Unworthy (The Worthy Series Book 1) Read online

  She’d forgiven him once for wiping her out of his life, but not again. Not this time. She grabbed some of the discarded clothes and started the process of rehanging them nicely so they could be put back on the display racks.

  “Cat.” She heard Amy calling her.

  “Just a second,” she called back and gathered an armful of clothes before heading out to the main sales floor. Once she’d gotten used to working the floor, Amy had left her to it and spent most of her time drawing designs for their upcoming re-launch of the store.

  The stuff they had out now was the best of the worst from Amy’s mom’s inventory plus clothes Amy had been able to order on the quick from local distributors. As they weren’t looking to sell big-box store amounts of product, it had been easier than expected to restock the store with clothes the women of Miami would actually wear.

  “Catherine.”

  Cat froze as she saw why Amy had been calling for her. Ian’s mother stood in the store looking elegant as she always did. Her stomach dropped. What was she doing here? Did she know that she and Ian had broken up? Oh God, did she know about the bracelet?

  “Hi, Mrs. Lawrence. I didn’t expect to see you today.”

  Ian’s mom stepped over to wrap her in a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek as was the customary Miami greeting. Even if you’d seen your girlfriends earlier that morning, you’d still give them a kiss to say hi. Cat stood stock still, shocked that she’d earned a hug, even with Miami customs. “No, I can imagine you didn’t expect to see me today, if ever again.”

  Cat stared at her, not sure what in the world she and Joy had to say to each other. “Are you here to shop?” she asked. “We have some great things in all sizes.”

  Joy didn’t smile. “Not today. We need to talk about Ian.”

  Cat hugged the bundle of clothes to her chest. “Is he all right?”

  “If you mean physically, yes. Emotionally? You destroyed him, Catherine.”

  She turned away, feeling the tears that had been a breath away all day, come to her eyes. “I can’t do this here. Please, Joy.”

  Joy grasped her upper arm. “I’m sorry to corner you at work. I know it’s inappropriate, but I wasn’t sure where else to find you. I don’t know where you live.”

  Cat caught Amy’s eye, trying to convey her desperation nonverbally. Luckily Amy was as smart as she was kind. “Mrs. Lawrence, I need Cat working now.”

  Joy glanced at Amy then back at Cat. “I’ll be out of your hair in a minute. I just have a few quick things to say.”

  She really, really wanted to walk away, but good manners and her long history with this woman forced her to stand there and listen to whatever Ian’s mother was going to dish out.

  “My son gave up his dream for you,” Joy said without preamble. “And you treated it as if it meant nothing.”

  “Ian was—is—everything to me,” Cat protested, and shocked that Joy already knew about their break-up. Obviously news traveled fast in the Lawrence family.

  “If you loved him as you claimed, how could you let him give up on the club?”

  She frowned. “Club? What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t know?”

  Cat shook her head. “I know that he and Drew wanted to buy their own space, but nothing’s happened with it. Right?” Her heart began to pound that there was something she didn’t know. Something that might be extremely significant.

  “Wrong. Ian was moments away from buying a property, but you needed money for Danny to go to rehab. He made a choice between his dream and yours. He chose you.”

  The pile of clothes in her arms fell at her feet, but she barely noticed. She covered her mouth with trembling hands and shook her head from side to side. “I didn’t know…”

  “No, and you didn’t confide in him. Instead you lied, and then you lied again. Your brother never went to rehab. You stole Ian’s dream for nothing.” Joy frowned at her. “I’m ashamed of you, Catherine. Your parents would be disappointed.”

  “Please believe me. I didn’t know,” she said, trying to talk over the lump in her throat.

  “Now that you know, how are you going to fix it?”

  Cat stared at her with wide eyes, but Joy simply returned the look with raised brows and then exited the shop. She didn’t know how long she stood there staring out the glass front windows until Amy wrapped her arms around her from behind. “Let’s go, honey. To the back office.”

