Once Upon a Friendship

“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.