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  Her response infuriated Thea enough that she momentarily forgot about Nick and what they’d just been doing. “You called because Mom is upset? Not because she’s gone off the deep end and is trying to come between Nick and me?” Thea said.

  “Oh, so Nick is the one behind this,” Becka said. “Now suddenly it all makes sense.”

  “What makes sense?” Thea asked. If anything, Becka’s response had just made her angrier yet. “What are you talking about?”

  “She said you want her to lose her house—that you’re going to move out on her!”

  Thea rolled into a sitting position against Nick’s couch and pulled her shirt down over her breasts. Her bush still peaked out from the top of her half-open jeans but that didn’t seem very important right now.

  “Oh, so she’s admitting now that I’m the only reason she still has the place. Earlier today she didn’t seem to think it matters that I’m the one paying all the bills.”

  “You don’t pay for everything!” Becka snapped.

  “I pay more than my share!” Thea argued. “I’ve paid the entire mortgage for the past twelve years and that’s just the beginning. But Mom has the gall to tell me it’s her house and I can’t lock my own bedroom door to put an end to her snooping.”

  Becka evidently didn’t want to argue finances anymore. No one ever wanted to admit the contribution Thea made to the family. Instead she changed her line of attack. “Well what the hell do you have that’s so bad you don’t want her to find it?”

  “Did you really just say that?” Thea asked. If she’d been angry before she was seeing red now. “Do you want Mom coming over and snooping through all of your stuff?”

  Beside her, Nick stood and pulled his jeans up over his still very-hard dick. Then he stalked off toward his little kitchen.

  “Mom can’t do that,” Becka told her, “because I own my house!”

  “Well, I own half of Mom’s!” Thea snapped back.

  “No, you don’t!” Becka retorted. “You’ll inherit a third of it—just like Dwayne and me—and that’s only after she dies, you idiot. Until then she owns everything.”

  Becka’s words cut through Thea’s anger and made her start thinking. She’d never considered the issue before but Becka was technically—if not morally—right. “Becka, are you saying you plan to take a third of the house when Mom dies?”

  Becka seemed as surprised by the sudden shift in topic as by the drop in volume of Thea’s speech. “What? Of course I am! It’s mine.”

  A cold tendril of fear and disquiet began to worm its way into Thea’s mind. “Becka, that’s not right. In three year’s time, I will have literally paid for half of that house. I’ve already put more money into it that Dad and Mom ever did. You can’t take a third of it! That’s like stealing from me. It’s not right!”

  If Becka had been angry before, that was nothing to what Thea’s words inspired in her now. “What do you mean it’s not right!” she screamed into the phone. “My share of that house is going to pay to put Jamal through college!”

  “But Becka, I have literally been paying all the bills there since before Jamal was born. You said it yourself when you started this conversation. Mom couldn’t have kept the house without me. In fact, they would have probably lost the house when Dad was sick if I hadn’t been there to take over the bills. It’s not—”

  “You’ve just been paying rent!” Becka cut her off. “Don’t try to make it into something more than it is. And I’m sure Mom could have made it without you. She could have gone back to work or drawn on Dad’s insurance money.”

  “I don’t think there was that much insurance money,” Thea said. “Mom said the funeral was very expensive.”

  “Well, I don’t know the exact amount,” Becka told her, “but Dad always told me he had enough to pay off the house.”

  “To pay off the house?” Thea repeated. “But Mom always said…” She let her voice trail off, thinking. Her mother’s terrible finances had been the principle reason Thea hadn’t moved out after her father died.

  Then as her mother grew more frail and dependent upon her, it had seemed like she had to stay to help her get around. But Mom didn’t actually have any big health problems and if she really had a big chunk of insurance money stashed away, why exactly had Thea been living with her all these years?

  “You know,” Thea said, “things have got to change. I’m tired of the way Mom manipulates me. I’ve been putting my life on hold forever to help out. You didn’t come back home to help out when Dad got sick—”

  “I did too help—”

  “No, Becka, you really didn’t. I’m not saying you didn’t care, or you never visited. But you didn’t go to the doctors with them and you didn’t help with the shopping and you never paid one red cent toward their expenses.”

  “I’d just gotten married!” Becka exclaimed. Her feeling of outrage couldn’t have been more plain.

  “And you and Wilson were more than happy to dump the whole mess on my shoulders.” Thea finished.

  “I can’t believe you’re blaming me for this!” Becka told her. “You didn’t move back out because in your heart you’ve always been a mousy little girl who’s afraid of life.”

  “And now you’re complaining that I’ve overcome my fear?” Thea said. “So is the real problem here that you’re afraid I’m going to stop subsidizing Jamal’s education and you’re retirement?”

  “How dare you!” Becka growled.

  “Well, one thing’s for certain,” Thea shouted back at her. “If I’m going to stay with Mom—and it’s a mighty big if right now—we’re all going to sit down and recognize my contributions to this family. And I’m not just talking about the money now. Things are going to be made right because I’m mighty tired of being taken advantage of!”

  “You greedy, ungrateful, horrible—”

  Thea hung up the phone before her sister could say anything else.

  Chapter Four

  Family Problems

  Thea sat on the floor fuming at her sister.

  She’d always known her sister was a lazy, self-centered, good for nothing bitch, but she’d never realized how greedy and manipulative she was before. How the hell could she think she deserved a full third of Mom and Dad’s house when she knew that Thea had been the one taking care of things all these years?

  Of course no one, especially not Thea, had expected her to still be taking care of Mom twelve years after she’d moved in to help with Dad. That situation had sort of snuck up on them. But still, the pure gall to act like all of those years of paying all the bills meant nothing. It made Thea furious! And what was this crap about paying for Jamal’s education with her inheritance? Mom wasn’t that old. Nobody was inheriting for ten or twenty years minimum!

