow will be disposed of when the locks are changed. You can keep the car.”

“Dad...”

“Get out.”

The man sitting calmly in Liam’s chair didn’t blink. His hands weren’t trembling. His mouth didn’t twitch.

Liam looked at him and saw a stranger.

“You are no longer welcome here, Liam,” Walter said as though he was ordering a glass of water with the coffee he’d just been served. “Either you go quietly or I will call security.”

Liam didn’t remember getting back to his car. He knew he’d done so on his own. Without escort. He climbed behind the wheel, starting the car with a calm he’d probably feel if he felt anything at all.

What did you do when you realized that what you’d counted on to never change didn’t even exist?

All these years he’d put up with the man’s abuse because he’d thought he understood him. Thought that, ultimately, he and his father would be a team.

The old man was really capable of disowning him? What honorable man did that? Threaten, yes. Make life hell, maybe, if he thought his son needed toughening up.

But denounce him completely, as though he didn’t exist?

He had someplace to be. So he drove.

He turned away from the showpiece building that housed Connelly Investments, heading toward historic downtown, and then found a moving and storage company with his satellite phone service. Placed an order for the following morning.

And only faltered once—when the friendly female voice on the other end of the line asked him the final delivery address for his packed-up life.

He told them he’d have to get back to them.

CHAPTER THREE

MARIE AND GABRIELLE took each other out to a quick lunch at their favorite salad shop—not the fine dining Liam would have preferred. The building’s purchase was a big deal—more for Gabrielle than any of them, as no one in her immediate family had ever owned anything more than a car.

“I might not be able to eat out again for a while.” Gabrielle chuckled as she slid her arm through her friend’s, hugging Marie’s elbow to her side as they left the self-serve restaurant and headed toward her car. “I’ll just have to take scraps from our business tenant’s kitchen.”

“I have a feeling our new business tenant, the owner of that famous coffee shop downstairs, will give both of us anything we want,” Marie said laconically. They were heading back to the coffee shop. Marie had good, dependable employees, a few of whom were qualified to run the shop in her absence. She just didn’t enjoy being absent.

“Yeah, and if history serves, the owner will work us both to the bone for it, too.” Gabrielle had been with Marie from the very beginning, traipsing around Denver looking for just the right space to lease. Spending eighteen-hour days cleaning the place. Choosing a logo. Ordering. And working until they dropped when business picked up before Marie had had a chance, or enough profit, to hire employees.

“Can you believe it?” Marie skipped as she glanced at Gabrielle, yanking a bit on her arm. “We actually did it. We own an entire historic apartment building!”

Gabrielle smiled. And worried, too. About Liam. The future. The mammoth undertaking they’d agreed to. The fifty or more senior citizens who were counting on them to keep a roof over their heads.

The empty apartments they had yet to rent. Hopefully to a young family or two. Starting a new generation of traditions.

She wanted to tell Marie about Liam’s despondency regarding his father that morning. But why put a damper on her friend’s joy? Especially since the only evidence she had that anything was wrong was her own sense of foreboding...

Still, she couldn’t help but ponder the practical ramifications of their new responsibility while she drove the two of them home. Parking in her reserved spot in the small lot behind the building—parking was going to be a problem if, in the future, they rented to too many young, two-car families—she put a smile on her face as she followed Marie out of the car.

“Let’s go in the front door,” Marie said, her grin bubbling over as Gabrielle pulled out her key and turned toward the private back entrance off the parking lot. “Let’s be like landlords checking up on our business tenant...”

Even at thirty, Marie had a playful, girly streak. It was one of the things Gabrielle loved about her. “You are the business tenant,” she reminded her on a laugh.

They were in partnership, she and Marie and Liam. A legally binding arrangement that kept the three of them together. Solidifying their odd little family into the future. More than the building, the investment, the asset, it was that fact that put the smile on Gabrielle’s face.

* * *

“WHAT’S TAKING THEM so long?”

“They’re coming around the front.”

“Janice, watch your mother, she’s at it again.”

Standing behind the counter of Marie’s quickly decorated coffee shop, Liam turned when he heard Grace speaking to Janice in the cacophony of voices around him.

Janice’s mother Clara, a ninety-five-year-old woman who lived with her seventy-three-year-old daughter in apartment 491, was picking up the chocolate Hershey’s Kisses that Grace had had a couple of women spreading around the tables. Clara was stashing them away in the covered compartment beneath the seat of her walker. The old woman was known for her stealing. Most often involving chocolate.

