Page 3 of Holiday Home 3
“Make it three,” Avril said, twisting to look over her shoulder at Tess.
He couldn’t make out Avril’s expression but saw Tess’s. As the two women locked eyes, Tess’s expression trended toward a renewed glower, though she broke it off—and their stare—before it fully formed.
About a minute later, four glasses of sparkling water sat on her table. Only one of them would experience what it was like to have its contents drained over the course of the ensuing discussion.
Sitting at the only unclaimed chair at her table, sunlight poured itself onto Tess’s back through the wide window directly behind her. Through the opened blinds, Liam could see the igloo that he, Tess, and Anna had built several days ago rising poignantly amid the field of snow that smothered her backyard. Switzerland was its new name, though only he and Tess knew that. The first place where they’d had sex. Somehow, though it had been only two days since that marvelous event, it felt like a lifetime ago.
How had he gotten from that unparalleled echelon of bliss to here?
The responsible party for that plunge took a long draught of her water.
“Ah,” Avril said after finishing her drink. “Refreshing.” Setting her glass back on the table, she scanned all three of their expressions, severe, dismayed, anxious, all in that order, before raising an eyebrow. “Okay, so what are we going to talk about, Tess?”
“You, first off,” Tess answered, granting Liam and Anna a brief reprieve from her stern focus.
“Sure. What about me?”
“I’m very disappointed in you, Avril.”
Of all the tongue lashings she might have expected to receive, such a professor-like beginning clearly caught her off-guard. Blinking owlishly, the sexiest redhead that Liam knew tilted her head to one side.
“It was just a kiss,” she said in defense of her earlier actions. “It’s hardly a big thing.”
“It is not about the kiss,” Tess said, injecting a potent dose of surprise into all three of them.
“Huh?” Avril said, the smattering of mostly faded freckles crossing over the bridge of her nose dancing as her face scrunched together.
“It isn’t the kiss,” Tess repeated. “It’s the self-centeredness behind it, the disregard for what Anna is going through right now.”
“What… do you mean?” Avril said, slightly leaning away from Tess as though she’d just pulled a can ofsurströmmingout of her pocket and offered it to her.
“Why are we all here right now, Avril?” She paused, then gestured back toward the living room. “Not here in my kitchen, but in my house. We all gathered for a specific reason, and you seem to have forgotten about it. Worse, you’ve shoved it to the side so you could take centerstage with the stunt you just pulled.”
She didn’t wait for a response before answering her own question.
“Liam and Anna’s encounter with Trent, Avril. That’s why we’re here. Because of that very unpleasant encounter and the fallout that’s ensuing because of it.”
As if Tess had planned it, Anna’s phone began to vibrate inside her purse. It wasn’t the first time it’d done so since he and Anna had confronted and then left Trent standing stupefied at the ice-skating rink where he’d hunted Anna down. Well, sincehe’dleft Trent standing stupefied. He’d been the one to lose his temper and patience with the haughty, arrogant jackass and blurt out that he was Anna’s boyfriend.
All this because Anna’s father, likely the man causing Anna’s phone to vibrate for the fifth or sixth time this past hour, wanted to tether his wonderful, kind daughter to the utterly unworthy scion of Alden Electronics. Like she was a bargainingchip, not a human being. Without having met Arnold Royce, Liam already knew he abhorred the man. Especially now that he knew what kind of man Trent was.
“They wanted to let us know about the… secret they’d been keeping from us,” Tess continued, offering them a kindness by downplaying the fact that they’d been deceiving everyone for quite some time. “They wanted our help with this unpleasant development. They didn’t want to rub it in our faces or make a big deal out of what they’d done. They wanted help, Avril. Anna wantedyourhelp.
“However, your actions took us off that topic. Because of what you chose to do, instead of discussing how we can help Liam and Anna with their situation, we’re now forced to address how you decided to suddenly kiss Liam and make the current topic about that—about yourself. That should not be the case, and I don’t believe you’re so narcissistic that you’d have done what you did if you’d realized all this at the time. You care deeply about Anna, and we all know that. But I am still very disappointed by your earlier actions.”
As soon as Tess finished speaking, silence reigned supreme within her kitchen, within her whole house. Graveyards envied the quiet that manifested itself within Tess’s home. All eyes rested upon Avril, an Avril unlike any he’d seen before, as they waited for her response. They had to wait a while.
Throughout Tess’s lecture, she had sunken into herself as though her bones had vanished, leaving her body gelatinous. Trumped only by the kiss itself, this was his biggest surprise of the day.
He’d never seen her deflate like this. He wasn’t sure if anybody had, for even Anna seemed to marvel at her best friend’s diminished state.
From the moment that she’d opened the door to her apartment, already intending to enact a lascivious scheme uponhim, Liam had only known Avril Knight as a being of unfettered vigor. She was like the summer sun in that regard. From the moment she crested the horizon every dawn until the moment she vanished in the evening, she shone so brilliantly that there were times when he had to find some shade and recuperate. She couldn’t be doused or dulled or diminished, not by anyone. Neither Anna’s consternation nor Victoria’s exasperation could tamp her down. She rolled with the punches, deflected every verbal dart that sought to pin her down, and seemed altogether immune to gloominess. There was something enviable about how everlasting her exuberant energy was.
Had been.
The Avril across the table from him struggled to swallow a lump of regret as thick as iron. The Avril slumping in her chair had lost every vivacious element to her name. The emerald sheen of her eyes seemed a bit dimmer, her auburn hair a little less lustrous, her fair skin a bit pallid. He’d heard about people getting physically sick and vomiting due to internal strife, but he’d never seen it for himself. For all their sakes, he hoped that wasn’t where this road led.
Still struggling to locate her voice, she fidgeted in her chair. Her dejected gaze found the floor, and one corner of her lower lip curled beneath her upper canine. A part of him felt as though he should look away, as if staring at this pale shade of a person was only hastening her fade into nonexistence. Another part of him was so astonished to see her like this that he couldn’t even blink.