The Inheritance Test, page 16
Of course, she was the one who’d done the breaking up—at least, the hostile-word-exchange part—but still. She was broken up, if that was a word. Or a thing. The ache in her chest whenever she thought about Declan was painful. She prodded at it like a sore tooth, trying to see if everything was miraculously better. And... Nope.
Declan had still come to Martha’s Vineyard fully intending to swap a race win for a CEO and owner role at Masterson Entertainment. If he’d been up-front about what he had riding on the race outcome, she’d have done things differently—or at least been better prepared and less shocked.
You weren’t one-hundred-percent honest either, were you?
She shoved her phone into her desk drawer and shifted her glare to her laptop screen where she’d just finished revising her resignation letter. And then she hit the Send button.
Two seconds later Thea barreled into her office. Wow. Even for Thea, that was fast. “What did you do?”
“I resigned,” she said. “I’m sorry. What I did just isn’t fixable.”
“You’re just going to leave us?” Thea wanted to know.
“I let down our kids. I don’t deserve to stay.”
The ache in her chest got worse. Her head, clearly jealous of the attention, decided to throb along. Ignoring Thea’s protestation, she grabbed her box of things and went outside. Now that the paparazzi had given up on her and Declan, she could walk unimpeded to her car. Her Kate Middleton moment was over. She could go to the grocery store in her pajamas and only the cashier and her fellow shoppers would know—not random people in North Dakota or Timbuktu. She’d made the mistake of reading the online comments once and people were harsh when they didn’t say it to your face.
The sound of someone laying on a horn drew Charlotte’s attention across the street. Right. It was Monday, so it was Muffin Monday and that meant Gitty’s bakery truck. At one o’clock in the afternoon, the breakfast pastry crowd had dwindled and the afternoon cookie line hadn’t yet formed.
“Did someone die?” Gitty yelled.
She shoved the box of crap into her car and marched across the street. “Do you think I have a problem asking people for help?”
“Do you want an honest answer or are you going to shoot the messenger?”
Charlotte narrowed her eyes. “Okay. So I’m hearing a yes. Except why won’t you just come out and say it?”
Gitty sighed. “I promised I’d work on my filter, but what the heck. I’ll start tomorrow. You hate asking for help. Remember when you got trapped in the bathroom in the fourth grade and you wouldn’t admit it for hours? We all thought you had food poisoning but you were trying and failing to figure out how to take the door off its hinges.”
“I’m sorry. I could—”
“Don’t say ‘fix it,’” Gitty said softly. “You don’t have to fix everything. You can’t—no one could—and as your friend, I’m not okay with what that does to you.”
“I can’t fix this,” she admitted. “No matter how much I want to. Martha’s Kids is out of money. We can’t fund the summer camps. Raising those funds was my responsibility, so I’ve resigned.”
Gitty nodded. “And did you ask the board what they thought was best for Martha’s Kids? Maybe you could try asking them for help?”
She hadn’t. She thought about that while Gitty made her a coffee and popped a leftover muffin into a paper bag for her. She’d tried to handle everything on her own. She’d insisted on it, because if you fixed the thing fast enough, you didn’t even have to confess that you’d been the one to break it in the first place.
“I should have brought the budget issues to their attention,” she admitted.
Gitty nodded. “And?”
“And—” She stopped because, really, she didn’t know what the next step was. She looked at Gitty, who also shrugged.
“And then there would have been a bunch of smart, caring people brainstorming solutions,” Gitty said. “And maybe one would have worked. Maybe you would still be broke. But there would have been an apology followed by a conversation.”
There probably would also have been yelling, finger-pointing and...forgiveness.
“I made another mistake, but this one I can fix.” She had to un-quit.
Gitty flashed her a thumbs-up. “You’ve got this.”
Charlotte wasn’t as sure, but she was going to try. Oh, boy. She was going to try. Turning around, she marched back inside Martha’s Kids and into her former office. Hopefully still her office, she told herself. And then she fired off a second email, taking back the first one, since as they ran a summer camp and not a multinational IT company, no one had figured out yet how to shut down her email or change the locks.
“We have a budget problem,” she told Thea when Thea stuck her head in the door a few minutes later. “And could you schedule a board meeting for as soon as possible? I need to explain the situation to them and pitch some possible solutions.” She sucked in a breath and looked at Thea. “But I need help to do that. I need your help.”
Thea smiled. “On it, boss lady.”
* * *
Charlotte knocked on the front door of the house, keeping a wary eye on the bushes and driveway. No paparazzi jumped out to snap her, which she put in the win column. She could only imagine the stories they’d have spun. She didn’t miss the unwelcome attention. But she did miss...
Declan.
She was done with pretending to be perfect, pretending that she had her shit together and that she took full responsibility for what she got wrong. She just wanted to let go.
And go to Declan.
Her father actually opened his own front door. He looked around the driveway, then turned and walked into the house. She followed him to his study.
“You moved out,” he said, sitting down behind the big desk. He had the same look on his face that he’d had when the election results came in and his candidate had lost.
She had. Turned out, it was hard to draw boundaries with her father when she walked past him every day. “I did.”
