The Cornerstone (3 page)

Wes passed a phone over his shoulder, and I knew without looking it contained a rundown on our sister’s fiancé. Thank God for Wes’s fuck buddy at the CIA.

There wasn’t much beyond the basics: name (Matthew Antrim Walsh), date of birth (nearly three years older than my sister), federal tax filings (architect-engineer, and his bottom line was annoyingly healthy), known associates (too many siblings to comprehend; dead parents). He was Ivy League all the way—Cornell, MIT—and he didn’t even have a speeding ticket to his name.

I hated everything about him.

“I’d like to meet this asshole,” I said.

My mother let out a long-suffering groan. “For your information, Matthew is a wonderful young man and you will not do anything to interfere with your sister’s happiness. Is that understood?”

“What qualifies him as a ‘wonderful young man’?” I asked.

“To start, he reads my blog every week and shares my posts on social media.” My mother glared at me in the rear view mirror. “That’s more than I can say for either of you.”

SHANNON

Eighteen months ago

I
was a
mess. A wreck of epic proportions. The crown princess of Barely Keeping It Together.

I wanted to shatter everything I could get my hands on and scream until the rage I felt was purged from my blood.

I wanted to get weepy, messy drunk and clutch my mother’s handkerchiefs—the ones my father ripped out of my hands not six months after her death, right along with everything else she’d ever touched—to my chest until the pieces of her that I’d lost started coming back to me.

I wanted to fall apart—crawl into bed, hide under the covers, and sob until my body ran out of tears—but falling apart wasn’t in the cards this weekend. I’d enjoy that luxury, along with plenty of crying, drinking, and screaming, when the happy couple was well on their way to Switzerland next week.

“Hey.” Lauren curled up next to me on the patio loveseat and dropped her head to my shoulder. “Let’s walk and talk. Okay?”

She steered me toward the string of gray-shingled cottages at the north side of the inn while I rattled off the schedule of events for her big day. It was more for my benefit than hers: she was going to do whatever she wanted tomorrow—Lauren only pretended she liked order and structure—and I needed to stay busy to prevent myself from drowning in a bottle of whiskey.

“You are in beast mode, my friend. Don’t worry about anything. Tomorrow is going to be perfect,” she said as she flopped onto my bed. “And you know what will make it perfect? Me marrying Matthew. I don’t need anything else.”

“I still think the catering manager is underestimating the amount of appetizers necessary for cocktail hour,” I said, dropping beside Lauren. “And I know he’s not going to have enough of your signature drinks ready.”

She rolled to her side and squinted at me. “I have a signature drink?”

“You have
two
signature drinks. Watermelon bellinis,” I said, “and blueberry martinis. Actually, I’ve been calling them blue ball martinis and pussy pink bellinis in my head.”

“We
must
call them that tomorrow.” Lauren shook her head and laughed. “When did you pick those?”

Lauren and Matt selected the date (late May), the location (the far end of Cape Cod), and the vows (still under wraps). I took care of most everything else, and I treasured every minute of it. This was my family’s first wedding, and I wanted to guarantee they had the celebration they deserved.

“Last month when I came down here to meet with the flower people,” I said, yawning.

Exhausting
didn’t even begin to describe this week, and it was only Friday night. We were doing construction on the office, Patrick was being a moody bitch, I had to let a bookkeeping assistant go, and I was up all last night threading ribbons through wedding programs. That one was a bad idea; I was talented in neither arts nor crafts.

“Well I hope those balls and pussies taste good,” she said. We looked at each other and immediately burst out laughing.

“Lauren, you should know by now…balls never taste good,” I said with tears sliding down my cheeks while I hugged my sides.

“Apparently you would know,” she gasped between giggles. “But I guess my bigger concern is someone choking on the balls. No one ever chokes on pussy.”

“And why would they?” I asked, shifting to lean against the headboard. “Pussy is pretty. Pussy is manageable. Balls are just awkward. They’re hairy and wrinkly, and frankly, I do not know what to do with them. I’m sorry, but when it comes to cock and balls, they are separate and unequal. I feel as though balls hang there, judging me for not even attempting to meet their needs.”

