Once Upon a Friendship Read online

  “I overheard the head counsel, my father’s second in command, making overly optimistic return promises to a potential investor on land that we don’t own.”

  The facts sounded even worse out loud than they had rambling through his mind all night.

  Gabrielle, a prelaw student who lived life in black-and-white, sat up. “That’s illegal.”

  He shouldn’t have said anything. Shouldn’t have betrayed his father. He’d let his fear get the better of him.

  Something a boy would do.

  “It’s not illegal unless he actually took money, which he didn’t,” he quickly assured his friend. “The agreement is only verbal at this point. Thing is, it’s land that my father has wanted to develop into a mountain resort for as long as I can remember. Buying the land isn’t such a big deal. But he never did because it would have to be rezoned before he could do anything with it. And because it borders Indian land, there would have to be an agreement between him and the tribe to develop it, and the Indians refuse to even consider the idea. Which is why Dad’s never purchased the land. So why is this guy even talking to investors about it?”

  “Did you ask your dad?” Marie scooted to the end of her bed, both hands on the edge of the mattress.

  “Yeah.” That was when he’d have taken a big gulp of beer if he’d had one in front of him. He’d had two already that night. The first in months. He wasn’t going back down that road again.

  “And?”

  He turned as Gabrielle asked the question. Her brow was raised in concern now. Because it was late and he was tired, he allowed himself to wallow a moment in that look. And then said, “He told me that George Costas, lead attorney and top executive at Connelly, knows his business better than anyone. That he trusted George with his life—and mine. And that there was talk regarding the land, though he didn’t say who was talking, and they had to have investors lined up and ready because if the time came to move, the window of opportunity to do so would be very small.”

  “Sounds legit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  Right. He was probably overreacting. “Problem is, the only way he’s going to get that land rezoned anytime soon—and there’s still no development agreement with the tribe, I checked—would be to back a politician who we both know takes bribes.”

  “A particular politician?” Marie asked now, poking at his beanbag seat with the tip of her toe.

  “Yeah. A state senator who’s up for reelection in the fall.”

  “Let me guess, your dad’s a new campaign contributor.” Gabrielle’s dry response washed over him.

  Liam shrugged.

  “You didn’t ask?” Gabrielle again. Sounding more than a little surprised.

  “I asked. He told me to mind my own business,” Liam relayed. But he left out exactly how his father reacted to him daring to question the old man or implying that George was not trustworthy, in light of Liam’s own lack of support.

  “He can’t contribute through the corporation.” Gabrielle joined Marie on the end of her bed. “It’s against Colorado law. He’d have to do it as an individual. And the candidate is required to report it, including name and employment, within a specified period of time depending on the office being sought, but it’s usually within a month.”

  “I’m not worried about the legalities of the contribution,” Liam said. “Not with George watching over everything with his eagle eye. But the one thing I really admired about my dad was his integrity. He might not be around when you need him, or care about what you need as opposed to what he wants from you, but you can count on him to speak the truth and stand by his convictions. It is, I hope, the one way I take after him. This senator is a snake. I can’t believe my father would ever get into bed with him. Yeah, money rules him, but it’s always only gained legally, and he’s always drawn the line at bigotry. Which is how he made it from pauper to millionaire in ten years. People know they can trust him.”

  “He made it from pauper to billionaire because he made savvy investments at a time when real estate was booming. And then invested with uncanny cleverness.” Gabrielle’s expression was droll.

  She was repeating his words back to him. Words spoken in previous late-night sessions. Usually after he’d come back to Boulder from time in Denver with his father.

  “And he built his reputation on integrity,” he added, though why he was defending the man, he wasn’t sure. “He was faithful to my mother until the day she died.”

  His junior year in high school. Of heart disease. Something they’d discovered she had when she was pregnant with him. Which was why he was an only child.

  “Are you afraid he’s changed?” Marie’s question brought him back to the present. Where Gabrielle focused on the practical, Marie always homed in on the emotional aspect of things. They made a great team for him.

  And for each other.

  He wanted to tell Marie he wasn’t afraid. But these were his best friends. The one place he was completely honest with himself. “Maybe.”

  “So playing cards tonight...that was to get back at him for it?” Gabrielle’s derogatory opinion was clear.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Don’t throw your life away because of him.” Marie spoke next. “Don’t throw your life away for anyone.” Her tone took on a bitter note that had him studying her more closely. And then he remembered something. She never went to bed with her hair still in a ponytail. He’d woken them up enough times to know that. The three of them had probably had a late-night conversation somewhere along the way about getting ready for bed, too. They’d talked about everything else in the world over the past three years.

  “You guys weren’t asleep, were you?”

  “No.”

  He sat forward, studying the two of them as he jetted himself out of the self-pitying fog he’d allowed himself to sink into.

  “What’s going on? What happened?” he asked, ready to get up and go find whoever had upset them.

  At one in the morning.