  Amy turned the lights off in the store and flipped the open sign to “closed”. Cat allowed herself to be led as if she were injured and then huddled on a chair.

  “What am I going to do?” she asked the room at large, knowing there was no solution. She’d screwed up horribly.

  Amy settled onto the desk and looked at her with sympathy radiating out of her. “Yeah, well, it’s not as if there’s a manual of how to run your life without mistakes. Everyone screws up.”

  “Yeah, but this might’ve been too big. One without a solution.”

  Amy nodded slowly. “Maybe, but there will be something you can do to fix it. You can’t build a time machine and recreate your perfect reality, but in a perfect world, what would be your reality? And then let’s work out the best way to make it happen.”

  Cat snorted out a laugh. “Just like that? Are you my fairy godmother? You’ll wave your magic wand and all my problems will go away?”

  “Not even close, and, reality check, you’re not the only one with problems.”

  She gave her a look. “Really? We’re going to do a comparison of who’s got it worse? Now?”

  Amy gave a slight smile. “Point taken.” She hopped off the desk and went to the large white board they had on one wall. Currently one side had swatches of fabric stuck to it with magnet clips. The other side was a list of things on their to-do list. She used a clipped fabric swatch to erase the red dry-erase writing. “Okay. Cat’s perfect world. Go.”

  She chewed on her lip, staring at the blank white board and remembering the first night back with Ian when he’d asked about her dreams. “First one’s easy. My parents would be alive.”

  Amy promptly wrote it down.

  “Why are you writing that?” Cat protested. “It’s not as if we’ll come up with any plan to fix that.”

  Her roommate shrugged. “True, but it’s worth noting the things in this world that you can and cannot fix.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m trying to help here,” Amy said. “I can stop, and you can go back to crying on the floor about all you’ve lost or you can get your ass in gear and try to fix it.”

  Cat blinked at her. “Wow. Ouch.”

  “I’m sorry if I’m being harsh, but we millennials are always getting judged by how we blame everyone else for our problems and don’t take responsibility. Own it, Catherine. You had a man who loved you. Really, truly loved you, and you screwed up.”

  She felt more tears rise, but forced them back. “You’re right, but he’s not totally innocent in all this. If he didn’t keep forcing me to choose between him and Danny, maybe I wouldn’t have felt as if I needed to hide everything from him.”

  “True. So you can have that honest conversation with him, or you can live the rest of your life without him and become bitter.”

  Staring at the carpet of the office, she remembered what it’d been like without Ian in her life. Seven years of crappy followed by six weeks of amazing. No contest. It was better with Ian in her life. “I want him back,” she said.

  “I know,” Amy said. “How are you going to get him?” She tapped the board. “Back to the list.”

  “Okay. Next on the list, Danny clean. Off drugs. And with a job.”

  Amy made two big circles. Inside one, she wrote “drugs’ and drew a line through it. Inside the other circle, she wrote ‘job’. “Next.”

  “I need to make things right with Ian,” she said, watching as Amy wrote, “Cat Ian.” “But how? He doesn’t trust me, because I lied about why I needed the money, and knowing he ne
eded the money for his club only makes it worse.” She sighed.

  Amy pointed the marker at the three things on the board. “You need to focus on what can be fixed. Number one? Sorry, hon, you can’t bring people back from the dead.” She moved the marker to number two. “Again, sorry.”

  “What do you mean? Danny’s doing so much better.”

  “Yes, because Danny wants to get better. You’ve been trying to take responsibility for your brother for too long. Ultimately, this is his battle to win or lose, and you’re going to have to get out of the arena and into the audience.”

  Cat opened her mouth to protest, but at Amy’s impenetrable stare, she closed it. “You’re right,” she finally admitted, and suddenly she felt a million pounds lighter. She’d been carrying the weight of her brother for too long, and now she understood what Ian had been trying to get her to see. No matter what she did, Danny was going to have to get clean on his own. All she could do was support from the sidelines.