“Well…” Lauren’s brows furrowed and she gestured toward me. “You could try—”

“Nope. Nope, not even a little bit. We are not talking about how you handle Matt’s balls.”

She laughed and ran her hands through her shoulder-length honey blonde hair. I’d always wanted hair like that. Yeah, every stylist who ever touched my hair told me how much people paid to get my precise shade of roasted carrot but that never stopped me from occasionally craving something new. I also coveted Lauren’s skin. The girl could blink at the sun and have a deep, golden tan.

I, on the other hand, blinked at the sun and turned into a crispy, blistered beet.

Even though I lusted after Lauren’s beachy blondeness, my fair skin and red hair were the only tangible pieces of my mother that I carried with me, even after all this time. We shared everything, right down to the way our hair got lighter as it lengthened, as if the fire started at the roots and cooled as it moved down our shoulders.

I wished I could say I recalled that about her, that I had a store of beautifully articulate memories and moments with my mother, but I didn’t. I had the misshapen, inconsistent recollection from my nine-year-old self and one photograph.

But now I knew that my father—we didn’t bother calling him Dad; it was either Angus or Miserable Bastard—went to his grave without revealing he’d never actually destroyed any of my mother’s things, and if it was possible, I hated him more than I had when he took it all away. He’d rounded up her possessions while we cried and screamed and begged him to stop, but it wasn’t enough to rid the house of her clothes, perfume, and journals. It wasn’t enough to make us watch while he threw an armload of her summer dresses in the fireplace and let them burn until nothing remained. And it wasn’t enough to scrub her spirit from the house, right down to the sad little rock collection she brought with her when emigrating from Ireland.

If we hadn’t found the secret passage he built at our childhood home where it was all hidden…
No
. I couldn’t let myself think about that.

There were times when I knew he wanted to destroy me too.

He started coming into my bedroom a few months after she died. I was shattered then, still a sharp, uneven fragment of something that was once whole. It was always after a long night of drinking—then again, every night was a drinking night for Angus—and he’d sit at the foot of my bed. Sometimes it started with him crying quietly while I pretended to be asleep or his hand wrapped around my leg over the blankets. Other times he tore the blankets up over my face and stole every innocent piece of me.

For years—decades—I believed that I deserved it. I was the one who decided we were spending the whole day down the street at the McLaughlin’s pool, and I was the one who didn’t think it was necessary to check on our pregnant mother when she was obviously unwell that morning, and I was the one who was too terrified to do anything but fucking watch when Patrick and Matt found her drowning in her own blood.

So I deserved the worst punishment imaginable. I deserved it all.

It took a lot of time and a lot of counseling to recognize that none of it was my fault, but it was moments like these when I recognized exactly how evil he was that I felt the weight of it all over again.

“If you ever find yourself wanting ball-handling advice, you know where to find me,” Lauren said. I stared at her, too lost in my thoughts to understand her comment, and forced a smile before shaking myself out of it.

Fall apart when the wedding’s over.

“I should really check on the gift baskets,” I said, shuffling off the bed. “And the tent timeline. I don’t want them setting up the reception tent during the ceremony.”

My priorities didn’t stop there. Matt was convinced Lauren’s Navy SEAL brothers were going to waterboard him, Patrick was moping like a premenstrual teenager, Sam was drunk, Riley was scamming on Lauren’s friends, Andy was very, very late in getting her ass here, and Erin…all things Erin.

“You want to talk about it?” Lauren asked.

I realized I’d been staring at a sweater for no fewer than ten years and sighed. “No. Not tonight. Not this weekend.”

She stood and inspected her hair in the mirror. Matt wasn’t the only one who fell in love the minute he met her. She was the best friend I’d always wanted, the bad bitch who liked to drink and swear and spend obscene amounts of money on shoes, the sweetheart who always knew when I needed to cry on her shoulder.

And she was one of the few who knew all my secrets.

“Would a special project help?” she asked. “A strategic initiative to keep your mind off everything else?”

“Depends on the project,” I said, pulling the baggy sweater over my head. It was a size too big, but it was the last one at the Tory Burch sample sale and I could not help myself.

