Maverick Millionaires

Mac lifted his face to the sky, enjoying the rain-tinged wind on his face. “I built this house to be, as much as possible, hurricane-proof.”

“Don’t you have a shelter?”

“That’s for tornadoes, not hurricanes.” Mac told her, walking back into the room. He lifted a bottle of wine and aimed the opening at her glass. “Have some wine, try to relax.”

“Huh.” Rory gulped from her glass and her anxious eyes darted to the rapidly darkening sky.

He needed to distract her or else she’d soon be a basket case. The wind howled and the lights flickered. Rory pushed herself farther into the corner of the couch. He sat down next to her, put his feet up onto the coffee table and placed his hand on her thigh beneath the edge of her shorts. More sex would be a great distraction, he thought, but Rory’s white face and tense body suggested she might kick him if he proposed that. Besides, they’d done it three times since noon. She needed some time to recover.

And that meant talking. Dammit. Not his best talent. Maybe he’d get lucky and she’d start.

He was given a temporary reprieve when his cell phone buzzed. Picking it up, he saw a message from Quinn, checking whether they were okay, and he quickly replied. He picked up Rory’s cell phone and tossed it into her lap. “I suggest you let your friends and family know there is a hurricane and you are safe. They tend to freak if you don’t. And the cell towers sometimes go down during storms so we might lose our signal.”

Rory nodded quickly and her fingers flew across the keypad. Within thirty seconds her phone buzzed and she was smiling at the message on the screen. “It’s Shay, suggesting I climb under a bed with a bottle of vodka.”

Shay...now there was a subject they’d been avoiding. He sipped his wine and rested his head on the back of the couch. “Did you take flak because we almost kissed?”

Rory tapped her finger against her glass. “You have no idea. She refused to talk to me for six months and it took us a while to find our groove again.”

Mac frowned. “Look, I admit I wasn’t exactly Prince Charming that night, I messed up in numerous ways but, God, we were young, and nothing happened!” Mac waited a beat. “Even if that open-mic incident hadn’t happened, she knew we were on our way out—”

“She’d mentioned she thought she was approaching her expiry date,” Rory interjected, her voice dry.

Mac winced. “Look, I can understand her thinking I’m a douche, but why couldn’t she forgive you?”

Rory’s eyes flicked to his face and went back to studying her wine. “The reason why Shay has such massive insecurities and the reason why I am not good at relationships is the same.”

Wait. Why would she think that she wasn’t good at relationships? She was open and friendly and funny and smart, who wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with her? Well, he wouldn’t...but he didn’t want to be in a relationship with anyone so he didn’t count. She had to be better at relationships than he was; then again, pretty much ninety percent of the world’s population was. “How do you know that you are bad at relationships?”

Rory’s laugh was brittle. She looked him in the eye and tried, unsuccessfully, to smile. “I can date, I can flirt, I can do light and fluffy, but I suck at commitment. I drive men crazy.”

He couldn’t imagine it. Here he was, the King of Easily Bored, and he was as entranced with Rory as he’d been from the beginning. “How?”

Rory waved his question away. “When I think things are getting hot or heavy or too much to deal with—when I get scared—I take the easy way out and I run. I just disappear.”

There was a message in her statement and he was smart enough to hear it. When she thought their time was over she’d make like Casper and fade away. Good to know, he thought cynically. Thinking back, he remembered what she’d said earlier. “You said there was a reason why you and Shay act like you do. Will you tell me what it is?”

He was as surprised as she looked at his question. He hadn’t intended to ask that. Did he really want to know the answer? It seemed he did, he reluctantly admitted. Rory was, when she let go, naturally warm and giving, and he wondered why she felt the need to protect herself.

“Well, that’s a hell of a subject to discuss during a hurricane,” Rory replied, tucking her feet under her. “Actually, it’s a hell of a subject at any time.”

“We can talk about something else, if you prefer.” Mac backtracked to give her, and him, an out of the conversation. He stood and walked over to the open balcony doors, holding his flashlight in his hand. Unable to resist the power of the approaching storm, he stepped outside and let the rapidly increasing wind slam into him. He leaned forward, surprised that the wind could hold him upright as the rain smacked his face like icy bullets.

Hello, Hurricane Des, Mac thought as he stepped back into the house and closed and bolted the doors behind him. The lights flickered and he checked that the hurricane lamp and matches were on the coffee table. They would probably lose power sooner rather than later. Mac resumed his seat, linked his hands across his stomach and looked at Rory. “Want to talk about something else?”

Rory shrugged and pulled the tassels of the pillow through nervous fingers. He knew it wasn’t only the crazy wind slamming into the house that made her nervous. The power dropped, surged and died.

“Perfect,” Rory muttered.

Within a minute Mac had the hurricane lamps casting a gentle glow across the room and smiled at Rory’s relieved sigh. “My parents are hugely dysfunctional...”

“Aren’t they all?”

Rory cocked an eyebrow at his interruption but he gestured for her to continue. “When I was thirteen, I was in the attic looking for an old report card—I wanted to show Shay that I was better at math than she was.” Rory tipped her head. “Strange that I remember that... Anyway, I was digging in an old trunk when I found photographs of my father with a series of attractive women.” Rory pushed her hair back with one hand. Her eyes looked bleak. “It didn’t take me long to realize those photos were the reason why my dad moved out of the house for months at a time.”

Mac winced.

