ENTANGLED: A McCarthy Love Story

CHAPTER 014

RICHARD MCCARTHY DIDN’T get to where he was by trusting people, he had inherited a small fortune and the McCarthy name and then he singlehandedly turned it into ten times what it had been and then made a name for himself. And that was before he had any of his boys. So when he summoned Nick to discuss the Samantha Baker issue, Nick didn’t know what to expect. He knew he wasn’t his father’s favourite but he was the most efficient, the most reliable so his father had turned him into the fixer, the handler. Any problems that needed taking care of, Nick was his man to call.
So it didn’t surprise him when his father had ordered him home when the Chinese had bailed on the Sea-world project, he had fixed that  without complaints even though that had pulled him away from his life. But when Samantha had come into their lives and his father had put him in charge of everything Baker, that meant he was taxed with her welfare, the medical tests, the legal part of her marriage to Jason and everything else. Not the man who had knocked her up, the man who she was going to marry but Nick.
He had been a little sceptical about the issue at first, especially after everything that had happened with Jason’s first wife, he didn’t think it was right for his father to put him in charge but he had said yes anyway and then he had gone ahead to screw thing up. Knowing Richard, he knew that this wouldn’t be a pleasant conversation and it wasn’t one he wanted to have.

Nick got back home even before Richard and Jason left Miami, apparently Jason was partying it up on a beach there. The only reason he had was found out was because he had drunkenly swiped one of Luxury’s card when he paid for a speedboat he bought. Richard was still mad but he had bothered to keep Nick updated. He had insisted on going down to Miami to fetch Jay but that was a surprise to no one because it had been clear for a long time who Richard’s favourites were.
Nick left Samantha in New York only because he was sure that if he saw her again he would lose his resolve. The hardest thing he had done in his life was easily not following her last night, it had taken everything in him and more to show the level of restraint letting her leave him like that. It had been awful the feeling of overwhelming sadness he felt after she had left, staying awake all night because his dreams haunted him.
He left her in New York because he hoped that by the time she got back he would be long gone, he couldn’t possibly imagine how he could exist in a world where Samantha Baker wasn’t his.
What if he had met her first? What if they had met under different circumstances? What then would have happened. He would have loved to pretend that things would have been different, that they could have stood a chance but that would just be lying to himself. He probably wouldn’t have noticed her or given her a second thought. He probably wouldn’t have noticed her big brown eyes that screamed her innocence or her tiny body that was made to be caressed, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the slouched shoulders like she was carrying the weight of the world or how she always got excited by little things. Or her laugh that didn’t come as often as he wished but brought joy when it did. He wouldn’t have noticed how her go to emotion was nervousness or how she would often bite her lips because of it.
Damn it!
He definitely would have noticed.
There was no not noticing Samantha Baker for him, he would have noticed her even if he was asleep.

The house felt devastatingly empty when Nick got home, Lu and his wife weren’t back from that wellness retreat weekend at Luxury Atlanta. It was funny because he had insisted his wife couldn’t travel for the gala in New York. And Alex, she had decided that it was the best time to fly to Paris with her latest fling, a Baron if Nick was remembering correctly or was he an Earl? It didn’t matter, knowing his sister she was going to fall heads over hill in love with him, allow him to spoil her silly and then find an excuse that made absolutely no sense to dump him and then unto the next. She was more like Chase in that regard even if she would never admit it, at least she had the curtsy of actually dating them before dropping them.