Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

The roads in Costa Rica had improved massively since the last time Callum had been here, but the general attitude of road and traffic signs being "optional" still seemed to apply to the Ticos on the street. Callum changed gears as a truck roared around him on a curvy two-lane road. Today was not a great day for driving off a cliff.

Liddy had been nervously bouncing her knee in the passenger seat. The raw skin on her cheek was pink, but she'd already collected a slight tan this morning. So had he, for that matter.

"It's going to be fine," Callum said in a calm voice, his eyes shifting back to the road. "We're doing everything we can. Even if Elle finds out about the dress being stolen, she wouldn't be able to ask much more of you."

"I mean, I gave the comfort of my own bedroom up for her," Liddy said with a chuckle. "And maybe my dignity. From now on, everyone I'm close to is going to assume we've slept together."

"Yeah, that would be the worst. "

"Don't worry, I have a plan. If you ever try to use this against me, I'll just tell everyone you have a small dick."

Callum guffawed at her, raising a brow. "You wouldn't."

She grinned. "Watch me. And, yes, it's a threat." She gave an exaggerated sniffle. " ‘We would have stayed together, but I just couldn't keep pretending I was satisfied anymore.'"

"You know, I always knew you were truly evil, but this just confirms my suspicions." He shrugged. "Fine. I'll tell everyone you're flatulent in bed."

Her jaw dropped in mock horror. Then she let a puff of air out from her lips with a shrug. "At least mine might be fixable. You're screwed. Except . . . not really, on account of your itty-bitty member."

He nearly choked with laughter. She's entertaining, that's for damn sure. "Having met your grandmother now, I know where you get your sense of humor from."

"Oh God, I hope I'm not that bad. She makes me blush."

"She's hilarious. Free. I appreciate her enthusiasm and complete lack of filter."

Liddy leaned back in her seat, and the air coming in through the open window tossed some tendrils of hair framing her face. She'd tied it back and set a bandanna on her head to be more comfortable with the windows open. She looked like she belonged in the hippie town they'd just come from. "Granny doesn't know where the line is, often to her detriment. But she also never loses."

"Which you would love." Callum grabbed a bottle of iced tea from the center console, then took a swig. He hesitated, then added, "You're quite a force yourself."

Liddy swung her gaze toward him, and he felt the weight of her stare. After a moment, she said quietly, "You don't have to do that."

He swallowed some more tea. "What's that?"

"Compliment me. We both know you don't mean it." She stretched her shoulders back as though she was having trouble getting comfortable.

He winced. I have been cold to her for the past couple of years.

"Just because I haven't patted you on the back doesn't mean I haven't noticed the quality of your work." He frowned and recapped his tea, then set it down. "Then again, I never really thought you needed my compliments. You'd already nabbed an amazing job—one that showed your professionalism—when we first met. You don't need me to tell you what you already know."

She looked away. "Just because I think I do a good job doesn't mean I wouldn't like to hear some affirmation occasionally."

He studied her profile. "That's fair. But if it helps, I rarely give anyone praise for doing the job they were hired to do. Your best efforts are expected."

"True, but that doesn't mean praise won't elevate camaraderie on a team. Right now, the people who work beneath you are more bonded by their dislike for you than anything else."

Wow, she didn't hold back.

Callum blinked slowly, considering her words. "I'm reserved."

"There's a difference between being reserved and being unfriendly. I'm not the most outgoing person on the planet, but even I have friends at work."

I have friends.

Though Mason and Aiden might not really count. He'd known them since he was a child because their fathers had been friends at Oxford.

"We're different, then. I prefer to keep my business and personal lives entirely separate." I learned the hard way that was for the best. Besides, he didn't really care for one of her friends. His disastrous lack of judgment with Miranda Kaster a few nights ago aside, Miranda had also crossed the line of innuendo on more than one occasion—an HR disaster waiting to happen for whatever sorry bastard she might set her sights on next.

