Page 140

“I meant that.” I point at the cliff. “Is it a slideshow?”

“Something like that. It’s me. All of me. I want you to know who I really am.”

“Because you think it’ll scare me away?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “No, because I want to let you in. I want to show you that your bravery has made me brave. I want you to see me and know me and decide if there’s a future for us.”

My throat tightens. “And what if there isn’t?”

“Then I’ll love you for the rest of my days from afar.” He walks over to the table. “Champagne?”

“I… guess?”

He hands me the glass, his fingers touching mine for the briefest of moments. “I’ve always said I wanted the best champagne served at my funeral,” he tells me.

I laugh softly. God, this man.

“Take a seat.” He points at one of the chairs and I do as he asks. I’m facing the cliff, staring at the image being projected.

“So, I’ve been practicing this all day. Please bear with me if there are any stumbles. I’m good when I talk about other people, a little bit terrible when I talk about myself. Bennett suggested I pre-record the voiceover, but that felt wrong.”

“Bennett knows about this?”

“He helped me with the photos.” He lifts a brow. “The kid is a genius with a scanner.”

He clicks a button I didn’t know was in his hand and the first photo appears. A baby, in his parents arms.

“Don’t worry, I’m not taking you through all the kid photos. Some of them should never be seen. I couldn’t survive the embarrassment.” He takes a breath. “So, these are my parents. The biggest assholes you could ever meet. The man who had to father a kid to get his inheritance, and his wife who married him because she loves diamonds.”

I look at his dad. There’s a hint of West in him. The man who seduced Leona. Who made her promises he never intended on keeping. The one who broke her heart and left her to pick up the pieces. When she was too young to know how to glue herself back together.

West clicks and the next slide appears. On it is a girl with long dark hair, laughing at something out of frame, her arm looped around a boy who’s staring back at her with big, saucer like eyes. Leona. My chest tightens. She’s beautiful, yes, but it’s not her face that makes my chest ache. It’s West’s. The devotion written across his expression as he stares up at her. A boy experiencing love for the first time in his life, and not realizing it should be given freely by those who brought him into the world.

It reminds me of the way he looks at me. My throat tightens.

“She made me feel alive for the first time in my life,” he tells me. “Until the night she couldn’t anymore.” His voice cracks as he looks away from the image. “I thought if I was stronger, smarter, older, I could have stopped it.”

The slide clicks again. This time it’s West in a school uniform too stiff for his narrow shoulders. He looks older. Less… alive. His mouth a thin line.

“Boarding school,” he says. “Where they sent me when I became an inconvenience.”

Another click. West is older now. Standing next to Parker and Hudson on what looks like their first day of college. They’re all grinning, looking shy in a way I find hard to believe now.

“They saved me,” he tells me. “You all did. Became the family I didn’t think I deserved. I smiled more those first few weeks at college than I had in my whole life. And I learned that smiling makes life easier. The more you smile, the more you can get away with.”

Oh, easy-going, laid back West is being born in front of my eyes. A front, to hide the darkness. My gaze lingers on him. I remember this version of him. I was a kid, but he was always laughing. We loved it.

Click. My breath catches. It’s me. Ten years old, on West’s back, as I try to fight Autumn who’s on Asher’s back, and we’re all in the ocean. God, I remember that day. How much I adored West, even then.

“You,” he says simply. “My fighter from the very beginning. I might have been the one holding you up physically, but you hold me up in every other way.”

Our eyes meet. I’m not going to cry. Not this time.

More slides follow. Him getting his college degree. His first job. His first win in court. Then there’s more. A snip of a newspaper clipping showing a death covered up, followed by a record of contracts signed and debts paid. He talks me through each one, telling me what he did to ‘clean’ up messes. I watch him become the man who waded through L.A.’s dark side, all with a smile on his face.

But in all of these photos of him, the smile never makes it up to his eyes. How didn’t I see that? Was I blind? I want to run over and hug him, to take the hollowness away. It hurts to see him like that.

Each click makes him wince. But he doesn’t flinch from the truth. He lays it all out, rips himself open. And he rips me open too.