Everything but the Truth Page 7

  I wonder what it would be like to spend the day on a big boat with Malik, sunbathing and drinking fancy sparkling water and eating grapes, or whatever rich people do. I’m so lost in outlandish daydreams of his endlessly deep, warm brown eyes, that when I hear his voice—hear him say, “Lucy”—I almost think I imagine it.

  But then a shadow falls across the sand beside me, and I shield my eyes, looking up to meet his gaze. He’s so tall and I’m so short, that from this angle the sun creates a halo around his head, casting his expression in shadow.

  “Um, hey,” I say, my heart thundering to life, like it, too, just woke from sleep. “What’s up?”

  Casual. I sound casual, right? And not like my insides are completely malfunctioning and I can’t stop swallowing and I think the butterflies in my stomach are probably cannibals and attacking each other? Why does he always have this effect on me?

  He stops a foot farther back from the waterline, to keep his leather shoes from getting wet. “You have plans this afternoon?”

  “Uhh . . .” I glance back at Sunrise House. From here—across the grassy lawn, beyond the beautiful cedar trees and manicured hedges—it looks like it’s in deep slumber. No sounds, no lights switching on or off, no faint music trickling out on a breeze.

  I try to peer into my mom’s office window to discern if she can see the two of us down here, but there’s too much glare. And besides, I didn’t tell her I was going for a walk, so she probably can’t even tell it’s me from this distance. “No?”

  “Good. Then you can come with me.”

  “Where?”

  No, not where. Yes, please! I don’t care if we’re going to a Miley Cyrus concert.

  “My house.”

  The butterflies are climbing up my throat now. “Um, your house?”

  “Yes. Well, it’s my grandfather’s house, really, but I’ve lived there for a year, so I guess it’s home now.”

  “Oh,” I say, finally breathing again. “Has the art arrived already?”

  He digs at the sand with the toe of his leather shoe. “No, but he wants more furniture in his new place. I’m supposed to go tag it and have it picked up, but I don’t know what would look good. And I figured, who better to ask than you?”

  I cross my arms, smirking. “So, you’re telling me you’re not actually good at everything.”

  His smile reveals a perfectly straight row of bright white teeth. “Almost everything; furniture’s not my gig. But you seem to have a good eye for this stuff. We can shop through the house and pick out some of his antiques.”

  My mind goes a zillion miles an hour, churning through the thousands—no, millions—of dollars’ worth of antiques that man must own. Stuff I’d never dared dream I would touch, let alone own it like he does. “Seriously? I’d love to.”

  He holds a hand out, and when I accept it, he squeezes my fingers, peering down at me through lashes I’m certain are thicker than my own.

  Which makes me realize I should have spent more time on my makeup. And my clothes. And . . . oh geez, my T-shirt says IF HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF I AM SO GETTING A DINOSAUR. That’s . . . embarrassing.

  “Thanks. I’m sure you’ll do a better job than me. He said something about grabbing the . . . uh . . . fah . . . tool? From his study. And then I knew I was in over my head. What even is that?”

  I grin. “This is weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “You. Not being flawlessly perfect.”

  “I’ve never said I was perfect.”

  I shrug. “I know. You just . . . exude it.”

  He snorts. “I exude perfection.”

  “Yep. Anyway, he’s asking for a chair. Eighteenth century. Carved armrests, upholstered seat and back.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t he just say that?”

  I elbow him as we cross the dock, stepping onto the grass. “I don’t know, maybe he thought it would be funny to see what you brought him?”

  “I guess he’s not aware I have a secret weapon,” Malik says, draping his arm over my shoulder.

  I’m pretty sure I’m about to melt into the grass and create a Holly-shaped puddle, a dopey smile plastered to my face.

  I trip on a rock, apparently too distracted by his arm muscles and delicious lips to focus on where I’m putting my feet. I’m abruptly flying toward the ground, about to get my wish of being a puddle, when Malik manages to catch my arm and I end up swinging around and slamming into his chest.

