Page 12 of Operation Protector
And in that moment all Ali could think was what a fool Liz Hollen was.
Chapter 6
“Lay it out for us,” Quinn said. “Just be honest, that’s all we ask of anyone.”
They were sitting around Ali’s dining table, a nicely built piece with cushioned chairs that invited longer stays. Colby had a feeling they were going to be very glad of that before this was over.
“Do you want me to leave?” Ali asked.
“No,” he answered instantly. “Unless you want to. You’ve already helped Grace…”
“And I’d like to help more. So I’ll stay, if it’s all right with you.”
He was a little surprised at how all right it was. How much he wanted her to do just that. Because from the moment he’d set foot in this place, it had felt…welcoming. And he hadn’t missed that while there were some unpacked boxes in the far corner of the living room, the bookshelves along the wall opposite the big windows were already stocked. And stocked with every kind of book he could imagine, heavy, hardbound tomes, paperbacks, large books of photographs of all sorts of places and things.
It felt like home.
It was a moment before he could shift his attention back to the Foxworths.
“Where do you want me to start? The beginning, the end…?”
“How about the beginning of the end,” Hayley suggested.
His mouth quirked at that. He was still having a little trouble believing this was really happening, that he had this operation,with the incredible reputation for helping people trying to fight the bigger behemoths around today, on his side.
On Grace’s side.
“Liz and I got married young,” he began. “That was the first but not the biggest mistake. The biggest was that neither of us had any idea of who the other really was. I knew her family was—” he glanced at Ali “—a big deal, but she insisted she had nothing to do with them, so it didn’t matter.”
“A bit of youthful rebellion?” Quinn suggested.
“Yeah. But after Grace was born they patched it up. Which I thought was a good thing.”
“But it wasn’t?” Hayley asked, as if she already knew the answer.
“Not for me. Because it came with a lot of mistaken assumptions.”
He started to lift his hand to shove back that stubborn lock of hair that always fell over his forehead, but the cut on his arm twinged and he stopped the movement. He took a deep breath. He could only hope they’d understand. Drew’s story encouraged him to go on.
“She assumed that I would immediately grab at the chance her family offered, to become part of their…empire. Become an executive, leave the dirty business of doing actual, physical work with my hands behind.”
He hadn’t meant to sound so bitter, but apparently he didn’t quite have that leashed yet.
“Because of course who wouldn’t rather be trapped in a high-rise office rather than being out here in nature, among the peons, creating things,” Ali said, her tone nearly as sharp as his had been.
Colby’s gaze snapped to the woman sitting at one end of the table. He’d been a little surprised at himself when he’d realized that for some reason he didn’t mind that she was going to hearjust how stupid he’d been. But now she was jumping in to defend him. To defend him more than his then wife ever had, when Ali didn’t even know him beyond what Grace might have said.
“And what was your mistaken assumption?” Hayley asked.
His mouth twisted wryly. “That she knew me. That she understood this was who I was, and I was doing what I wanted to do. And… I assumed she understood me. Enough to know I wouldn’t be happy doing anything else.”
“And loved you enough to let you do it?” Ali asked, her voice soft now.
“Yeah,” he said, his jaw tightening. “My biggest mistaken assumption. When the truth was, I embarrassed the hell out of her. I made decent money, it wasn’t like she had to do without, but she was embarrassed when she had to introduce her husband,the carpenter, to their ritzy friends.”
He’d tried to put the same tone of distaste in his voice that Liz had used, and thought by Ali’s look of utter disgust that he’d succeeded. He glanced at Quinn, who he thought wore an expression that seemed just as disgusted. Which was proved right when the Foxworth man muttered a description of women like Liz that made the tension inside Colby ease a bit. It even made the two women here and now smile, although he could see them try to suppress it.
They saw it. They really did. They weren’t at all impressed by the Hollen name, or their status and standing in the county. But then, after what the Foxworth Foundation had accomplished in the last few years, they had no reason to be. They were, in fact, a much bigger name than the Hollens themselves.