Lauren rolled her eyes at my sweater—she tried to talk me out of this purchase but I wouldn’t hear of it—and adjusted the sleeves. “I’ll handle Patrick and Andy if you deal with Will. Chat him up, debate foreign policy, insult him, send him into town for a jar of peanut butter, whatever you want. Just don’t let him out of your sight.”

I gave the bed petulant a glare and nodded. “I might need to borrow your black Mary Jane Manolos,” I said while slipping my credit card, room key, and phone into my pocket. “You know, forever.”

“I guess that’s the price I’ll pay to keep my husband’s balls unharmed.”

“Make it stop,” I groaned. I stomped toward the door, shaking my head and covering my ears. “We’re not talking about Matt’s balls anymore.”

WILL

Eighteen months ago

S
urveillance wasn’t my
thing.

I hated all the waiting and watching. Don’t get me wrong—keeping track of a bossy redhead who didn’t know how to mind her own business was one of the easiest gigs to ever fall into my lap, but it was tedious as fuck. This was why I couldn’t do protection ops. I was a scalpel: perfect for quick, quiet attacks, the kinds that were measured and rehearsed for the greatest impact.

I was about ready to bind and gag Shannon Walsh, and then lock her in a closet until the wedding was over. Listening in from the far end of the bar while she quizzed the bartender on his stock of craft beers only reaffirmed it.

She couldn’t go five minutes without flitting between the Walsh encampments, and that was on top of her routine cross-examination of the inn staff. She wanted to know when they were pitching the reception tent, where the blue hydrangea centerpieces were being housed for the night, whether they’d prepared extra scallops wrapped in bacon for the cocktail hour.

Apparently those were the groom’s favorite, and if her tone was any indication, the catering manager could expect Shannon’s fancy high heel to find a home in his small intestine if he underdelivered.

I had to hand it to her—the bitch had balls.

And maybe I was a little punchy. I’d been traveling for the past seventy hours and my body and brain were still in mission mode. There was a gravity associated with coming off deployment. All sailors experienced it, but everyone experienced it differently. For me—after nearly three
years
hunting terrorists—it was the sudden, shocking loss of purpose. Without the constant chatter of comms in my ear, the familiar weight of body armor and weapons, the adrenaline of running exceedingly dangerous ops, the dual responsibilities of guarding my country and getting my men home safely…without all that, I didn’t know what to do with myself.

Instead of figuring out how to shake off the culture shock, I fixated on Shannon. She was the expensive, refined kind of beautiful. High maintenance. Diamond earrings bigger than most mortar shells. She couldn’t go thirty seconds without checking her phone.

Amazingly enough, that wasn’t the most annoying part.

No, it was that this woman didn’t even
like
beer. I refused to believe she could. This chick was too high society for beer, even weird hipster beer.

“What about Upper Case?” she asked. There was no hint of impatience or condescension in her voice, and that was the secret weapon. She was calm and relatively pleasant, but it was obvious in the sharp angle of her eyebrow that she was ready to climb over the bar, show this guy how to do his job, and shrivel his dick off with little more than a tight grimace. “Or Congress Street? Triple Sunshine?”

The bartender studied the taps in front of him and then crouched low to inspect the bottles lined up in the refrigerator. He stood, shaking his head. “I’ve got Smuttynose, and…and Slumbrew.”

She drummed her fingers against the bar while she contemplated those options. I was actually concerned the bartender was wilting under her glare. She was a dictator dressed as a socialite, and I doubted she wilted under anything. “What about Sea Hag?”

He snapped his fingers and pointed at the fridge, smiling with relief. Hell,
I
was relieved on his behalf. “
That
I can do for you.”

“I knew you’d come through for me, Barry.” She sent him a wink as he slid the uncapped bottle toward her. He high tailed it to the other end of the bar, presumably to dislodge his nuts from wherever Shannon shoved them.

I was expecting her to dart back to Lo’s side or hunt down other staff members to harass or just go the fuck to bed because it was past midnight and even the wicked required rest, but that all changed when she turned her gaze on me. She collected her bottle and marched my way, offering a bright, plastic smile as she approached.