The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(97)

“And who, exactly, is that?”

My fingers curl into my fists, and I feel like I’m sitting in an ice bucket on fire.

You’re better than this, my good shoulder angel whispers.

You know better than anyone how little rich people can truly change, my bad shoulder angel counters. Look at you, falling back into old habits just because someone said your old name. Do you really think Phoebe Lightly will let you get away with this?

Fuck. I swallow hard and match her socialite composure with some repressed haughty privilege of my own. “I’m someone willing to go as far as I have to go to protect the people who matter.”

Something flashes beneath her poise, and under all the adrenaline and fear and shock of having my past suddenly drop into my home, of having my past threaten my present and my future, my heart tries to kick me in the balls.

“And I’m not one of those people, am I?” she says.

I swallow hard, but I don’t answer her.

I can’t.

Upper East Side Phoebe Lightly is a threat to my entire existence—I knew that the minute she walked into my town—and this woman standing in my safe sanctuary isn’t my girlfriend, the woman on a mission to be a better person.

No, this woman is 100 percent Upper East Side Phoebe Lightly.

She could destroy me. My family. This town.

And if not her, then someone from my past. Someone from her past.

A former lover. An angry employee. A disgruntled ex-friend.

If she knows who I am, who else has she told?

Who else would she tell?

Who else from her family will figure it out?

Fuck.

She could tell the entire Upper East Side.

The socialites would descend on my town without hesitation, looking to score a lost heir, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid. Tickled Pink deserves better than the life I thought I could shake off and leave behind.

The thing about change?

It’s hard, and regression can happen in an instant. Especially with the kind of change that people like me—and people like Phoebe Lightly—have to make to be truly better people.

To walk away from who we were raised to be from birth.

I should know.

That regression is happening to me right now, and I have close to twenty fucking years of experience being who I want to be instead of the silver-spooned asshole I was until one of my family’s ships leaking all over the damn ocean finally served as a wake-up call to who I was and where I was going.

She’s had what, a month?

I want to trust her.

I want to tell her everything.

Of all the people in this world, I think she’s the one who could get it.

But what if she doesn’t?

What happens to my family—my whole family, this whole fucking town, me—if she realizes I’m no better at my core than anyone in her family?

And what will my friends and family do if she tells them?

How will they handle the fact that I’ve lied to them, and not about something small but about something big, the entire time I was building a life here?

They’ll never forgive me.

I’ll never be able to look them in the eye again.

I won’t belong here anymore.

I probably never did.

My lie is up.

It’s time to face the music.

Fuck.

“We were never going to work, were we?” she says quietly. You’re a dead man quietly. “You’re fine if I’m the one who needs all the work. But not if you have to let anyone in. All the way in. Is that why it didn’t work with you and Shiloh? Because you didn’t let her in?”

Basically. “You’re treading on dangerous ground.”

“Of course I am. We’re spoiled rich brats who use trust funds to build tree houses and Ferris wheels and pretend that we’re fine, because money can fix everything, when we’re not. We’re not fine at all, and there are so few safe spaces in this world to admit it.”

“You come from people who wanted to make better toilet paper. I come from people who think it’s just another day at the office when there’s an ecological disaster that kills millions of sea creatures.” Jesus. I just said that out loud.

I’m going to have to throw her off the balcony and make it look like an accident.

Fuck off, idiot, both of my shoulder angels tell me.

They know I don’t have it in me, but I have something in me, and it’s not pretty right now.

Phoebe’s glaring. “So you ran away from home and changed your name to disassociate from them instead of taking a stand and publicly announcing you were cutting ties? Did you take your trust fund with you?”

If my face wasn’t hot before, it’s steaming now. That was low.

And accurate, a snide voice whispers in my head. “Get. The fuck. Out.”

“You did. You took the money and ran.”

“I said—”

“Don’t worry, Richard. I’m going. You have bigger problems. I might’ve figured out fastest why your brother’s here and who he is, but I won’t be the last to put it together. Tickled Pink isn’t full of backwoods hicks. And they know you. They’ll figure it out.”

“If you—”

She makes a commanding noise, and my voice dies away.

If deadly calm Phoebe Lightly is terrifying, visibly angry Phoebe Lightly is something else entirely.