I pulled my hand away defensively. “We need to stick with our agreement, Seth.”
His lips tugged into a wicked smile. “I’m down with that . . . for now.”
I sat back in my chair and sipped at my chai.
Seth changed the subject, talking about his day and asking about mine. Minus the sexual innuendos and subtle touches.
I was relieved and disappointed at the same time.
CHAPTER 13
RILEY
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said with a laugh as I watched Seth rig up two fishing poles.
After two weeks of seeing him almost every day, I was losing my hesitance to tell him how I really felt.
I’d laughed a lot over the last couple of weeks, more than I could remember doing in my entire life.
My desire to strip him naked had only grown, but he’d been true to his word, and he never pushed or used the chemistry between us to manipulate me.
Getting together on a daily basis was becoming almost natural to me. To be honest, it was also something I craved now. It would probably feel abnormal not to see his smiling face or experience his wicked sense of humor every day.
It didn’t much matter what we did or where we went.
He’d offered to take me anywhere. After all, he did own a private jet. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go everywhere with him, but I’d chosen to just be . . . normal.
We’d checked out several restaurants in the area, including Maya’s Bistro, where I’d met Aiden’s wife, Skye, who was quickly becoming one of the friends I’d never had.
There were movies, where Seth had happily discovered that I liked science fiction stuff rather than chick flicks.
I swore that I’d gained another couple of pounds from meeting up with him at the Coffee Shack daily, but I was learning not to sweat it, since I ran every day on the beach. Since Seth always assured me that women with curves were sexy, and encouraged me to eat whatever I wanted, I’d lost the somewhat paranoid notion that I had to be thin.
Seth looked up at me. “You wanted to do this,” he reminded me.
“I’ve never fished,” I explained. “But I’m going to fumble around like a newbie. And now I’m a little bit worried if this dock will hold both of us.”
I had suggested that we take a fishing trip on the old dock that sat on his vacant beach property. I’d been taken aback when I saw a flash of disagreement on his face at first. But he’d brushed his hesitance off and complied with the idea almost immediately.
“It will hold up,” he said as he stood. “This dock has been here as long as I can remember. It was built for the long haul.”
“I guess you would have taken it down if you’d ended up building your resort here.”
He nodded as he handed me one of the fishing poles. “I would have,” he answered. “In fact, I looked forward to it.”
I got distracted when he taught me how to cast my line and didn’t think about his statement again until we were both sitting casually side by side on the dock with our lines in the water.
“Why were you looking forward to taking it down?” I asked curiously.
There was a moment of silence before he spoke. “I spent a lot of time here as a kid. Fishing. Just like this. My mom used to bring us here.”
“So you have good memories here.” I was confused. Did he love the place or hate it?
“Some,” he confirmed. “But I always knew she didn’t come here to fish with Noah, Aiden, and me.”
I turned my head to look at him. Even though I could only see his profile, I could tell that his square jaw was tight with tension. “Then what did she want here?”
“She came here to watch for my biological father,” he said huskily. “It’s the perfect vantage point to see planes coming and going from the small airport. I think she watched for him every day, but when she really thought he was coming, she’d come here to wait. Only to be disappointed when he didn’t arrive.”
My heart ached from hearing the raw vulnerability in his voice. “Did you watch, too?” I asked.
“Hell, no. Everybody knew he wasn’t going to come except my mother.” His voice was tight.
“I’m so sorry,” I answered. “It must have been hard to be without a dad.”
“Now that we know the truth about him, I think we were better off. My half-siblings went through hell when they were kids because he was an abusive alcoholic. I’m not sure what my mother ever saw in him. But she still hoped he’d come back, because she thought she was married to him.”
“He was never around?”
“To tell the truth, I don’t even really remember him. He dropped in once in a while, just long enough to get my mother pregnant. But he rarely even acknowledged his bastard kids.” His voice was low and thoughtful.
“He didn’t even talk to you?” I asked, flabbergasted that Seth had really never talked to his dad about anything.
“Nope. He was more interested in pulling my mother away from us so they could go somewhere alone. She was a beautiful woman.”
“Bastard,” I grumbled.
His lips turned up in a small smile. “Actually, we were the bastards. An entire family of illegitimate kids who had no idea why he rarely chose to visit us. You must know that my father was a bigamist. One family on the East Coast, and the other on the West?”
I wasn’t going to lie to him. The whole sordid story had been all over the news. “I knew that, but I had no idea that he’d abandoned you.”
“He did. Completely. He was a goddamn billionaire, but he never gave my mother a penny to take care of the kids he’d fathered. We always lived dirt-poor.”
I hadn’t known that, and my heart squeezed at the injustice. What sacrifice would Seth’s father have performed by giving his mother plenty of funds to raise his own children? To me, it just seemed . . . cruel. He’d had the money, and he never would have missed it. At all.
“But the whole thing made you sad?” I could tell by Seth’s reaction that the bigamist thing still bothered him.
“Not so much me as it did my mother. It makes me a hell of a lot angrier that he always hurt her. It killed all of us to see her wait, watch, and never give up hope that he’d eventually come home. She worked her ass off to support all of us, yet my so-called billionaire father never contributed a dime.”
“Did she know he was wealthy?” I found it difficult to imagine that she hadn’t had some resentment toward the man who had fathered her children.
“None of us really know. Mom didn’t talk about him much. I guess she wanted us to be kids and not worry about adult stuff. She was pretty tight-lipped, but she had to have known. On the rare occasions he did show up, he came on a private jet. And she flew on it when he took her away for a while. I suppose he could have come up with some story, but near the end, we know she found out about him having another family and another wife.”
I watched him stare out at the ocean, and I instinctively knew that he was caught up in remembering all his mother had gone through.
Now I regretted the fact that I’d pushed to come here. I hadn’t known it would dredge up so many bad experiences for him.
“We can go,” I offered softly. “I didn’t know you didn’t like being here.”