Last Chance (Second Chance Book 3)
Last Chance
Second Chance Book Three
Michelle St. James
Blackthorn Press
Contents
Last Chance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Links
Also by Michelle St. James
Last Chance
Second Chance Book Three
Michelle St. James
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in review.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is
no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used.
Copyright © 2020 by Michelle St. James
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Rebekah Zink
1
“How are those pancakes, buddy? Did I get enough chocolate chips in there for you?” Declan asked Griffin.
Kate leaned against the counter and took a drink of her coffee, watching as Griffin tried to grin around the pancakes almost overflowing his mouth.
“Perfect,” he said.
Declan pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!” He turned toward Kate and pulled her into his arms. “I still think Mommy should eat before work, don’t you?”
He was talking to Griffin, but his eyes burned into Kate’s, his hands resting on her hips. Desire flared inside her the way it always did when he touched her, and she had a flash of him the night before, moving between her legs, stoking the fire in her body until it erupted into a sizzling inferno.
“Mommy doesn’t eat breakfast,” Griffin said.
He was blocked from Kate’s view by Declan’s broad shoulders, stretching the seams of a white T-shirt that made his eyes look bluer than usual, his dark hair shining under the September sun that made its way into the kitchen.
She stood on tiptoe and kissed him. “Hear that? Mommy doesn’t eat breakfast.”
Declan sighed. “You rebel, you.”
She laughed. “Yeah, right.”
She was the logical, reasoned one in their relationship. He was the rebel. It had been that way since they’d met in college, and while he’d matured in the six years they’d been apart, she’d remained as rational as ever, the best student in her father’s school of life, a school that taught logic over emotion, business over pleasure, head over heart.
She kissed him again. “I have to head out. You sure you can get Griff to school before your meeting?”
“I’m sure.” He ducked his head toward her ear and inhaled. “Hmmm… you smell good.”
She felt the stirring in his jeans, the press of him against her belly, and laughed. “Easy, tiger. It’s 7 a.m. Let’s keep it PG.” She pushed him playfully away, but not before she had a tempting memory of tangled sheets, tousled hair, bare skin.
“What’s PG?” Griffin asked.
Kate hesitated, searching for a kid-friendly answer.
“Pigs and goblins,” Declan answered smoothly, and she was amazed all over again at how easily he’d adapted to full-time parenthood.
Griffin giggled. “That’s silly.”
Declan leaned across the kitchen island, his expression somber. “You know what’s really silly?”
“What?” Griff asked.
“How crazy the pigs and goblins get when we’re late for school.” He picked up Griff’s empty plate. “Go brush your teeth. And do it right, because you know I’m going to check.”
“I know, I know,” Griffin said, hopping off the stool and heading for the bathroom.
Declan rinsed the plate and set it in the sink, then turned to look at Kate. “What?”
She hadn’t realized she’d been staring. It wasn’t just that he was nice to look at, although no woman with a pulse would ever deny that Declan Murphy was hot. He was a source of endless fascination to her: the way he moved from the gorgeous heartthrob that set her pulse racing to the tender father that sometimes caused tears to sting her eyes when she least expected it.
“You’re a great dad. That’s all,” she said.
He grinned. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
She could tell he meant it. “It’s true.”
After raising Griffin alone for the first six years of his life, she was still getting used to having a partner. Before Declan had re-entered their lives, she’d relied on her mom for help, and every now and then, her brother Aiden.
After her dad’s death — his murder — she and Griffin had moved back into the big house on the Walsh property overlooking the water in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Her mom had taken care of Griff during the day while Kate went to work at Walsh Media Group’s world headquarters in downtown Boston. On the nights when Kate couldn’t get home in time, her mom had fed Griffin dinner and read him his bedtime story.
It hadn’t been very different from the way things had been in L.A., when Kate had relied on Marie, the nanny she’d hired shortly after Griffin’s birth, to do all the same things.
Now Declan was there in the morning when she woke up, sleeping next to her, his long eyelashes casting shadows across his cheeks. He got Griffin up for school, leaving a cup of hot coffee in the bathroom while Kate showered. He made Griff breakfast, cracked jokes that made him laugh, traded off taking him to school. Declan was even learning to cook, and it was more and more common for Kate to come home to a house smelling like homemade pasta sauce or roasting chicken or Thai curry.
That was the other thing that was different: Kate tried to get home for dinner more often. It’s not that she hadn’t cared before. She’d always treasured her time with Griffin, had always aimed to get home before he went to bed.