  “Okay, onto three,” Amy said. “You borrowed money from Ian, so I think there’s one obvious solution.”

  “I need to pay him back,” Cat said, nodding in agreement. “How? If I had the money in the first place, I wouldn’t have needed to borrow it.”

  “That I don’t know. No long lost relatives? Stocks? Bonds?”

  Cat shook her head. “Danny wiped us clean. The only thing I have left from my parents is memories.” As always, when she thought of her parents, her fingers went to graze the diamond ring on a chain around her neck. “And this.” She tugged it out of her shirt to show it to Amy.

  “That’s a rock,” Amy said, leaning in to inspect. “Girl, you’ve had that around your neck for all these years and never thought to pawn it?”

  “At first, yes,” she said. “But I could never bring myself to do it. It was my last connection with my mom. And then it became white noise, like part of my body.” She brought the ring to her lips to gently kiss. “Can I sell you?” she whispered to the ring.

  Memories of kissing Ian and how he’d looked last night in the office when he’d learned she’d sold the Christmas bracelet, played in her mind. Then memories of her mom peeking through her doorway to whisper, “buenas noche, mi gata” filtered in, but they were blurry and sentimental rather than piercing. Her parents would always be in her heart, but they were her past. Ian was her future. At least she hoped. Yes, she could sell the diamond.

  “I’m going to get him his club,” she said and rose from the chair, ready to wring as much as she could from the buyer of her mother’s engagement ring. She stalked out of the office then turned back. “Can I please have the afternoon off?”

  Amy rolled her eyes, then laughed. “Go, but keep in mind you’ll be working serious overtime someday when I have drama of my own.”

  “Deal.”

  “Three thousand?” She planted both palms hard on the glass display case. Her mother’s ring lay on a black velvet tray between them. “We both know it’s worth a hell of a lot more than that.”

  “Yes,” the dealer said, “but I have to make a profit, too.”

  “You’d make a huge profit off this. And I’m selling it, not pawning it.”

  “Exactly. You’re coming in here each week with big-ticket items. How do I know these are clean? I don’t want stolen goods.”

  “They’re not stolen, they were gifts,” Cat protested and then winced at what her words insinuated. “And they weren’t gifts for services rendered.” She grabbed her necklace and ring and turned to storm from the shop. “I’m not a hooker,” she muttered to herself.

  “Thirty-five hundred,” the skeeze yelled after her.

  In answer she let the door close behind her. So much for her plan. Three thousand wasn’t going to come close to getting Ian what he wanted most. She didn’t relish facing his mother with her failure, but if she didn’t meet success, it was unlikely she’d ever see Joy again anyway.

  Wait a second…Ian’s family—they had money. A plan began to quickly formulate. It had the potential to backfire and create a bigger cluster than was currently at hand. But if it worked…everyone won. Even people who didn’t know they were losing.

  Ian’s father looked at her as if she’d grown a second head. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in his office chair with the view of Miracle Mile behind him. “You want me to do what?”

  “Invest in Ian’s new business venture with your own money and from selling my ring.” She held his gaze, noting that Mr. Lawrence was still a very good-looking man and it gave her a glimpse of what Ian would look like in the future.

  “Is that your mother’s ring?”

  She nodded steadily.

  “Why should I take business advice from you?” Michael asked. “Rumor has it you’ve made some very poor financial decisions of late.”

  She felt her cheeks heat, but didn’t flinch. “This isn’t about me. This is about you and your son. Ian thinks you don’t like his business.”

  “I don’t,” Mr. Lawrence said.

  “Or is it that you’re disappointed he chose not to join you here?” she gestured to the office surroundings and was pleased to see he looked slightly chagrined. Or was she projecting what she wanted to see? Either way, she forged ahead. “Ian wants to move to the next stage of his career. Thanks to me, he can’t invest in the bar. But you can.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You’re in real estate. For you this is another real estate deal. No one is expecting you to run the nightclub. That is Ian and Drew’s specialty.”