"Callum, not that this is any of my business, but what personal life, exactly? The entire office knows you practically sleep at work. You never take vacations. You rarely go out to any group functions, even the annual holiday party. I'm not saying this to make you defensive, but you even worked most of the plane ride down here and then went straight to work after arriving."

Callum ran his hands over the smooth steering wheel, his chest tightening. "You're right, it's none of your business," he said in a low voice.

Liddy's mouth parted with a quick retort, but she closed it again, clearly thinking better of it. With a nod, she shifted her body away from him to look out the window.

He regretted his words almost immediately, but any apology he thought of stung the back of his throat.

What does she know about my life, anyway?

Yet she wasn't entirely wrong.

He'd purposely set up boundaries between his work and personal life. And in his efforts to achieve career success, most of his personal life had gone out the window.

Not that he cared. He wasn't looking for the same things that many people seemed to want. Domesticity. A long-term, committed relationship. Neither had any appeal. And the hours he kept at the office made it so that he was rarely home—even the fiddle leaf fig that Isla had given him to bring "cheer" to his flat had died. He couldn't keep a damn houseplant alive, which was an indictment for his ability to keep any other living creature satisfied for long.

He liked it that way, though. It was simple. Easier.

He enjoyed being the best at what he did. Enjoyed watching his bank balance increase as a result, too. Not that he had anything he wanted to spend that money on. But it was still satisfying.

Finding women to warm his bed had never been a problem, either. He was always clear that he offered nothing more. And when, inevitably, a woman started behaving as though she was special, an exception to that arrangement, he cut things off for good and moved on.

Even that was little more than an annoyance.

Somewhere, over the last few years, he'd started feeling less.

But when was the last time I did anything fun?

Surfing this morning had been fun.

Maybe because it was the only thing he'd done in a while that hadn't been a part of his schedule.

Liddy didn't deserve his defensive reaction. Why am I allowing her to get under my skin? She had said nothing he didn't already know.

"I didn't mean to snap at you," he said at last.

"We don't have to talk about it."

"Look, Liddy, I'm not . . . particularly good at this. Talking about myself makes me uncomfortable. And you're right, I've been cold to you over the years. I regret that. I think we've made a good team despite that."

"Maybe. But what if you knew I tried to get you fired one time? Because I may as well tell you about that since we're sharing."

Fired? He raised his brows. "Over the comments you overheard me make when we first met?"

She shook her head. "No, that would have involved humiliating myself. I looked into you after I was hired. And I found out you have a criminal record. I don't know how you even got past the background check, but I went to Aiden, and he ordered me not to say anything to anyone else."

"I didn't—" He couldn't argue with the facts. No one had blinked twice at his background at Camden Enterprises because, well, they knew him. But to someone like Liddy, the red flags had been incontrovertible evidence of his ineligibility for his position.

Because it was all bullshit.

And it shouldn't bother him what Liddy thought of him.

Yet it does.

But maybe he could help her understand.

Callum cleared his throat. "When I was eighteen, I moved to England to go to Oxford because my father went there. But what I really wanted to be was a footballer." He tried to block the images out of his head. "After university, I was invited to join a football club, and my chances looked good—until a game when I shattered my leg in two places. It ended any hope I had, put me in the hospital for a while, and meant I went to physiotherapy for years."

Liddy's eyebrows drew together in confusion as though she wasn't sure why he was telling her this.

"Sophia came to stay with me while I was going through this, to help me get on my feet again. My father and his wife lived in the States, my grandparents had all passed away, my sister was in university, and my mum was already running La Hacienda. In the middle of all that, I proposed to her." Callum's fingers tightened around the wheel. "She kept me going through that hell. In some ways, she was the only thing I had left in my life. I started working for the Camdens, and it finally appeared that my life might get back on track."

He was silent for a moment, the gut punch of those memories coiling through him. He didn't enjoy thinking or talking about it.

