Twice in a Lifetime (Carina) (10 page)

“Damn it, I would make a shit spy too—cross that off the list of potential new careers.”

“Are you in the market for a new job?” If she wasn’t mistaken, he sounded hopeful.
What an ass, an
arrogant, smug, gorgeous ass
. Her hands itched to punch him.

“No, I’m not in the market for a new job. I am very good at my job. Are you in the market for a soul? You really could use one.”

He motioned for the waiter’s attention. Liam ordered a steak with a baked potato and a salad.

“You are not having dinner with me. If you want to eat here, find another table.”

“I am paying for dinner. I will sit wherever I bloody like.”

“Then you will be sitting alone.”

She picked up her bag to leave, but he wrapped his large hand around her wrist. It wasn’t painful, but there was enough pressure to tell he was serious. “Sit down, Sarah. We aren’t done speaking. You can’t run away every time you hear something you don’t like.”

“I don’t have anything else to say to you.”

“I have plenty left to say to you.”

“You are hurting me,” she lied, and instantly her hand was released. It was the one positive attribute she could still find in Liam. He would never knowingly hurt her, at least physically. Her anger was blunted slightly at this realisation.

“Sit down, Sarah, or I won’t help Sam.”

She smiled bitterly. There it was, the real Liam, mercenary and cruel. “Thank you for reminding me who you really are. I nearly forgot I hate you. Remember you said you hated the way I looked at you with pity because I knew your past? Well, you don’t have to worry about that now, because now all I see when I look at you is the person who betrayed me and destroyed my friend’s future.”

“Sam didn’t have a future. He destroyed that himself. You can’t blame me for that.”

“Sam had messed up, but he was going to get help. He had a chance and you took it away. I won’t forgive you for that.”

“That is part of your problem, Sarah. You think people can change. People are who they are.”

“What is the point of all this—” she gesticulated wildly “—if people can’t grow and change?”

“Why does there need to be a point? The universe doesn’t owe us meaning. We are here. We find whatever happiness we can, we get on with it and we die. That’s it.”

“You really should be an inspirational speaker,” she said sarcastically.

“Talk to me, Sarah. Really talk. Don’t run away this time.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. She thought again about reaching across the table and slapping him. “Me run away? That’s your job, asshole. You screw things up and then you fuck off. You want me to talk and tell you what I feel? I think you destroyed our best friend because you are stupid and pig-headed and you overgeneralise. You knew one addict who didn’t get clean, and you write them all off. I hate you. I hate me for thinking I loved you.”

“I tried to protect you, Sarah. I did the best I could with what I had at the time. I was a stupid kid trying to get by. Did I fuck up? Yeah, I guess you could say I did. But would I do it again, to keep you safe? Without a doubt.”

She was too angry to look at him. She balled her hands into fists to keep them from shaking. The connection she’d thought they had was gone. Those weren’t his emotions she was seeing on his face; they were just her projecting. She had seen what she wanted to see. She was such an idiot for loving him.

“You can never really admit you are wrong. There is always a caveat. ‘I fucked up, but’. You arrogant bastard. You grassed Sam up. He was our friend. You betrayed him and then you betrayed me. So don’t even pretend what you did had anything to do with protecting me.”

Liam sighed. He ran a hand through his hair. “Of course I was protecting you. I loved you, Sarah. He was putting you in danger. What kind of man would I be if I let him do that? Do you want me to say I am sorry? Because I will. I am sorry about how everything turned out. But I am not sorry for what I did.”

She gasped at the audacity of his logic. He didn’t get it. He never would, and it was time that she stopped pretending he was someone he wasn’t. “If you loved me you wouldn’t have turned Sam in. Even if you had given up on him, I hadn’t. And you knowingly and wilfully hurt someone I love. You don’t do that to someone you care about.”