  Gabrielle looked at Marie, as though waiting for her to tell him. As if it was Marie’s story to tell. Which meant...

  “It’s the med student, isn’t it? What’d he do?”

  Marie’s lower lip started to quiver.

  “He has some big presentation coming up Monday and was going to be studying tonight, so Marie agreed to cover for a coworker who wanted the night off,” Gabrielle said. “As it turns out they were slow and Marie got off early. She made jerk face’s favorite coffee drink and took it over to his place to surprise him.”

  “He was...with the girl I was covering for at work.”

  Now he understood the edge Marie was carrying. It hadn’t been about the hour of his visit, or him at all. “They knew you wouldn’t find out because they made sure you were busy,” Liam summarized, watching Marie fight with heartache, wondering what on earth he was supposed to say to her.

  This was why he could never even think about getting involved with either one of them. He’d rather die than be the cause of that look on Marie’s face.

  And then it occurred to him. “You know this isn’t about you, right?”

  Marie and Gabrielle exchanged a glance. One of those glances. The ones that left him out in the cold.

  “You’re gorgeous, Marie. That blond hair and brown eyes...”

  “I’m too short.”

  She was shorter than Gabrielle, who was long and leggy, but— “You are definitely not too short.”

  “It’s not about her looks,” Gabrielle interrupted, with a sound resembling a snort. She was gorgeous, too. Not an obvious showstopper like Marie. But more in line with the kind of girl he went for. He was more of a leg man.

  “What is it with men?” Marie’s derisive tone wasn’t directed at him, but
he sure felt as if it was. And took the brunt of her watery brown-eyed glare for all men. “Why can’t they be trustworthy?”

  “They can be.” Of that he was sure. Which was why his father’s actions earlier that day had upset him so much.

  “I sure didn’t see that tonight. Nor a good part of the time I was growing up...”

  Her father, who’d been unfaithful to her mother in the past and who’d only a few years earlier been brought back into the family fold, had been with another woman at their cabin in northern Arizona that summer. The girls had been the ones to discover him there. From what Gabrielle had told him, Marie had taken it pretty hard.

  “And Brad, freshman year.” A guy Gabi had dated who’d broken up with her when she wouldn’t sleep with him.

  “Jimmy Jones.” A cowboy the girls had met when they’d gone to a rodeo the year before. He’d played one for the other and gotten caught in the middle. For a day or two there, Liam had sweated that the jerk might break up a friendship he’d considered unbreakable. But the girls had surprised him—seeing through Jimmy and giving him a taste of his own medicine. Poor guy hadn’t seen what was coming...

  “Don’t forget Mark,” Marie said. She’d dated him the beginning of sophomore year. Until she’d found out that he had a fiancée at home in Phoenix.

  “All right, already,” Liam said, holding up a hand in surrender.

  “It’s like guys’ drive for sex is stronger than their hearts. Or their morals,” Marie added.

  “It’s a driving force,” Liam allowed, feeling only a little uncomfortable in his beanbag seat beneath the girls. They were family. Talked about anything. Everything. “The desire to have sex with women is always there,” he continued, knowing that the one thing he could give his friends was an honesty they probably wouldn’t get anywhere else. “It doesn’t matter how much you’re in love with a girl—you can’t help reacting when you see a beautiful woman. You’re right about that. But being attracted and acting on that feeling are two entirely different things.”

  “So when you were going with Karen last year, you were still attracted to other women?”

  “Of course!” His honesty was going to help Marie see that this had nothing to do with her. Needing to do what he could to erase the hurt from her eyes, he continued. “Karen had this woman who groomed her dog. I don’t know what it was about her, but she did it to me every time. I just had to see someone that reminded me of her and...”

  “Did you ever come on to her?”

  “No.” It would have been indecent and, having grown up in a superficial world, Liam put his highest value on authenticity. As his father had taught him by example. And that wasn’t what this conversation was about. He was trying to save Marie from self-flagellation. “But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to. Or that I didn’t think about it. Or try to find her when Karen and I broke up. She’d moved.” And he’d moved on.

  Marie’s med student was a schmuck. But since there was no chance that they would still have a relationship, there was no reason to belabor that point.

  “Did Karen know?” Gabi’s question was softly spoken.

  “Of course not.” He was authentic—not stupid. “I didn’t tell her when I thought the dress she had on made her look heavier than she was, either,” he said, to prove his point. “Nor did I admit it when she asked me if I saw the cellulite on her thigh.” He’d grabbed her up in a hug instead, telling her that she was beautiful and she needed to quit worrying so much. He’d distracted her with a kiss.

  And he’d noticed that cellulite every time he saw her after that. But only because she’d made such a big deal about it. Not because it changed—in any way—how he felt about her.

  “So, like I said, guys are jerks,” Marie said. But she was kind of smiling and didn’t look as though she was going to break any minute.