“He betrayed my mother with so many women,” Rory continued. “I’ve always felt—and I know Shay does too—that he betrayed us, his family. He cheated on my mom and he cheated us of his time and his love, of being home when we needed him. He always put these other women before us, before me. Yet my mother took him back, still takes him back.”

Okay, now a lot of Shay’s crazy behavior made sense. “Hell, baby.”

“He said one thing but his actions taught me the opposite.”

“What do you mean?”

Rory shrugged. “He’d tell me that he was going on a work trip but a friend would tell me that she saw him at the mall with another woman. Or he’d say that he was going hunting or fishing but he never shot a damn thing. Or ever caught a fish.

“And my mother’s misery was a pretty big clue that he was a-huntin’ and a-fishin’ for something outside the animal kingdom.”

Underneath the bitterness he heard sadness and the echo of a little girl who’d lost her innocence at far too young an age.

“I thought the world of him, loved him dearly and a part of me still does. But the grown-up me doesn’t like him much and, after a lifetime of lies, I can’t believe a word he says. I question everything he does. As a result, trust is a difficult concept for me and has always been in short supply.” Rory dredged up a smile.

Mac swallowed his rage and stopped himself from voicing his opinion about her father. Telling Rory that he thought her father was a waste of skin wouldn’t make her feel better. Rory was bright and loving and giving and her father’s selfishness had caused her to shrink in on herself, to limit herself to standing on the outside of love and life, looking in. She deserved to be loved and cherished and protected—by someone, not by Mac but by someone who would make her happy.

God, he wanted to thump the man for ripping that away from her.

“Tell me about your childhood, Mac,” Rory softly asked, dropping her head to rest it against the back of the couch. “Dear God, that wind sounds like a banshee on crack.”

“Ignore it. We’re safe,” Mac told her, slipping his hand between her knees. He never spoke about his blue-collar upbringing in that industrial, cold town at the back end of the world. It was firmly in his past.

But there was something about sitting in the semidark with Rory, safe from the wind and rain, that made him want to open up. “Low income, young, uneducated single mother. She had few of her own resources, either financial or emotional. She relied on a steady stream of men to provide both.”

He waited to see disgust on Rory’s face or, worse, pity. There was neither, she just looked at him and waited. Her lack of reaction gave him the courage to continue. “I was encouraged not to go to school, not to go to practice, not to aim for anything higher than a dead-end job at the canning factory or on one of the fishing boats. When I achieved anything, I was punished. And badly.”

Rory sat up, and in the faint glow of the lamp, he could see her horrified expression. “What?”

Mac shrugged. “Crabs in a bucket.”

“What are you talking about?” Rory demanded.

“You put a bunch of crabs in a bucket, one will try to climb out. The other crabs won’t let that happen. They pull at the crab who’s trying to escape until he falls back down. My mother was the perfect example of crab mentality. She refused to allow me to achieve anything more than what she achieved, which was pretty much nothing.”

“How did you escape?”

“Stubbornness and orneriness...and my skill with a stick. I waited her out and as soon as I finished school I left. I simply refused to live her life. There was only one person in life I could rely on and that was myself. I was the only one who could make my dreams come true...”

“And you did.”

Mac looked at her. Yeah, he had. The wind emitted a high, sustained shriek and Rory grabbed his hand and squeezed. He couldn’t blame her; it sounded like a woman screaming for her life, and the house responded with creaks and groans.

Through the screaming wind he heard the thump of something large and he looked into the impenetrable darkness to see what had landed on the veranda. A tree branch? A plastic chair his guys had left behind? Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to stay in the living room next to the floor-to-ceiling windows, even though they were covered with boards. He stood up and hauled Rory to her feet.

It was also the perfect time to end this conversation... Looking back changed nothing and there was nothing there he wanted to remember.

“Where are we going?” she asked as he picked up the lamp.

“Bathroom.”

“Why?”

“It’s enclosed and probably the safest place to wait out the storm,” Mac said, pulling her down the passage.

“Are we in danger?” Rory squeaked, gripping his uninjured biceps with both hands as they walked into the solidly dark house.

“No.” At least, he didn’t think so, but while he was prepared to take his chances with the storm, he wasn’t prepared to risk Rory. Mac pulled a heavy comforter from the top shelf in the walk-in closet and handed Rory the pillows from the bed. In the bathroom, Rory helped him put a makeshift bed between the bathtub and the sink. He sat with his back to the tiled wall and Rory lay down, her head on his thigh. Touching her hair, he listened to the sounds of the storm.

Rory yawned and tipped her head back to look at him. “I’m so tired.”

Mac touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “Go to sleep...if you can.”

“Can I put my head on your shoulder?” Rory asked. “At least then, if the roof blows off, I’ll have you to hold on to.”

“The roof isn’t going to lift, oh, dramatic one.” But he shifted down, placed a pillow beneath his head and wrapped his good arm around her slim back when she placed her head on his shoulder. Her leg draped over his and her knee was achingly close to his happy place. It would be so easy, a touch here, a stroke there...

Mac kissed her forehead and pulled her closer to him. “Go to sleep, Rorks. You’re safe with me.”

“Tonight’s conversation didn’t seem that light and fluffy, Mac,” Rory murmured in a sleepy voice.

It hadn’t been, Mac admitted. They’d have to watch out for that. It was his last thought before exhaustion claimed him.

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