Liam pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. She could feel frustration radiating off him. “Damn it, Sarah, I was trying to take care of you. And Sam. You were in over your head. He needed help and I thought a short sharp shock was the wake-up call he needed. You were too soft and too young to deal with him. The problem was bigger than all of us.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know why you did it. But it wasn’t for me. And it sure as hell wasn’t for Sam. I never give up on people, you know that. But guess what, Liam—I am officially giving up on you. I don’t love you. I don’t even like you any more. I hate you. I actually hate you.”

His gaze went to the table. He shook his head. He looked as defeated as she felt.

“That’s fine, but you need to get the facts straight about this narrative you have playing in your head. Yes, I grassed Sam up, but you know what, I was eighteen and I thought I was doing the right thing. We were all in way over our heads. He had a fucking gun, Sarah. He was dealing heroin. I thought he was going to get you both killed. I tried talking to you about getting him help but you were so sure you had everything under control. I thought it was the only chance to save both of you. So, yeah, I fucked up. But it’s not like I had a whole lot of choices available to me at the time.”

“I did have it under control. He was going to start methadone, the next day, Liam,” she shouted. A woman at the table next to them turned and glared at them, but she didn’t care. Let people stare.

“He has had years to get clean and you have had years to help him and yet here he is, in Dubai, facing drugs charges. You didn’t have it under control then, and you don’t have it under control now.”

His words were a slap on an already bruised face. “I hate you.”

“You already said that.”

“Well, it bears repeating. You are a controlling, arrogant asshole. How dare you judge me and my career? Yes, Sam is not a ringing endorsement for my abilities as a social worker. But I have had many successes, people that have got clean and gone on to lead productive lives. I help people. But you can think whatever you want about my job because I don’t give a shit what you think any more, Liam.” He didn’t get it. He had no idea that people could be helped. He just wrote them off, as he wrote her off when she disappointed him.

“Fine.”

Her cheeks grew hotter as her anger mounted. “Don’t say fine to me, like you don’t give a shit either. I am the one not caring here.”

“What do you want me to say, Sarah?”

The sadness in his eyes made her pause. Was it real? Or was she just projecting again?

“I want you to admit you’re wrong about what you did, all of it. Don’t just say you are sorry about how it turned out. That is a bloody cop out.”

“You’re safe, Sarah, That’s all I wanted. I like you too much to lie to you and tell you I regret my choices.” His tone was solemn, the anger gone, replaced with something else, something she could not identify; sadness, disappointment? She shook her head. She didn’t care about his feelings, because he certainly never cared about hers.

“You jackass! You spent years lying to me about what happened with Sam. You won’t admit you’re wrong because that would mean admitting a weakness. And nothing is worse than being weak. You always have to be in control of everything.”

“That’s rich coming from you, Sarah. You are just as controlling as I am. You have to be in charge of everyone and everything. No one can ever be counted on in Sarah’s world. How does it feel to be the only reliable person in the whole fucking world?” He clenched his jaw, the muscles growing taut under his tanned skin.

Now he was angry? He didn’t have the right to be angry.

“I relied on you, Liam, and you fucked me over. So, yeah, you’re right, I am controlling because no one is going to do that to me again. But you know what? Your controlling is a different kettle of fish. You know the names of the men I have slept with. You didn’t want me, so you don’t get to know who I have fucked.” Sarah’s hands balled into tight fists, pounding the table as she spoke.

People at surrounding tables were starting to stare openly, but Sarah was too angry to care.

Liam took a deep breath; her words cut to the bone. All he had ever wanted was to keep her safe. If she could not see that, she never really knew him. “I never stopped wanting you, Sarah.” He had not intended to whisper but his voice failed him.

“Shut up. You left me. You never even looked back.”

“Is that what you think? I have spent over a fucking decade looking back. Yes, I know who you have slept with. But do you think I fucking relish that information? I wish to Christ that Richard and Jonny didn’t exist. I wish that it had only ever been us. I hate that I fucked things up. I hate Sam for putting us in that position. And sometimes I even hate you for choosing him. But know this: I never stopped caring about you, Sarah. I will never go back to Scotland but it hurts like hell knowing I left the only part I loved behind. You picked Sam. You picked Scotland. You picked your granny. You picked fear. You picked everything but me. And I remember that every day. I shouldn’t still care. But I do.”

