Her shoulders slumped as her fingers moved over Lucas’s handwriting. Shaking her head, she said, “If I am pregnant, I’ll have to deal with Lucas. But if I let this go…him treating me like a bill to be paid…then how will we ever work together to take care of a baby? He may not love me, Dee. But he has to at least respect me.”
Delilah nodded and gave her a smile. “You’re absolutely right. I’m with you. Do you want me to go with you to see him?”
“No.” Rose threw a look at the window and the cold, rainy day outside. “I have to do this alone.”
“Okay, then.” Delilah picked up her purse off the coffee table and shrugged into her windbreaker, pulling the hood up over her perfectly styled red hair. “But call me when it’s over, okay?”
“I will.” She stood there in the center of the living room and watched her friend leave. Then she told herself to get a firm grip on her sweeping emotions. There was no point in facing down Lucas if she couldn’t calmly and clearly tell him exactly what she thought of him and his stupid check.
Minutes passed and she realized she wasn’t going to calm down. The best she could hope for was that she wouldn’t shriek at him or maybe kick him in the shins.
“Did he really think I could be bought off?” she asked herself, and then in the next instant, answered her own question. “Well, why wouldn’t he? He knew Dave stole jobs out from under him, so in the world according to Lucas King, that makes all of the Clancys thieves.”
Turning on her heel, she headed for her bedroom. She needed to change. And fix her hair. And makeup. This Clancy was going to teach Lucas King a lesson he wouldn’t forget.
If it was the last thing she ever did for him.
“Lucas…”
He didn’t even look up from his desk. “Evelyn, if you don’t want Katie’s cookies in the break room, tell Rafe.”
“This isn’t about the cookies,” his secretary said and waited for him to look up at her. “Someone’s here to see you.”
Someone? Evelyn usually wasn’t so vague. He frowned, then understood as a man walked up behind Evelyn, then slipped into Lucas’s office. “Dave.”
Almost the last person he’d expected to see here at King Construction. The only way he could have been more surprised was if Rose had shown up unannounced. Something inside him jolted to life at the thought, and he ruthlessly squashed it down.
He and Rose were over.
Even if he hadn’t called an end to it himself, after the way things had gone between them at her house, he knew she was done with him.
He didn’t like it and maybe he regretted the whole useless revenge plan in the first place—regretted it more than he would ever have thought possible—but hindsight was pretty much useless in most situations.
“It’s okay, Evelyn,” he said, standing up from behind his desk. He looked at the man opposite him and realized that he didn’t even feel the old anger anymore.
Lucas couldn’t help thinking about what Rafe and Sean had said, about letting it go. And somewhere over the last couple of days, he now realized, he had. Wasn’t sure why. Wasn’t even sure how. But that hard, cold ball he’d been carrying around in his gut for the past two years was finally gone.
When his secretary left and closed the door, Dave said simply, “You shouldn’t have gone for Rose, Lucas.”
There was that sting of shame again. But he didn’t owe Dave anything, so he squashed that emotion flat. “And you shouldn’t have betrayed our friendship, Dave.”
“Damn it,” Dave countered, “this was between you and me. You didn’t have to drag my sister into it.”
“Wrong.” Lucas met his stare evenly. “This was between our families. You didn’t just cheat me, Dave. You cheated my brothers. You cost us seven jobs that winter.”
“Yeah,” he said on a snort of self-derision. Scrubbing one hand across his face, Dave said, “I know. Still can’t believe it myself, really. And you should know, I didn’t want to do it.”
“Small consolation. Whether you wanted to or not, you did.”
“I needed the money,” his old friend snapped, shooting Lucas a look that mixed both pride and embarrassment.
It was an admission he hadn’t expected to hear. Hell, the Clancy family wasn’t as wealthy as the Kings, but they came damn close. “For what? What was so damn important?”
Was he finally going to get the answers to the questions that had plagued him? And when he had them, would it make any difference?
Lucas had spent far too much time over the past two years thinking about the betrayal that had cut him so deeply. He’d even questioned his own ability as a judge of character and that bothered him more than anything. If he could be so wrong about Dave, what was to say he wasn’t wrong about a lot of other people in his life?
“My father was dying, and the business was going down,” Dave said, his words spilling from him as though a dam inside him had finally broken. He looked at Lucas. “Dad had made some bad investments in the years before I took over. He lost most of our capital. There were suppliers to be paid, contracts to honor and hospital bills piling up. I had to make good on it all or we would have lost everything we had left. I needed the jobs, Lucas.” He scowled at the memories, but added, “I had to protect my family. I’m not sorry I was able to do that, but I am sorry I used you to do it.”
Lucas could look at his old friend and see what that confession had cost him. He could even understand now, why Dave had done what he had. After all, there weren’t many things Lucas wouldn’t be willing to do to protect his brothers. So now that he knew the truth, how could he hold it against the man?
“You should’ve told me,” he said finally. “We were friends. I could have helped you out, and you wouldn’t have had to do what you did.”
“Sounds good now.” Dave laughed shortly and shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you, Lucas. Pride’s the one thing you and I always had in common. And that pride made me steal from a friend rather than admit that I was about to lose the company my grandfather built. Hell, I didn’t even want to admit the truth to myself.”
Rain slapped at the window behind him, the only sound in the room as the two men looked at each other and each tried to finally put the past behind them. Absently, Lucas wondered if fate hadn’t taken a hand in the weather lately. If not for this new storm, Lucas would have been out inspecting the latest job site, talking to the crews. But with the weather delay, he had spent all afternoon in the office, catching up on paperwork. So he’d been here to hash this out with Dave.