"And then she cheated on you?" Liddy asked. Her wide blue eyes were sympathetic, her voice gentle.

He held her gaze briefly. "Yes. You can imagine, there was—a bit of an argument that followed. And then, once she'd left, I hauled everything that reminded me of her, of my days as a footballer, down to the street and threw it in a bin. Then I lit it all on fire for good measure."

Liddy grimaced. "So the arson and disorderly conduct?—"

"I deserved it. I did it. Lost my temper. And in a city like London, when someone sees you dousing a bin with petrol and lighting it on fire in the middle of the night from a flat that's close to their house—after hearing shouts of obscenities—well, it all got blown out of proportion."

"But the Camdens didn't care because they knew about the breakup."

"The Camdens were friends of mine and knew I'd been struggling in the wake of my injury. They didn't know about the breakup. They knew about the loss of football. I never told Quinn or any of them about what happened with Sophia. I was too humiliated by the whole thing."

Liddy chewed on her lip. "If you're trying to make me feel guilty for trying to get you fired?—"

"On the contrary. I'm not. The fact is, the Camdens gave me a chance. Maybe I didn't deserve it. I just wanted you to know the other side of the story."

Of course, he wasn't really sure why he wanted her to know. He couldn't redeem himself entirely by telling her. But . . . maybe she won't think the worst of me.

The last day felt like a week in some ways. I don't know why it matters. But it does.

Liddy wrinkled her nose, then looked back out the window. She rolled it up a second later, sitting straighter. "Thank you for telling me."

"I know it's not an excuse for what I did. I was able to get out of jail time, but it left a mark on my record. I have to live with people believing I have an inherently violent side. When really, I was broken and tried to burn the memories of what I had lost."

"Bent, not broken."

He gave her a curious look. "What?"

Liddy pulled her thick braid over her shoulder and loosened it. "It's a saying we have in the scoliosis community. We're ‘bent, not broken.' You weren't broken, Callum. Just a little bent out of place with what happened. Maybe you turned around and put all that energy into becoming a workaholic bossy pants, but you did it with excellence. You're not broken."

Her kindness hit him deep in his chest, a strange feeling twisting in his lungs.

She's so beautiful. Inside and out.

Why had he refused to see that about her?

"You know, you don't appear to be bent or broken."

One might say you're nearly perfect.

She gave a wan smile. "That's due to a lifetime of painful braces and now titanium rods in my back. I should have gotten the surgery earlier, but it was expensive, and we didn't have a lot of money—plus I was scared. I kept hoping that if I tightened those braces enough, my spine would be straighter, and I could look like everyone else."

"And the braces didn't help?"

She shook her head, then pulled off the bandanna, shaking her hair out. "They helped but not enough. And they were painful. God, I was always in pain. Getting the surgery was the best thing that ever happened to me." Sadness lingered in her eyes.

Something about the way she'd said it made him want to reach for her hand.

His mouth twisted. "I hate that expression. Bent, not broken. It feels like . . . less. And you're not less, Liddy. If anything, I'm learning how much more you've been than I even realized."

As the words left his mouth, he shook his head with a smirk. "Sorry. I'm sure that sounded idiotic. It sounded better in my head."

She shared a smile with him. "If you think this is going to soften any revenge plan I may have against you, Callum Scott, you'll have to do better than that." Her wink at the end brought a smile to Callum's face. A quick one, as he couldn't give too much away.

"I'll do my best." But he was charmed. He relaxed back into his seat, feeling strangely confused. Each of their conversations seemed to open a door that couldn't be closed. Like they'd crossed some line of comradeship, and now they couldn't go back.

But do I even want to go back?

Maybe it had been easier to keep his distance. To allow her to believe the worst in him.

Liddy Winnick had become the only new person he'd shared his thoughts with in years. The more he got to know her, the more he wanted to know.

Truthfully, that's terrifying.