“Why? Why do you hate Sam? He never did anything to you.”

Liam took a deep breath. Ever since he had seen Sam at the jail he had been asking himself that. And the answer he found was unsettling. Sam wasn’t the problem; maybe he never had been. For years Liam had focused all of his anger on Sam because it was easier than dealing with the truth. “Sarah, if I let myself really be angry at the person who fucked things up, I would end up hating you. And I would rather die than let that happen. So let me be angry at Sam so I don’t have to think about how much you hurt me. You destroyed us.” Once the words were out he could not take them back, and he didn’t want to. She needed to know.

He had never stopped caring for Sarah, but a decade had given his anger enough time to take root and propagate, wrapping its tendrils around everything he associated with her, with the betrayal. Sam had taken the brunt of it. All the anger he could not let himself feel for Sarah he focused on Sam, and it made it easier somehow to give their story a villain rather than admit Sarah had given up on them.

Sarah’s lip trembled. He thought she might cry but she didn’t. She wrapped her hands around her middle, protecting herself. With a pained sadness he realised she was covering herself from him, physically and emotionally. He could feel her shutting down and slipping away. “I just want to go home. I want to check Sam into a residential treatment facility, and I want to scream and shout at doctors until they give my granny her operation.”

“I thought she had it this morning?”

“So did I. But apparently she is not a priority. They plan on keeping her on a morphine pump until an orthopaedic surgeon can make room for her on his schedule.” Her shoulders slumped.

She looked defeated and broken. There were dark shadows under her green eyes. He had done that to her and he would do anything to fix it. He wished he had the words to make it better. But his words would only hurt her now. There was nothing to say to heal the rift between them. They were broken, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He focused on the one thing he could fix.

“That’s not good enough.” He picked up his phone and dialled his secretary.

“Gemma, I need you to arrange an insurance policy for a person in Scotland. She has a pre-existing condition, so I am also going to need to arrange for you to pay for her to have an operation done privately.” He finished giving Gemma all the pertinent details.

“Thank you, Liam.” He could tell she was itching to tell him to go fuck himself but necessity prevented it. “You don’t need to have Gemma call and follow up with the hospital, though. I am happy enough to harass the hospital staff.”

“It’s not a problem.”

Tears welled in the corners of her eyes, intensifying the pale green colour. He hated that he had had a part in her pain. He would do anything to make it better, but he couldn’t. With all his money and power, he still could not be what she needed. He battled the urge to stand up and pull her into his lap. He wanted to comfort her and reassure her, but she would find no comfort in his arms.

“This doesn’t change anything. I appreciate you doing this for my granny. But I don’t want anything to do with you. I can’t take the up and down, reading into every little thing, trying to find some little glimmer of humanity in you. I don’t want to have meals with you or speak to you. I don’t want to be your friend because we’re not friends and we never will be.”

“We are living together at the moment, so it might be difficult to completely avoid each other.”

“Just let me go home. There is nothing left to say. All we can do at this point is hurt each other. I still have some good memories left. Let’s just call it a day.”

“No.” This wasn’t how it was going to end. Not this time. They weren’t finished yet. She wasn’t going to disappear out of his life again. “You made a deal, Sarah. And you will honour your end, or I will not honour mine.”

Her back straightened. A look of defiance flashed in her eyes. She was silent for a long moment. “I will stay, for Sam. I will do this for him, because I love him. As God is my witness I will never have sex with you again, no matter how horny I get. I think it is clear that I don’t need to love someone to sleep with them, but I need to like them,” she said.

His jaw tightened when Sarah said she loved Sam. Her intent transparent, she was trying to wind him up, but his instincts responded just the same. When it came to Sarah, something primal in him always screamed “mine”. He would not show it though, just as he had not shown it years before. He would take his own advice. Life was too short for regrets. He would keep it light; he had already shown too much of his hand.

He shrugged off the heaviness that had settled in his chest. “In my defence, that wasn’t my A game in the elevator. I can do better.”