The worst part about Angel’s hatred of him was that he truly loved her. He kind of always had. They had a connection from the beginning. He must have met her on the first day of kindergarten if not earlier—it was a small town, and they were the same age. They connected that year when she was, of course, chosen as the angel in the kindergarten school play, where he was a shepherd and had to stare at the angel for almost the entire two hours. Why he was the only one who noticed that she was going to fall, he didn’t know. Why he thought he would be able to catch her, he didn’t know either. They both ended up breaking their arms, and then they had actually been friends of sort the entire time they were in school.
Just friends, too. He had never been sexually attracted to Angel. By the time he realized what sex really was, she was already dating Franky Berg, and she dated him from the time they were twelve until he dumped her during college. Almost as soon as that relationship was over for her, she learned the secret her mom had been keeping from her for eighteen years: who her dad really was. That information is what had turned them into supposed enemies. He and Angel shared a dad.
Angel was the product of his dad’s fifteen-year affair with Sara Johnson. To this day, he had yet to acknowledge her as his daughter in any way. Sara had been the one to tell Rafferty, not his father. It was Sara who had asked him to be tested to see if he and Angel shared the same blood type. The woman was desperate and would do anything for her daughter. Sure enough, they did, and then came more tests. That was when he had found out Angel had actually lost function of her kidneys and needed a transplant.
Today he had one kidney, and she had the other. She owed him, and he was about to ask for payment. Mia was worth far more than a kidney to him.
Rafferty walked across the street without looking for traffic. Traffic would stop for him; it was Landstad. Of course, there was no traffic to speak of since it was freezing outside.
Pushing through the door, Ruth was sitting at her desk and seemed happy until the moment she saw him. Then she was as cold as it was outside.
“Anderson, your friend is here,” she announced in her best angry personal assistant voice.
Anderson quickly came out to her office area. “Rafferty, what can I do for you today? Come into my office. My personal assistant has some issues with you.” He was trying to get him away from Ruth as fast as possible.
It almost made Rafferty laugh. His friend was suddenly smitten with his personal assistant, which for the past few weeks had been fun to watch and even more fun to tease the man about. Ruth had been working for Anderson for years, and now suddenly he was interested.
Rafferty looked over at Ruth, who was staring intently at her computer. “I want to talk with her for a minute.”
“Nothing to say to you, Brooks.” Ruth turned and was now shuffling through the papers on her desk, making a point not to look at him.
He grabbed a visitor chair, pulled it to the front of her desk, and plopped down in it. “I need you to talk to Mia for me. Talk me up.”
“No, I don’t want any of my friends talking to you. They deserve better.” She didn’t look up at him, but he kept staring at her anyway, which caused her to start blushing. She always blushed easily, and he liked to see that hadn’t changed.
“You owe me, Angel,” he mumbled quietly, hoping Anderson wasn’t paying attention.
Standing up, she looked down at him with anger. “And this is what you want? Mia Lawson? What happens when you need a liver?” Her voice was just as quiet.
“I hear yours is getting quite the workout at book club.” Their gazes didn’t break as he got to his feet, the smile gone.
“Not nearly as much as yours always has,” she countered, but he knew she had no idea. She never went out for fun. She was too much of a homebody for that.
“Could you just talk to her?” he asked, nicer now. Anger wasn’t going to get him anything.
“No. If she wants to talk to you, she will. She knows you as much as I do.” She picked up the pile of papers.
Which was exactly why he needed someone else to talk to her. They had too much of a past. It wasn’t even all that had happened in the last few years. He had messed things up badly long before he came back to Landstad.
“Come on, Angel.” He begged.
“No, you can lord it over my head some more. It’s nice when you drag it out like this. I would hate for that to stop.” Whispering so Anderson didn’t hear, Ruth sat down and turned her back on him. Only to stare at the wall, not even pretending to be doing anything productive.
Leaning against the door jam, Anderson folded his arms, his face set in slight annoyance. “Come into my office, Rafferty. She said no.”
Rafferty shrugged in defeat. His work life was done, and his love life was done. Now he had nothing to keep him in town, which meant he would have to give up on Mia forever. But maybe it was for the best. Ruth was right—if Mia had wanted him, she knew where he was. She’d never wanted him.
In Anderson’s office, he sat heavily in the chair across from his friend. “Dad just sold the building our office is in. Someone offered him way more than it was worth, and he took it.”
“So now you have rent. I rent this place. It’s not bad, and you don’t have to worry about taxes and upkeep. When something breaks, you just call the management company, and it gets fixed.” Anderson tried to make it sound like it wasn’t the end of the world.
“No, they want us out. They doubled the average rent price in the area. Dad is retiring, but I need the office. I don’t want to leave town, but I might have to,” Rafferty admitted. There was no way he could afford the rent. Any rent, really. His dad wasn’t as well-liked in town as Anderson. So far less successful.
“Maybe somewhere else in town?” Anderson suggested.
“No luck. They own almost all the open rental space in town.” Rafferty leaned back and rubbed his eyes hard.
What he hadn’t realized until today was that for being a small town that should be having issues with keeping renters and finding buyers, Landstad was the complete opposite. The town was thriving for some reason. There were only a few homes and no businesses for sale in town, and it had been that way for years now.