But there had been times when she’d stayed at work later than necessary, enjoying the quiet of her office after everyone went home, the focused purpose of her work, which seemed so much safer and tangible than the work of being a single parent.
Now she found that she wanted to be home, sitting around the table in the guest house she, Declan, and Griffin had moved into after Aiden and his boyfriend Miguel got engaged and bought a house in East Cambridge. She wanted to sit next to Griffin, watching his face light up when he told her about his day at school, watching his eyes shine when he laughed at something Declan said. She wanted to feel Declan’s hand brush hers when he passed the potatoes, wanted to look up to find him watching her.
Declan dropped a kiss on her forehead. “I better go check Griff’s teeth if I want to keep impressing you with my paternal talent. You know the other day I caught him standing there with the water running? His toothbrush was totally dry. Kid was trying to pull a fast one on me.”
“He definitely gets that from you,” she said, walking to the sink to rinse her cup.
“Haha. See you later, beautiful. Have a great day.”
She watched him walk thro
ugh the living room and disappear down the hall. The guest house wasn’t huge, but it worked for now. Her mother had offered it to her when Aiden and Miguel closed on their new home. Kate had surprised even herself by asking Declan to move in one night when they’d been lounging in bed in the house Declan shared with his brothers, Ronan and Nick.
She loved the Murphys, had come to love Julia, Ronan’s wife and their baby, John Thomas. She’d become fast friends with Alexa, Nick’s girlfriend and the newest edition to the family. She’d even come to see Elise, Julia’s sister, as a kind of little sister herself.
But the Murphy compound in Back Bay, large as it must have seemed when it was just the men, was starting to feel tight in spite of the fact that each of the brothers had their own apartments in addition to the common kitchen and living areas.
And that was without Finn, the youngest Murphy brother, who’d been traveling and hadn’t been back to Boston in at least five years.
Still, Kate’s dad had taught her that no lie was as bad as the lie you told yourself, and she knew practical considerations hadn’t played a part in her decision to ask Declan to move into the guest house with her and Griff.
She’d just wanted to be with him, wanted to share her life with him, whatever that might mean in the future. She knew it was true even as the thought terrified her, even as the secrets of her parents’ marriage had revealed fault lines in the Walsh family that Kate hadn’t known existed.
Even as they still threatened to tear them all apart.
She sighed and picked her bag up from the floor. She hesitated over the hooks by the door, contemplating a light coat, then decided against it. The September mornings were starting to carry the faint bite of fall, but the days were still mostly warm.
Thinking about winter made her feel depressed. Last winter she’d danced around the truth about Neil Curran, the man who’d been her father’s oldest and closest friend, the man who’d been at her father’s side when he’d founded Walsh Media Group, the man who was godfather to both her and Aiden.
The man who had had an affair with her mother twenty-five years ago.
The man who was her sister Beth’s biological father.
The man who’d killed Kate’s father and endangered Griffin’s life when he’d taken Griff swimming too far out in the cove as a storm rolled into Marblehead.
Knowing Neil — the man she’d called Uncle Neil her entire life — had paid someone to tamper with her dad’s plane, sending it crashing into the Atlantic, was bad enough. Learning that he’d had an affair with her mother, one that had resulted in the birth of her sister almost thirty years before, had leveled her.
Kate hadn’t had time to deal with the revelation at first. But after the failed raid on Neil’s apartment, a raid Declan had set up with Logan Hunt at the FBI, Kate had settled into a proper depression, replaying her interactions with Neil over the years, the interactions she’d witnessed between Neil and the rest of her family.
She’d berated herself for not seeing it: Beth’s alienation and anger, her difficulty engaging in relationships with everyone but their mom, the differences between Aiden and Kate, who’d inherited their mother’s copper-colored hair, and Beth, who had dark hair, something Kate had assumed came from her father.
But it hadn’t. It had come from Neil.
And now that she knew, she saw other things too. The angular line of Beth’s face resembling Neil’s rather than the softer curves inherited by Kate and Aiden. The way Beth could look into Kate’s eyes without blinking long past the point of comfort, something Neil did too, and Beth’s slight figure, which was more like Neil’s than Mac or Annie Walsh’s, who had bequeathed Kate and Aiden a sturdy athletic physique.
In the months Kate had agonized over the paternity test she and Declan had found in Beth’s safety deposit box in the Bahamas, she’d raged internally at everyone — her mother for being disloyal and dumb and having an affair with Neil, her father for letting it happen and not telling Kate and Aiden so they knew what they were dealing with. Beth for being secretive and angry instead of just talking to them, telling them what she knew, how much it must have hurt her to know she wasn’t really Mac Walsh’s daughter in a family where being Mac Walsh’s child meant everything.