Marie was known for buying chocolate and purposely leaving it lying around just to watch the elderly woman’s joy as she found it. Grace, an eighty-year-old resident who baked every morning for Marie and was the organizer of all functions among the residents of the building, was still tying balloons to chairs. Knowing everyone well from his years of visiting the girls, Liam had known just whom to seek out in planning the homecoming that was to have been in lieu of dessert after the fancy lunch that was supposed to have happened that day.

The lunch, of course, hadn’t happened. And the party would have gone on, with or without him, too. That’s how it usually was with him and the girls. He came and went at his pleasure. If he was there, great. If not, no big deal. Was that why it worked so well?

The realization, on this day of standing up as a man, didn’t sit well with him. At all. He loved Marie and Gabrielle more than anyone else on earth. They were his sisters in his heart. He looked out for them. Felt protective of them.

And, he supposed, he used them, too. Like a brother used sisters.

To whine to.

To have them always be there.

And to know they’d always be happy to see him when he bothered to show up.

Like now, as he stood there, hands in his pockets, watching as the residents got ready for the big moment. He’d paid for the party.

And here he was thinking it was a bonus that he’d been able to show up.

Liam didn’t like the man he was seeing.

At all.

Was the old man right then? Was he worthless?

“Shh, quiet, everyone, they’re rounding the corner! They’re coming in the front!” Susan Gruber, wife to Dale, said, with a sideways smile to her husband. Liam had never seen one without the other.

The front door opened. He pasted a huge smile on his face, glad that he’d made it back in time.

“Surprise!” More than fifty voices chorused at once. His was among them. And the shocked happiness on both of the girls’ faces was worth the effort it was costing him to hang around, to pretend that all was well. That he was going to be fine.

He was a good man. Maybe he’d taken advantage of the girls all these years. Maybe he hadn’t seen that. And maybe, now that he did see it, it was up to him to do what he could to rectify the situation. Maybe, very soon, he’d be in a position to be around more, to tend to them for a change.

Because he was decent. His father be damned.

He’d remembered every birthday. Always took them out. Brought gifts that he’d picked out himself and that they’d loved. Whenever they needed a favor, he did what he had to do to grant it.

He should have noticed that they didn’t call much.

And maybe he should call them more often, instead of just stopping in for his weekly home-cooked meals when he didn’t have anything else to do. Or dropping by after an evening function when he needed to whine.

He watched as their gazes scanned the crowd gathering around them—residents and many of Marie’s regular coffee customers, all with cards and good wishes. Both of his partners were grinning from ear to ear. Gabi noticed him first, elbowed Marie and nodded in his direction. Their shock at his presence was obvious. Their gazes met with his. Nothing was said. They didn’t know he’d just lost the only life he’d ever known. They’d just been glad to find him there.

And he was glad he’d come.

* * *

PEOPLE STAYED FOR over an hour. Eating cake. Drinking coffee. Conversation flurried. As some of the older residents drifted upstairs to their homes, more customers came in with cards and congratulatory messages. Police officers. A couple of board members from a downtown historical society. The district state representative.

They might not be expecting to turn much of a profit, but the building they’d purchased was valuable to the community. At least in a historical sense.

And Liam had written the guest list. Gabrielle had just learned that from Grace. But she knew that he’d wanted people to know that a good thing was happening at the Arapahoe. He thought if people knew, they’d be more apt to support Marie’s shop.

He’d wanted that for her.

He’d always wanted what was best for them.

Gabrielle couldn’t remember feeling so utterly...almost content. They’d done a good thing, her and Marie and Liam. Threefold. A goofy name for their business, but it fit them.

Her partners, who were both more social than she was, were working the room now, moving from group to group while Gabi made certain that everyone had enough to drink. Liam had stood back until she and Marie finally noticed him there. But he was making up for his reticence. And seemed to be just fine. So, good. Her concern that morning had been unwarranted.

Grace was keeping the coffee flowing. The shop was still open to the public and business went on even in the midst of celebration. Sam, one of Marie’s full-time employees, was taking orders and serving organic sandwiches as well as coffee.

Gabi had to get back to work, too. While she’d kept her afternoon clear of appointments, she had a hearing in the morning regarding an estate dispute between siblings and had notes to prepare. She’d brought everything with her to work from home where she wouldn’t be interrupted.

She was surprised Liam hadn’t left.

Glancing his way as she carried a coffeepot around the room, refilling the cups of those who were just drinking it straight and black, she tried to catch his eye. He’d been managing to avoid her.

Because they were crowded with well-wishers? Or because he had something to hide? Maybe her relief had been premature.