  “Even if I were interested, what makes you think Ian would want to invest with me? You can’t have missed that things are strained between us.”

  “Of course not,” Cat said. “That’s exactly why you should invest. I lost my parents too young. You need to make things right with Ian and not waste another second with this friction between you two.”

  Mr. Lawrence leaned forward to fiddle with a pen on his desk. “You think me investing against his wishes would repair the relationship?”

  “It’ll show you believe in him and his business. As long as you’re not a controlling dictator and remain a silent investor, I know it will go a long way to repairing your relationship with your son.”

  Mr. Lawrence sighed. “He’s not ever going to work here, is he?”

  Cat shrugged and crossed her fingers at her side. The conversation was going better than she’d dared hoped. “I don’t have a crystal ball, but I know families and loss. Don’t lose your son, Mr. Lawrence.”

  “Why are you coming to see me? If Ian wants me to invest, he should come to me.”

  At his stubborn statement, she lost her temper slightly. “Really? Do you honestly think, given how judgmental you’ve been about Ian’s career, he’d ever come to you for anything? Ball’s in your court. Hit it wisely.” At her closing argument, she rose and left. Either he’d see the light or not. Hopefully, she’d thrown open a curtain.

  “You forgot the ring, Catherine,” he called at her back.

  She kept going.

  “If you’re looking for my sister, you just missed her.” Danny Ross was walking slowly on a treadmill. Sweat poured down his face and his Calvin and Hobbes T-shirt was drenched.

  Mention of Cat piqued Ian’s interest for a second, like a punch to the gut, but he shook his head. “Not here to see her.”

  “You fighting?” Danny held the railing at his side and glanced over at Ian. “She seemed sad and kind of defeated. Do I need to kick your ass?”

  He found it noteworthy that Cat had obviously told Danny nothing of what occurred between them. “You’re welcome to try, but I’m here to talk to you.”

  “Oh?” Danny slowed the treadmill to a stop and then stepped off as carefully and slowly as an old man would. “They’re making me exercise here. Hate this shit.”

  Here was the Baptist Hospital addiction rehabilitation clinic where Danny had been for a week. This time for real. He didn’t know how Cat had pulled off that miracle
, but he was happy for her sake that Danny had made gains. “Can we talk out there?” He pointed to the large pond out front where birds dove and swam.

  “Not allowed to leave yet.”

  “Oh.” He looked around for another place to have a quiet conversation.

  “There’s a rec room with a pool table and stuff. This time of day, it’ll be quiet.”

  Ian followed him down the hall until they reached the rec room. There was a pitcher of ice water and Danny poured himself a cup with shaking hands, sloshing water on the table. Ian hated seeing him like this, but he supposed it was better than the alternative of either dead or still high.

  “What’s up?” Danny asked, slouching back on a sofa.

  “I need the names of everyone you owe money.”

  “Why?” Danny asked.

  “I’m paying your debts.”

  “Why the fuck would you do that?”

  “Two reasons. To give you a fresh start and a chance at being clean and to keep Cat safe. We might not be together, but I don’t want to ever read about her body being pulled out of Matheson Hammock. And besides, we were once friends.” He met Danny’s stare evenly and tried to read his expression. “Don’t say no out of a warped sense of pride,” Ian said.

  “Nah. Wasn’t going to do that. I’ll take your offer because I don’t want my sister touched by this shit.”

  “Too late,” Ian countered.

  A dark look passed over Danny’s face. “I know, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. She’s through covering for me though. Told me today. Told me she’d no longer be my sister if I slip even once.”

  “She did?” Ian asked, shocked.

  Danny nodded. “Can’t believe she stuck around as long as she did. I owe her a lot. And now I’ll owe you, too. I’ll pay it back, man. Swear. I’m going to get the fuck out of here and get a real job and then I’ll pay you back. It might take until we’re old, but I’ll do it.”

  Ian looked at him hard. “I believe you.” He rose. “When you get out of here, come see me. Maybe I’ll have a job for you.”