“So now you’ll pay rent when you’re lucky to still have a job at all. You got it all wrong there, Charlotte. You didn’t have the experience or the charisma to handle a man like George Moore. He rolled you and your board.”
The zing of shame in her stomach was familiar. Ignoring it was not, but she tried. “I didn’t,” she admitted. “I—”
But her father was on a roll. “You’re too trusting. Naive. You had a good thing with that actor and then what happened? He made you look like a fool, too.”
“George did that stuff,” she said even though he was still talking and not listening. “Not me. I interviewed him. I voted to hire him. Clearly I did not make sure we had a good process in place or he wouldn’t have been able to make off with the money he did. And yeah, he cleaned me out, too. I trusted him. That was my mistake. But I’m not responsible for his stealing or for his leaving because he was too much of a cowardly shit to own up to his mistakes.”
It was a good speech, one she might have practiced before coming over, but it was wasted. Her father talked over the whole thing, commenting on Declan’s shortcomings and her failure to keep him in line. “You were looking better. Today you’re windblown and your nose is red. I don’t understand why you can’t make an effort. It’s not that hard.”
Translation: her makeover had worn off, although she’d kept the cashmere.
“I’ve done what I could to help you,” her father continued. “You wanted to participate in this race and I got you a partner who all but guaranteed a win: handsome, athletic, knew how to win a crowd and how to sail a boat. You could have taken Martha’s Kids to the next level with the prize.”
“You picked Declan as my partner,” she said numbly. “I thought it was random.”
“His father owed me a favor,” he said. “I made a quick call, reminded him of that.”
It was nice that her father had wanted her to win. Except that he’d wanted her to win because he thought she was a failure at her job. He thought she needed to take Martha’s Kids to the next level despite her repeated explanations that the organization’s size was a choice and not a mistake. Like he always had, he’d ignored her.
“I have to go,” she said. “No, I want to go. I’ve said what I needed to and this isn’t a conversation. This is you telling me—again—that I’ve disappointed you. I know that, but it’s going to have to be okay because I can’t fix it. I won’t fix it. Oh and FYI, I’m canceling on our next lunch date.”
As her father blustered on, she left the room.
This wasn’t a movie. There wasn’t a script and a next line. Declan had said she refused to let other people help, that she insisted on fixing things that weren’t her mistakes. He’d been right. She couldn’t do this on her own. Fixing what wasn’t right in her foster kids’ lives would take more than one person, no matter how much that person cared. It took a team. An island’s worth.
Declan had also said that he held on when he had to, even when it was hard and it hurt and letting go would have been the safer option.
She’d done the opposite.
She’d let go.
Of him, of her life, of the things she couldn’t control. And instead she’d held on far too tightly to all the wrong things: The pride that had her hating to ask for help. The ugliness of her father’s emotional abuse. The hurtfulness of George’s betrayal.
It hurt her, holding on so tightly. She opened the front door and went outside. It would be nice if she could let go of all of those things that were so bad for her as easily as she’d stepped over her father’s threshold, but she had to accept that it wouldn’t be easy. She’d have to do it one step at a time and sometimes she might go backward instead of forward. She’d watched Declan throw himself into life, the race, their relationship, willing to take the risk even if it meant possibly crash-landing. He’d given it everything.
While she’d held back, afraid of losing.
Twenty
Declan had jumped off buildings and bridges. He’d launched himself from planes and mountainsides with explosions licking at his heels. It wasn’t all that often that he hesitated and he’d built a reputation in Hollywood for his ability to do whatever it took to make a scene happen. Even when Charlotte had disappeared over the side of the Cupcake, he’d known exactly what to do next: follow her, hold onto her, bring her safely to shore. Being strong enough, fast enough, well-trained enough—that had been, well, enough.
Now he had no clue what came next.
His agent was still angry about the quickie engagement and breakup. He’d been rooting for the perfect fairy-tale ending to Declan and Charlotte’s story and then Charlotte had returned his ring. Hell, she’d kicked him out without considering the optics or what people would say. She’d called him out for making their relationship be about other people and for putting his career first—for that goddamned stupid contract he’d signed with J.J., which hadn’t been about being his own boss or being the CEO of a successful company. Part of him was still the kid who’d been left in the foster care system by his parents and then adopted. And adopted meant that someone could take it back. Could take his life away and tell him to go.
Bottom line? He was afraid of being left so he made sure he was the one who left first, and if he couldn’t do that? He made a game out of the relationship he’d been seeking, so it was all fun and nothing that could actually hurt him.
He’d thought he’d be fine, that he’d get over his feelings for Charlotte, that he’d go back to California and immerse himself in Masterson Entertainment and everything would be fine.
He wasn’t fine. The media coverage after their breakup had been as bad as his publicist had predicted. Articles had speculated about his relationship with Charlotte. Nothing nice had been said and the pictures had been worse. All sorts of people had also come forward, too, from previously unknown members of the biological family to Vineyard residents who, it turned out, had plenty to say about Charlotte and her ex-fiancé.
