Page 72 of Power Play

Stop. Stop talking. Just…close your mouth and walk away.

“What happened when she died?”

It was strange. I didn’t really know. For me it felt like I was seeing the past through this weird thick mist. Events were sketchy. Sadness coated all my experiences.

I hadn’t asked him, but I wondered if that was when my father turned to gambling. Something to distract him from the grief of losing my mother. Or had she died knowing he’d been a cheat?

“My dad travelled a lot for…well, I won’t call it work. I just joined him on the road until I turned fifteen and he sent me to boarding school.”

“You went to boarding school?”

“Yeah, for three years of high school. I have no idea how Dad made that happen, but he did. He did have this way about him. This ability to convince people he was someone bigger than he was. He was…magnetic.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone said about him,” Liam said, his voice a little harder. His edges not quite so soft. I was reminded why I could not let my guard down around him. Why it was a mistake. “Most good liars are.”

There was no real heat behind his words. Just an acknowledged fact.

A strange laugh bubbled out of my throat. “You know, it’s not easy when you realize your father is a con man and the worst con he ever got away with was the one he played on me.”

Everything in Liam sharpened. “What do you mean?’

I shook my head. I’d already said too much. More than I wanted to. It was being in this house with him. It was the kiss. It was fucking with my head.

“Were you able to get all the stuff we needed from Instacart?” I asked, changing the subject.

“No!” He cried like he was suffering such an injustice. “You’re not going to believe this. They don’t have Instacart here.”

“What?” I said in mock shock. “You’re joking.”

“Apparently, we’re no longer in America. I have to actually go to the grocery store,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll make sure Tess is settled in. Put her things away.”

He lifted his hand and I wasn’t sure what he was doing. Or what he wanted from me. He picked up my hand and slapped our palms together.

“Go team,” he said with his big goofy smile.

I laughed a little harder than I needed to and he preened like he’d made the best joke ever.

I’d never been part of a team. Not really. I’d thought for so long that my father and I were a team. That we were working towards the same things. Only to have every dream I’d ever dreamt used as fuel in the fire he set to our lives.

I turned away from Liam, tired suddenly and raw. But of course he grabbed my hand.

“What?” I asked, exasperated by him and the pull he had over me.

“Where’d you go?” he asked. “One second we were a team and the-”

“We’re not a team,” I snapped. Then winced at the sharpness in my voice. “We’re not a team,” I said more calmly. “I’m your nanny, you’re paying me, and I’m just doing my job.”

The screenedin porch was a reader’s paradise. There was a lamp. A ton of comfy places to sit or lie down. Pillows. Blankets if the ocean breeze turned cool. All was great if you could ignore the bugs on the other side of the screen, attracted by the reading light.

Liam would hate this room.

I sat in a big chair with slouchy cushions with my back to the screens.

“Oh wow,” Tess said, from her spot on the couch. “That one is huge!” She pointed at the corner of the screen, where last I’d checked there’d been a moth the size of my hand.

“I’m not looking,” I said, my face buried in my book. I was not reading the romance. Liam had made me self-conscious about it, so I was reading the Antony Renard cookbook and getting hungry all over again.

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