The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(96)

I can barely find my voice, but I need to. I desperately need to find my voice. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

She lifts her phone and flashes a website at me without turning around.

She’s on the Wi-Fi. Someone gave her the password.

And that’s a photo of me as a teenager, twenty-some years ago.

She knows.

She knows.

Panic overrides everything else in my brain, and I short-circuit.

All of me. I’m short-circuiting and reverting to an autopilot response that I once practiced so much I probably still sometimes say it in my sleep. “Who’s that, and how’s that related to anything?” I tell myself to shut up, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work, and I can’t stop myself. “You drink too much tonight?”

“Edward Richard Montgomery Beauregard the Fourth,” she says, each distinct syllable a physical slap in the face making me realize how much I have to lose in this exact moment. “The lost heir to the Greenright Oil fortune. I was barely in middle school when you disappeared. Right before your grandfather’s trial for negligence in that oil spill, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Deny deny deny.

It’s instinctual. My heart’s running from a saber-toothed tiger, and my head feels like it’s been put in a juicer. I need to breathe. I need to breathe, and I need to think, and I need to process that everything I’ve buried in my life is spilling out into the open in my private sanctuary.

“You might think Upper East Siders have no interest in old Texas oil money, but you’d be mistaken. We always have contingency plans for advantageous connections and marriages, and we’d rather marry big belt buckles with massive trust funds than have to shop at discount stores and wear anything of generic origin, and we can’t have contingency plans if we don’t know about the money in Texas and California and Seattle and—well, anywhere old and new money settle. Everyone knows about the no-foul-play-suspected disappearance of Edward Richard Montgomery Beauregard the Fourth, and everyone has a conspiracy theory about where he went and what he’s up to.” She sweeps her feet off the ottoman, rises, and fuck me, there is zero doubt that this woman is Estelle Lightly’s granddaughter.

She’s in red. Red power suit. Red lipstick. Red anger seething through her deadly calm voice. Her messy bun is the only thing chaotic about her, and it adds an air of danger that a slicked-back corporate hairdo wouldn’t. “In the interest of being the bigger person that I’m trying desperately to be, I’m choosing to believe you have a very good reason for lying to me about who you are, and I’m going to give you one chance to tell me what it is before I walk out this door.”

This is not Phoebe Lightly, my girlfriend with a soul.

This is Phoebe Lightly, deceived socialite.

And I’m not Teague Miller, grumpy single dad in a small town in Wisconsin.

I’m Edward Richard Montgomery Beauregard IV. I’m seventeen fucking years old again, trapped, angry, and terrified, and I know exactly what a deceived socialite can do, because I was dating one when my world blew up, and I know how this ends.

I know exactly how this ends.

Time to leave.

Move.

Get Bridget.

Take what’s left of my bank account, buy plane tickets, and go back into hiding somewhere they’ll never find out who I am, where I came from, and what I did. “My name is Teague Andrew Miller, and if you don’t believe me, the door’s right there, princess.”

Her green eyes narrow. “If that’s the name you were born with, you’d be having one hell of a fun time role-playing being what you believe to be a fictional missing oil heir right now. Or you’d be rolling your eyes and asking if I hit my head while I was slicing watermelon or if I finally broke myself by stepping too far outside of my comfy little heiress world. But you’re angry. And you’re scared. And the only reason you’d be angry and scared is if I’m getting too close to a truth you don’t want me to know. One more time. Why are you lying to everyone here?”

Fuck. Just fuck.

It’s been a long time since I didn’t know who I was, but in this moment, I do not have a clue who I am or what I want. All I know is that I’ve spent the past sixteen years putting this town above all else, and I’m suddenly terrified I’ve fucked it up so badly that I can’t stay.

I can’t stay.

My home isn’t safe, because of me.

And on top of the fear that if Phoebe Lightly figured me out, my whole fucking biological family could find me, there’s the sweat breaking out at what my friends and neighbors will do when they find out how long I’ve lied to them about who I am.

I’ve spent sixteen years lying to the people I love about who I am.

They’ll never forgive me.

And worse, once it gets out who I am—and it will—the rest of the life I left behind will descend on this town and destroy it.

I can’t stay here. Once again, I’m about to lose it all. And this time, it’s not just me in danger.

This time, it’s everyone who taught me how to love, how to live, and how to be the man I want to be.

It’s everyone I love. Truly love. “I swear on the grave of the man I named myself after, if you do a single thing to hurt my family or anyone in this town, I will bury you. I don’t give two shits how much of Estelle Lightly you have in you. You have nothing on me and what I’ll do to protect the people I love, and you have no idea who you’re actually up against.”