And then there had been today’s new development: a picture of George being escorted off a plane from the Bahamas in handcuffs. From what he’d heard, Charlotte’s ex wanted to make a deal to avoid the consequences of his actions as much as possible and had shared in great detail what he’d done at Martha’s Kids and how. The how concentrated on Charlotte’s gullibility and her falling for George’s charm, which turned her big heart and openness to trusting people into a fatal flaw rather than further evidence that she was an amazing person.
What pissed Declan off most, however, was that the impending demise of Martha’s Kids was a footnote in the media coverage. The disappointed kids who wouldn’t get their summer camp experience, the people in Charlotte’s office who counted on their paycheck from the foundation, all of Charlotte’s plans—those were collateral damage. Since that was just about the only thing he could fix, he’d made an anonymous donation yesterday.
But that was just money, which he had plenty of. He was across the fucking country from her when he needed to be there by her side. Or, since she’d sent him away in no uncertain terms, he needed to be on the island. Down the street. Anywhere he could do something for her. If George made her cry or worry one second more than he already had, Declan had plans of his own and he was implementing step one today.
He’d made the journey from his Santa Monica house to Hollywood in record time. They had two films in postproduction and a new shoot starting on-site this week for one of his particular projects, so there should have been questions aimed his way. Most of the people on the lot, however, detoured out of his way once they got a good look at him. He knew he looked grim as he stormed inside.
“J.J.?” he demanded of the young guy parked at the receptionist’s desk.
“Conference room. I’ll let him know you’re here, Mr. Masterson.” The receptionist stood up, discreetly trying to block Declan’s path, but Declan was around him and down the hall before he’d finished speaking.
He’d spent plenty of time in that conference room. He’d hammered out contracts, argued the pros and cons of projects and fought for Masterson Entertainment repeatedly. Today J.J. sat in his usual spot at the head of the long table. He didn’t look surprised to see Declan, although Nash’s presence on his right-hand side was unexpected. Nash didn’t often leave his chemistry lab, even though he’d already earned a fortune from his research. He nodded at his brother, who nodded back.
J.J. said nothing.
Classic power move.
Declan didn’t know what he’d hoped his adoptive father would say, but it wouldn’t have been the kind of stuff movie fathers said about how they were proud no matter what the kid did. J.J. prized winning. And sure enough, that was where the man started when he decided the silence had stretched on long enough.
“You lost,” J.J. said, not bothering with a greeting. “Sell me on why I should still make you my heir and not take the buyout offer I have.”
Nash leaned forward like a hunting dog scenting his target. “So the media coverage is actually true? You were stupid enough to sign a contract with him?”
He reminded himself that he loved his brother. “I was, but that’s not on today’s agenda.”
Nash gave him a level look. “Are there slides for this agenda? Speaker notes? I was told this was a family lunch and I’m feeling unprepared.”
J.J. cleared his throat and they both looked at him. Declan had been on the receiving end of J.J.’s disapproving looks before, but this was the last time. He might be an ass, but he wasn’t too proud to learn from the smart people in his life. Charlotte had made the decision to stand up for what she believed in. She’d put her shoulders back and walked into a ballroom as if she were royalty and that woman hadn’t been half as brave as the woman who’d told him to get lost. She made him want to be a better man. Well, that and she just made his world better.
“Declan did sign a contract with me,” J.J. said for Nash’s benefit. “We made a deal. He’d get Masterson Entertainment if he could prove that he was Masterson material.”
“You gave him an inheritance test,” Nash scowled. He didn’t seem to mind that he hadn’t been invited to take the test or that J.J. had effectively disinherited him.
“You did rehabilitate your image some,” J.J. said to Declan, ignoring Nash entirely. As if what Declan cared about was how people talked about him. There was only one person who mattered. Okay. Two. Nash—and now Charlotte. “Getting yourself engaged to a genuine New England princess was clever, although you seem to have lost yet another fiancée.”
“Asking Charlotte to marry me was the smartest thing I’ve ever done,” he interrupted. “And she’s a goddamned queen.”
“Have you told her that?” Nash asked.
Declan hadn’t. And since that was also something he could fix, he pulled out his phone and texted Charlotte. I’m an ass and I miss you. He hadn’t stared at his phone waiting for a woman to respond since, well, ever, so this was a first for him. And while he hadn’t really expected a handful of words to magically fix everything he’d screwed up, he was still disappointed when she didn’t text him back.
He held up a palm when J.J. opened his mouth and started to talk. There was nothing he could say that mattered. “We need to get a couple of things straight. First, I’m done here. I quit. No more tests. I’m starting my own film studio, so heads up that Masterson Entertainment has a new competitor and we intend to kick your ass. Second...” He shook his head. “No, wait. That covers it. I’m out.”
Then he turned around and got himself the hell away from J.J. No more contests, no more manipulation. Probably shouldn’t have thrown down the gauntlet quite so obviously at J.J., but he was trying to change, not become a completely different person. He was competitive; he went after what he wanted. And even though he had more money than one man could spend thanks to his career, he couldn’t sit around doing nothing. And that included doing nothing about Charlotte. He needed her back.
