I’m not paying you. I can’t because I’m poor now.
Her follow-up text came through, and he didn’t know why, but it made him chuckle.
I’ll be there. Send.
He wanted to say more. He wanted to say she could pay him back by going out to dinner with him. Just to test her. Take her to a food truck, feed her the chili and cracker dinner of the common people, and see if she scrunched up her face. He wanted to say he was proud of her for taking the first step toward her independence, but it was way too soon to tell if she was salvageable. She could change her mind tomorrow, and his words would be wasted on a cold heart. He’d wasted words on another heart like that before, and he liked to think he was smart and learned lessons, didn’t make the same mistakes twice, so he left it at that. I’ll be there.
And then he shoved his phone into his back pocket, turned his headphones up with some Slipknot, fired up his chainsaw again, and dragged the blade through another big log.
She’d told him he would have to face her parents, but he was a lion shifter.
He wasn’t afraid of anything.
Especially not the Wilsons.
Chapter Four
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this to us,” Mom said. Why was she crying? She paced the living room while Kimberly sat on the couch, wringing her hands. No one was better at the art of guilt-tripping than her mother. “We have everything you need here. You won’t have to do anything, just recover from that awful Braden’s treachery. I bet he was cheating—”
“Mom, he wasn’t cheating.”
“What else could explain him leaving you?”
“Because I wasn’t that great to be around, Mom! I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t fun enough, or charismatic enough, or patient enough for him. I never was. I’m not even mad at him. I get it. He explained it. He’d been asking for me to be nicer for years. To go easier on him. To go on trips and loosen up, have fun, but I never changed—”
“You don’t have to change! You’re a Wilson. The people around us can change, and we can do whatever we want.”
“It’s that attitude right there, Mom. It’s that attitude that lost me my marriage. That notion that I didn’t have to change a thing, and he could just deal with it. And look what happened? He didn’t want to deal with me.” A tear slid to her cheek, and she whispered that last part again, thickly, “He didn’t want to deal with me.”
There was a knock on the door. Shit. That was probably Burke, and he couldn’t see her like this.
Dad stood to answer the door.
“It’s just Burke!” she called. “He can wait.”
Dad frowned at her. “It’s eight degrees outside, Kimberly.”
“He’s a lion shifter,” she exclaimed, rushing to wipe her cheeks.
“Why is that man coming over to our house?” Mom demanded as she watched Dad open the door for Burke.
“To help your daughter move,” Burke answered as he entered the house. He offered her dad his hand for a shake, and moved past him into the living room. “And I might be a lion shifter, but I’m still freezing my nuts off.”
Stupid shifter hearing!
“We were just discussing how my daughter won’t need your services because she’s staying right here where she is safe and taken care of,” Mom explained, her tone a little too bitter to be polite.
“Cool.” Burke stood behind where Kimberly sat on the couch and locked his arms against the back. “Now your daughter can explain why she needs to not live under this roof.”
Mom’s eyes narrowed to angry little slits. “What is he talking about?”
“I…” Kimberly twisted in her seat and glared at Burke. He looked annoyingly handsome in his dark gray wool-lined winter jacket with blond scruff on his chiseled jaw and his messy blond hair. “I…”
“Well, spit it out!” Mom said.
“I don’t know!” Kimberly said, panicking.
Mom parted her lips to say more, but Burke interrupted her. “Kim needs some time to figure out who she is outside of the Wilson Bubble. That doesn’t mean you are losing your daughter, Mrs. Wilson. It means your daughter is searching for a vein of independence. Let her work. Let her understand the value of a dollar. Let her struggle a little and figure out her own grit. If she can’t hack it, she can always come back to you. She knows there is a safe spot here, but right now? She needs to work on her shit.”
“Well…she can work on her—her—”
“Shit,” Burke drawled out.
“She can work on herself here.”
“No thanks,” Burke said.
“Excuse me?” Mom asked, standing.
Burke gestured from Kimberly to her mother. “Say it, Kim. This is where we start work on you learning to say no. It is ingrained in you to not let anyone down but, at some point, you have to stop letting yourself down, so say it. Say ‘no thank you.’”
Kimberly was frozen into place. Her dad’s face was unreadable, Mom looked furious, and Burke was sitting there with his eyebrows raised in expectation like she was capable of saying no to her parents. “I…”
“Say, ‘no thank you,’” he repeated.
“Kimberly, I think you should go to your room while we have a discussion with Mr. Dunne,” Mom gritted out.
Go to her room? Like she was a child and not a grown woman in her mid-thirties who had been married and divorced? “No thank you,” she whispered.
“What?” Mom demanded.
Kimberly sat up straighter and cleared her throat, looked her mom in the eyes and murmured, “No thank you. Your offer to let me stay here is very kind. So very kind. But Burke is right. I have to figure my life out. And maybe that means I’ll be right back here in a week. Or maybe that means I’ll learn some confidence in myself and be okay, because right now? I don’t see any value in myself—”
“You’re a Wilson—”
“And I want to be valued for more than my last name. Like Leslie is.” Holy. Shit. She couldn’t believe she’d just said that. Couldn’t believe it. Like Leslie? She barely liked her baby sister. But that had come out of left field, so there must’ve been some deep feelings inside of her to utter something so shocking. Some deep strain of buried respect for what Leslie had done when she’d gone against the family’s wishes and struck out on her own.
“You should do this,” Dad said quietly.
“Bert!” Mom yelled.
“Enough.” Her dad nodded at Kimberly. “Kimberly said her piece. She needs space, wants some independence—”
“She wants to be a heathen like Leslie!”
“And Leslie is happy.” Dad arched his eyebrow at Mom and said it softer, “Leslie is happy. We have a happy one.” He twitched his head toward Kimberly. “Let her try for the same.”
“I can’t believe you are siding with them,” Mom gasped out between her tears. She stood and marched toward the stairs. “I simply cannot believe it. I’m losing all of my daughters, one by one.”
Her heels clacked on the stairs as she stabbed each one. And each echoing crack made Kimberly hunch a little lower. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d said no to her parents. Her life had always revolved around pleasing them, being good enough, and garnering compliments from them.