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” Liam had to defend his sex. “Some take longer to mature than others.” He was grinning, too. And then sobered. “I think there are men who, for whatever reason, just like women. In the plural,” he told her with complete honesty.

  “Like you.”

  “Maybe. And maybe I’m just immature. But whichever, at least I’m accountable enough to know not to promise forever. And if I’m in a monogamous relationship, it stays that way until I’m out.”

  “You don’t think you’ll ever marry?”

  “Not unless something changes inside of me. Right now...” He shrugged. “I figure I’m just not the marrying kind.”

  They’d passed through the bullet hole, on to the other side. Again.

  The three of them chatted for another half hour. Gabrielle cajoled Marie and Liam into volunteering with her that next weekend, bagging donated food to hand out to homeless people. They talked about meeting up for pizza on Sunday. And then, with a shudder at the thought of graduating from college and the three of them going off their separate ways, Liam reminded himself not to borrow trouble and went home to bed.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Present day

  IT WAS REALLY going to happen.

  Standing at the window of the bank, her back to the seats where Liam and Marie were sipping cheap coffee from takeout cups, public lawyer Gabrielle Miller gazed out at the snow-covered Denver sidewalks and focused on breathing. Not too deep. She didn’t want to hyperventilate. But passing out from lack of oxygen wouldn’t serve her well, either.

  You’d think with five years of professional practice under her belt, and having personally vetted the contract they were all about to sign, she would be calm about the day’s events. It wasn’t as if they were buying a home that they were going to be moving into. No, they were simply transferring into their names the ownership of the historic Arapahoe—the old apartment building she and Marie had been living in and that Liam had been visiting as regularly as he’d visited their dorm rooms in college eight years ago. She and Marie were still going to be sharing the roomy three-bedroom unit that comprised part of the second floor of the eight-floor building in historic Denver. Marie’s coffee shop, a thriving business, was still going to encompass the entire bottom floor.

  Liam would now be an official part of them, part of the family, instead of just an honorary member.

  Gabi’s portion of the down payment hadn’t been a problem. She’d worked nearly full-time all four years of college in preparation for the law school loans that would eventually come due in her future. She’d continued to add to that account by working for Marie when she could during three years of law school, and when her loans had been paid off by the state as part of her employment agreement, she’d been able to slowly grow her savings.

  Three-quarters of it was going into this deal.

  But all but two of the thirty-eight apartments were rented on long-term leases that were transferring to them as the new owners, the majority of them held by residents who’d been in the building fifty years or more. They had guaranteed rent money coming. Most of them government checks.

  Until the friends had made an offer on the place, most of the elderly residents had been trying desperately to find new homes. A few already had. The current owner’s rent increase, coming in a matter of weeks, would have put most of the elderly occupants out on the streets or into government-subsidized nursing homes. Fixed incomes could only be stretched so far.

  Those who could afford to move had done so.

  Most of those left had been in tears when Threefold had held a meeting with the residents to officially announce that they would soon be making rent checks out to them instead. In the same amount they’d been paying—not the new increased price.

  Threefold. The name she and Liam and Marie had chosen for the LLC they’d formed to purchase the somewhat decrepit building and manage it, too.

  Marie had come up with the name.

  Neither she nor Liam had argued.
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  Gabrielle felt someone come up beside her, but she didn’t turn to look. Marie generally didn’t let anyone sulk for long.

  “You having second thoughts?” Liam’s voice surprised her. He’d been over for dinner the night before—at least a biweekly ritual for the past nine years. When he was in town. And not in a relationship. Not that he didn’t come when he was in one. Just not as frequently.

  The night before, the three of them had gone over all of the paperwork together. One more time.

  “No. You?”

  His tone was too distant. Impersonal. Something was wrong. She’d known the second he’d come toward them in the bank parking lot.

  Maybe that was when she’d started to panic.

  And now he was seeking her out alone. That only happened when he was in need of analytical thinking without the emotional twist.

  Liam might prefer to be a freelance journalist rather than a financier, and he might even be better at it if the current success rate of his stories was anything to go by, but business was in his blood. And first on his college degree, too, with journalism as a minor. Business, working for his father at Connelly Investments, provided his substantial paycheck.

  “No second thoughts at all.” Amazed at the instant calm that came over her at the words, she turned to look at him.

  “You sure? Because I can’t afford to make a mistake here, Liam. If our figures are out of line, if you think there’s real risk here, I just can’t afford to take it. I mean, we’re looking at almost a solid year with no real income from rent. The elevator fix alone is going to eat up the first two months and...”

  His smile made her smile. And she heard what she was doing.

  “We’re going to be fine.” He reminded her of the extra money that was being rolled into their loan to keep in an account for unforeseen maintenance. Of the monies she and Marie would be saving in rent that would offset the building’s common utility costs. Of the down payment monies they’d all three contributed, which were keeping her third of the Arapahoe’s monthly mortgage payments within her means...