gaze to the blue, digital numbers counting down above the door. “I’ll tell you the whole story once we leave the building, but I really am doing better. The transition was tough. He was right about that, but it’s better now.”
He kept glancing at me on our way down like he wasn’t quite sure whether to believe me or not. As soon as we got to the sidewalk, he demanded that I tell him what’d been going on and I did. I told him everything.
About my insecurities, uncertainties, and eventual inability to bite my tongue. I didn’t leave anything out—not even the parts about René that made Rick look like he wanted to jump on the first plane and go knock the guy’s teeth out.
While I spoke, we went to a deli down the street and found a table. It was only once we’d ordered our food that I got to the last part of what I needed to talk to him about.
Since I’d decided I wasn’t going to be holding back with Dane anymore, that also meant that I didn’t want to have to lie to anyone about our relationship. Not even Rick. If we were going to be doing this for real, and it certainly seemed like we were, then we were going to do it right.
Dane had been handling Jefferson all along, and he’d told me he’d speak to Rick about it as well, but he was my brother. If anyone was going to be talking to him about my love life, it would be me. Besides, I didn’t need Dane to keep fighting all my battles for me.
Rick whistled under his breath when I’d finished telling him everything about France. “I’m fucking relieved you had Dane with you and on your side. I told you that you could think of him like an extension of me while you’re away from home. I’m really glad he’s been taking care of you. I would’ve kicked his ass if he wasn’t.”
“There’s no reason to kick his ass,” I said. “But there is something else I need to tell you.”
“Yeah?” He cocked his head, taking a sip of his iced coffee as his gaze fixed on mine. “What is it? Why do you look so nervous all of a sudden?”
“Because I don’t think of Dane as an extension of you at all,” I said, bracing myself mentally as I looked him right in the eyes. “In fact, my feelings for him are the complete opposite to familial. I’m falling in love with him, Rick. And unless I’m misreading all the signs, I think he’s falling in love with me too.”
Chapter 36
DANE
After two weeks of hardly hearing from Jefferson at all unless it was about work, I was over it. I’d given the old man space and time, but now I needed to know what was going on.
The Killen mansion was situated in Carnegie Hill and was a red-brick, colonial building as big as some of the schools in the area. In fact, some of the other mansions that had been just like it had been converted into schools.
Jefferson was even leaving it to the trust that operated the school he had attended as a child. All the kids in the Killen family had attended the same preparatory school as he had, and once he was gone, he hoped that his family home would be a place of learning for children for years to come.
Little did the operators of the trust know that Jefferson had attached strings and scholarships to the property he had bequeathed to them. Billions of his hard-earned and inherited dollars had been earmarked as a scholarship fund for children who wouldn’t ordinarily be able to attend the school, and he’d even bought several townhouses nearby where those children could live.
I was one of the people he’d entrusted with ensuring that the directions in his will were carried out, and I fully intended on making sure that they were. Every time I walked up to this house, I tried to imagine what those scholarship kids would think when they saw it one day—the first time when they laid eyes on it and realized they’d be attending school here for years of their lives.
Jefferson was a good man. He was really excited about the possibility of changing the lives of so many kids, even if he knew it meant he’d be gone when it happened. He already donated tons of money to scholarship funds, but he felt differently about