  “Uhhhhh . . .” is all I can manage before coughing, trying to regain my breath after slamming into his rock-hard body.

  “You’re welcome,” he says, chuckling, making the heat rise in my cheeks.

  “Thank you.”

  “Shall I carry you to the car, just to be sure you don’t bite the dust before then, or . . .”

  I swat at his arm and step back. “I can manage.”

  “Are you sure? Because I need your intimate knowledge of Fuh-tools to save me, and you’re no good to me dead,” he says, reaching out and tugging a strand of my hair.

  “It’s fauteuil. You’re kind of a smart aleck, you know that?”

  His smile widens. “Most girls consider my wittiness to be charming.”

  “I have no idea why,” I joke as we approach the valet stand.

  It’s not until I look up and see Sam, a thirty-something-year-old valet, that the panic spikes. He’s smiling at me. Because he recognizes me.

  Obviously, he freaking recognizes me!

  “Hey, Holiday,” he says. “How’s it going?”

  “Um,” I squeak, my chest tightening. “Good.”

  Malik holds out his valet ticket to Sam, but as he drops it into Sam’s palm, it’s like the words finally register. He turns from Sam to stare at me, his brow furrowed, the gleam of mistrust sparking in his eyes.

  Sam’s oblivious, turning his back to us as he opens the key box and grabs Malik’s keys. Without another word, he jogs away with them dangling from his fingertip.

  “Holiday?”

  “Uh . . .” This is my chance to tell him. I could speak the truth and take responsibility for my lies. But . . . I can’t. A guy like him walks away when people lie. I can tell already. I tell him the truth, and he’s gone.

  And it’s a fling. A fling. It doesn’t matter, in the end, what my name is because we’re parting ways at the end of the summer. What he doesn’t know will never hurt him.

  I smile in a way I hope is a mixture of shyness and embarrassment. “See, I kind of have a reputation around here,” I say, turning the idea over and over, trying to decide if there are any ways it could backfire. But I don’t really have any better options.

  “For?”

  “Loving holidays!” I say with forced cheerfulness. “Christmas, New Year’s, everything. I love ’em all. I really go all out. With, you know, my outfits, and I help Henrietta, uh, decorate the hall.”

  But as the words leave my mouth, I realize that the Fourth of July is next week. I’m going to have to put on a ridiculous show for this to work.

  “Seriously?” I can’t tell if he’s intrigued or amused or what, but he seems to be buying it.

  “Yeah, so, a lot of people around here call me Holiday. You’ll totally see what I mean soon—I mean if you want to help me decorate for Independence Day, you should swing through, uh, tomorrow.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I have tons of decorations.”

  Shoot. I so do not have any decorations. This is going to get really interesting really fast.

  “Huh,” he says. “Just when I think I have you all figured out . . .”

  “Yep, you know me, just full of surprises!”

  And lies, many lies.

  I turn away from Malik, crossing my arms, watching as his Audi pulls up under the portico. Sam gets out and tosses the keys toward Malik.

  Malik snatches them out of the air, and then we’re climbing into his car and snapping our seat belts into place.

  It only takes Malik moments to navigate
the surface streets, whipping around corners and accelerating like we’re in some crazy car chase. We’re zipping onto the freeway now, and then barreling across the I-90 bridge over Lake Washington at a speed that makes the water blur into a mass of blue. But Malik looks completely at ease. There’s no narrowed eyes, no white knuckles. Instead, he leans back into his seat, occasionally glancing my way.

  “How’d you learn to drive like this?” I ask as he takes the first exit onshore, rapidly shifting downward as we approach a light.

  He shrugs. “My first car was a Lambo. You can’t own a car like that and not figure out how to maximize it.”

  “What’s a Lambo?”

  He raises a brow. “Lamborghini?”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry.” I stare out the window and hope he doesn’t notice my embarrassment. “So what happened to it?”

  “Wrecked it.”

  I jerk away from the window and look at him wide-eyed, tightening my grip on the door handle. “You wrecked your last car and you still drive like this?”