The end of winter had seemed to go on forever. Kate had spent too many days walking the beach below the house, shivering inside her coat, staring out to sea like the answers to all her questions, to everything that had gone wrong with her family, could be found on the horizon if only she looked hard enough.
Like the answers to her new questions — where Neil was hiding, where Beth had gone when she’d disappeared shortly after Neil — might be found there too.
More often than not, Declan had accompanied her, keeping Griffin busy with searches for shells and facts about the ocean while Kate paced the beach, hands stuffed into her coat pockets, anger and frustration keeping her warm while she considered all the places Neil could be hiding.
But there had been other times, times when Declan had been busy at MIS or with Griff, when Kate had stalked the shoreline alone, picking her way over the rocks that jutted from the bottom of the cliff, her mind as tumultuous as the water roiling in the cove.
She sighed and made her way along the path that connected the guest house to the main house, already dreading the walk in winter. The guest house didn’t have a garage, and Kate continued to park her Lexus in the one attached to the main house. It was one of the few times she allowed her mind to drift to the future, a silent acknowledgement that the guest house wouldn’t work for her little family forever. Eventually she and Declan would have to figure out what the future held.
Marriage? Their own home?
She couldn’t even begin to think about those things until they found Neil. Until they made him pay.
Beth was more complicated. If she hadn’t been in on Neil’s plans to murder Mac Walsh, to initiate some kind of takeover of WMG, why had she disappeared? Why had Kate found a copy of WMG’s financial reports — complete with Neil’s notes in the margins — before Beth had dropped off the face of the earth?
All of Beth’s actions screamed guilt, not just her disappearance but the fact that she’d obviously been working with Neil in some capacity all along.
She was a landmine in their family, buried deep but ready to blow them all to bits if they got too close, but Kate couldn’t bring herself to step around it, to leave it behind. Not until she knew the truth about Beth’s involvement. She was still Kate’s sister, and estrangement aside, Kate found that surprisingly hard to shake.
She slowed as she approached the main house and considered the possibility of stopping in to say hello to her mom. They needed to discuss their dresses for Aiden’s wedding, now only two months away, a task Kate had already put off for too long.
Instead she continued toward the garage.
It was childish to hold a grudge against her mom for her lapse with Neil almost three decades ago, although less so for the lie she’d perpetuated since then, but Kate couldn’t seem to help herself. She’d always been closer to her father, had blossomed under his praise, withered under his rarely displayed disappointment. Mac had been the one Kate lived to impress, and she’d eagerly drunk from the cup of his wisdom, all of which was designed to train her for an eventual role leading WMG beside Aiden.
Her father’s daughter had no glass ceilings to crack, not only because he’d prepared a place for her at the table of his company but because he’d settled for nothing less than the utter destruction of any obstacle.
He’d tutored Kate in the art of that destruction, had raised her on pearls of wisdom touting the merits of using her considerable brain power to make the decisions that would shape her life.
He was far from cold, he was even lavish with his affection, his laughter the sound that most came to mind when she thought of her childhood. But he’d always made it clear that heart had to work together with mind — and that mind should win if there was ever a tie.
Her mother was different. Sharp and insightful in ways that would have been indefinable to her father, that were sometimes indefinable to Kate, but still soft when it counted. There were few things Annie Walsh couldn’t forgive. Neil’s betrayal was at the top of that very short list, but she didn’t understand why Kate was having so much trouble dealing with an affair that had happened so long ago, one that, according to her mother, even Kate’s father had somehow reconciled before his death.
Kate wasn’t sure she could even explain it to herself, but in the months since Kate had confronted her mom with Beth’s surprise paternity, Kate had been walking the line between pretending everything was okay and avoiding her mom entirely.
She swallowed her shame and entered the garage using the back door. She just needed time, that was all.
Time and justice.
Once they found Neil, once they made him pay for what he’d done to Kate’s father, she’d be able to put it all behind her.
She got into the Lexus and thought about the past six months. They’d learned painfully little about Neil’s plans since his disappearance, but they knew he’d been planning a takeover of WMG. The shareholders MIS had interviewed who’d come clean about being approached to sell their shares had all said the same thing: that they’d been approached by a shadowy company led by an anonymous CEO.
It made sense that Neil was behind the takeover. He’d eliminated Kate’s father, had cozied up to Beth, who had the largest number of shares next to Kate, Aiden, and Annie, all of whom would never sell.