  He chuckles. “That was over a year ago. Before I moved up here to live with my grandpa,” he says. “I’m a better driver now.”

  Before I can ask another question, we’re pulling up at a set of fancy swirly iron gates. I had no idea Charles’s old place was barely ten minutes away. Okay, fifteen, if a normal person were driving.

  I wonder if that’s how Malik’s mom convinced him to move—telling him it was so close.

  Malik pauses, and then the gates are swinging inward, and I don’t know if it somehow recognizes his car or someone’s watching us on a security screen.

  I lean forward, looking upward out the windshield. It’s hard to catch my breath as I take in the sprawling mansion. Unlike Cartwell’s homage to glass and concrete, this place is . . . traditional.

  And this time, I can’t keep myself from openly gawking as I get out of the car. It looks like a gothic castle. Like something that belongs on a hillside in 1800s England. There are windows everywhere, trimmed in stonework, set against the brick of the home. Spires jut into the skyline at each corner of the roof.

  “I know,” he says, his voice level, betraying neither pride nor embarrassment. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I say, regaining my composure, remembering he thinks I’m related to Henrietta, that I come from money too, even if it’s not quite this much.

  “If my grandpa ends up liking Sunrise House, we’ll have to put it on the market. It’s too much for just me. I don’t even think I’ve stepped foot in half the rooms since I moved here a year ago.”

  I stare up at the house, taking in its grandeur. “I mean, let’s get real, you could put an entire orphanage in there and have room left over.”

  He laughs. “I know.”

  “So you live here alone?” I ask, following him toward a ridiculously ornamental carriage entrance. I can’t help but wonder if this place dates back to the time this overhang actually was used for carriages. “Your mom didn’t move up here?”

  He pauses on the front stoop. “No, she’s still in California. She developed a real estate branch of Buchannan Industries before I was born, and she established the headquarters down there.”

  “Oh.”

  The front entry is an enormous timber door that could accommodate driving a car inside. It features the same family-crest brass knocker as the one on Charles Buchannan’s suite door, except this one is the size of my head.

  Malik pushes the door open and steps inside, and I trail after him.

  “So, this is where I live,” he states simply, as my eyes adjust to the room in front of me. “The bedrooms are all upstairs, but he doesn’t need any more bedroom furniture.”

  There’s something a little different about Malik, now that we’re here. Something a little more grounded, serious.

  Which is totally weird, because people are supposed to be most at ease when they’re home. But instead of cracking a joke, tossing his arm around me like he did back at Sunrise House, he just leads me deeper into the cavernous house.

  “That grand staircase is . . . ,” I say, my voice trailing off. I don’t even know what to say about it. It’s glorious.

  “It’s made of hand-carved teak,” Malik says, moving away from the entry and toward a hallway. “The spindles were imported from England, from a three-hundred-year-old home that was being torn down, and then they were incorporated into this house when it was built. Some of the stonework is from that same house, actually. My grandfather has a love of English country homes, so that’s where the style comes from.”

  Malik’s voice is nearly echoing around in the place as he leads me away from the entryway. “This corridor is modeled after one in the House of Commons. Especially the pillars—”

  “Marble,” I say, my fingers trailing over the first one. “Your grandpa must be right at home at Sunrise.”

  He smiles. “Yeah, I may have joked about that the first time I saw them.”

  “They look better here,” I say. “I can’t stop thinking that Sunrise House reminds me of some opulent Vegas casino. Too over-the-top, you know?”

  He stops in the hall, pivoting on his heel to face me. “I’ve thought that since the day I walked in.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” he says, stepping closer. “See, I’ve grown a little tired of all this.”

  My mouth grows dry as he makes one last step; scarcely an inch separates us. “Maybe that’s what draws me to you.”

  He’s drawn to me. My chest tightens, and it’s hard to breathe. There’s something in his look, in the wicked curl of his lips.

  “Um, what?” I manage to say, and it comes out on a breath.

  “There’s something . . . real about you,” he says. “Even when you’re surrounded by a failed attempt at old-world elegance.”

  “Oh,” I say, because I can’t think, can’t move as he leans forward, his eyes darkening.

  His lips brush against mine in the barest of kisses, so feather soft that when he pulls away, I’m almost afraid I dreamed it.

  And then he steps away, his gaze directed back at the house, and it’s almost like it didn’t happen. “So, let me give you the real tour, shall I?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I say, reeling.

  Malik kissed me. I want to do that stupid thing girls do in movies, touch my fingers to my lips, but I resist.

  “Race you to the end,” he says, and then abruptly, bursts into a sprint.

  I scramble after him, but he has a head start, and it’s all I can do to catch up. Doors and columns and coffered ceilings and chandeliers all stream by in a blur as I careen around a corner. I bounce off a wall and can’t help the burst of laughter.

  This is surreal. I’m racing Malik down the halls of the biggest house I’ve ever been in, and I can’t decipher his odd mood swings. Serious when we arrived, then playful as he kisses me, and now we’re racing?

  Two enormous, fogged glass doors are up ahead, and I skid to a stop beside him.

  “Welcome to the orangery,” he says, opening the doors.

  As we step inside, it’s like I’ve entered another world. A humid jungle, with such vibrant green foliage that I’m on sensory overload. I almost expect there to be monkeys or parrots or something. It’s big enough for it—it’s almost as large as a basketball court.

  “Wow,” I say, my breath escaping me. “This . . .”

  I trail off as I look up. The glass walls arch into a series of domes, and in every corner, flower baskets hang with bright purple flowers and vivid green vines trailing toward the floor. Palm trees and orange trees soar upward. Ahead, a walkway curves around a lawn so perfect, so uniformly green, it looks artificial. The edges of the walk are trimmed in flowers—bright blues and reds. The path rises into a bridge that spans a bubbling stream.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I want to tell you something,” he says, motioning toward an ornate iron bench.

  I follow him over and we get situated, him
with one foot propped up on his knee as he turns to me. “I spent last summer in Nepal.”

  “Oh.” Huh? What’s an orangery got to do with Nepal?

  “It was after the car wreck. My grandfather felt I should ‘repair my image,’ ” he says, making air quotes. “All the news outlets were speculating on if I’d been drinking and driving, and they were running pictures from parties I’d been to, portraying me as a reckless party boy.”

  “Were you?” I ask.

  “I was sober when I wrecked, but I was on my way to a party, so who knows? I might’ve driven afterward. Not drunk. Buzzed maybe.” He frowns, as if he hasn’t realized the truth until this very moment. “The worst part was, the wreck didn’t really faze me. The next day I was texting with my friends about going out again. I wasn’t going to change.”

  He chews on his bottom lip, the first nervous tick I’ve ever seen him do. It’s like a chink in his otherwise perfect armor. “But see, my grandfather went into spin control. He didn’t like the way my actions reflected on him and Buchannan Industries. They created a plan to make me look like some sort of do-gooder. My mom was on his side, and they threatened to cut me off if I refused to go.”

  He’s playing with his watch, staring downward as he twists it around and around his wrist. “They set me up with an organization doing relief work for three months. I don’t even know why they allowed me to join them, given my reputation. I figure he paid them or funded the whole trip or something. I went there angry and determined to make it through the summer so I could go back to my life and pick up where I left off. I wanted to hang out with my friends. I had premieres to go to and I was dating someone. . . .”

  I take in a sharp breath and hope he doesn’t notice. “And?”

  He looks up at me now, and there’s such sincerity in his eyes, it’s like I can feel it tug at my heart.

  “To say it was a rude awakening would be an understatement.” He looks back at his watch again, this time swirling his fingertip against the glass, counterclockwise like maybe he can turn back time. “I hated every minute of it, because for the first time, I didn’t have a way to just check out from all responsibility. When I didn’t want to face reality, I couldn’t go back to my big bedroom. I couldn’t climb in my fancy car and head to a party. I couldn’t jump on our jet and go somewhere else. It was just unrelenting every minute of every day.”