  And Mom! Had she really had money socked away all these years and been too greedy to pay her fair share of things? If she’d been paying half of all the expenses, Thea would have never expected anything more. But if she’d been greedily playing the miser while Thea worked herself to the bone…

  “Arrgghh!” she shouted. “They make me so damn angry!”

  “It’s a gift families specialize in!” Nick observed.

  Thea had almost forgotten he was in the room.

  She looked around until she found him in the kitchen. He was mixing a drink—his favorite cranberry juice and vodka. The bottle read Grey Goose and it looked to Thea like Nick had just opened it. She knew he didn’t drink much at home.

  “I don’t want that,” she told him.

  “But you need it,” Nick said.

  He carried her glass over and sat down beside her on the couch. “That was a pretty serious argument,” he said.

  As if to mark his words, Thea’s ringtone began to sound again. She glanced at the phone. “It looks like Becka wants to start round two.”

  “Can I give you some advice?” Nick asked as he held out the drink for her.

  Thea wasn’t really listening to him. “Excuse me a momen
t, I have to get this.”

  Nick put a hand over hers as she started to accept the call. She still hadn’t taken the drink from him.

  “Thea,” Nick said. His voice was quiet but insistent. “Let voice mail take this one and turn off your phone.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Thea,” Nick said, “trust me on this. Fighting with your mother and sister now isn’t going to resolve anything. Complicated family dynamics aren’t going to get sorted out in one angry conversation.”

  “But…”

  The ring tone stopped playing.

  Nick let go of her and offered the drink again, and this time Thea took it.

  It Wasn’t Me immediately started playing again on her phone.

  Exasperated, Thea started to accept the call.

  “Thea!” Nick said. “Please!” He caught her hand holding the phone again and waited for her to look at him. “Do you have any idea what it took for me to close the bar today? Sunday afternoon is a big money maker and you’ve seen how those guys will keep drinking no matter how much snow is falling. But I closed down the bar for the first time since I opened it because you asked me to. Please don’t spend the day fighting with your family.”

  Thea felt trapped between competing emotions. She did want to spend the day with Nick but she was really angry at her mother and sister. It was hard not to answer the phone and continue the argument. “Ignoring her is only going to make her angrier!” she said.

  “Well maybe that’s okay,” Nick told her. His voice was very calm. “The single biggest thing couples in this country fight about is money.”

  Thea did a double take, wondering how this conversation had suddenly turned to Nick and Thea fighting over cash. Had she heard him correctly?

  “And in this regard, you and your mother are like a married couple,” Nick continued. “Then you add to that that inheritance is one of the biggest things siblings fight over and you have another very contentious problem between you and your sister. I don’t know all the facts in your situation—and frankly they are none of my business at this point—but it’s clear from what I overheard that you and your sister have very different ideas about what should happen to your mother’s estate. There is no way you can both be satisfied with the outcome now.”

  The ringtone stopped playing again. Nick lightly touched the bottom of Thea’s glass encouraging her to take a drink. What he’d just said made a lot of sense to her, but that didn’t mean she saw a solution to the problem.

  She lifted the glass to her mouth. The tart cranberry juice covered the taste of the vodka—if vodka really had a taste. She’d read somewhere it didn’t, but she wasn’t that experienced with drinking. What it did do was make her tongue tingle slightly, which was kind of a nice feeling. “What do you think I should do?” she asked Nick.

  “Oh, I don’t know if we want to go there,” Nick said. “We’ve only been dating a few weeks. This is serious personal business for you. We’re talking about your relationship with the two most important people in your life, and it’s a money problem. Do you really want me sticking my nose in here?”

  Thea’s phone lit up again as the ringtone started playing. She shook the phone in frustration. “Yes, I’d like to know, because what I want to do right now is start shouting at Becka again.”

  Nick took a deep breath. “I think I should have made myself a drink too,” he joked.

  When Thea didn’t smile, he took another deep breath, as if he knew he was making a mistake but decided to do so anyway because she’d asked him to. “Look, the way I see it, you have two distinct but still related problems. On the one hand, you feel you’ve basically been purchasing your mother’s house from her all these years and your sister still wants to get a third of it one day.” A puzzled expression crossed his face as he suddenly realized that Thea’s third and Becka’s third did not add up to one whole house. “Who gets the other third, by the way? You’ve never mentioned another sibling.”

  Thea looked down at the floor in embarrassment. “I have a brother,” she said.

  “Really?” Nick asked. “Why haven’t you—”

  Thea cut him off. Dwayne was someone she did not want to talk with Nick about now. “He’s in prison. I don’t want to talk about him. Okay?”

  “Well, um, okay,” Nick said. He was clearly curious yet far too intelligent to persist in talking about another sensitive topic. “I was thinking that your brother is obviously going to want a say in this, too, but we don’t need to further complicate this now. The big issue, as I said before, is that you think you’ve been purchasing the house and Becka wants her full third no matter how much money you’ve put into the home. It’s important that you understand that a big issue like that can’t be happily resolved for both of you. One of you is going to feel shorted whatever happens.”

  Thea didn’t agree with that. “If Mom really has all of this money squirreled away, she could pay me half of all those mortgage payments I made—and half of all the other bills I’ve been paying for her.”

  Nick frowned. He looked genuinely unhappy, like he was going to say something he knew was going to make her mad.

  “What is it?” Thea asked him. “That would be fair, wouldn’t it?”

  “I think I need that drink,” Nick said.

  He pushed himself to his feet, but Thea caught his hand and pulled him back down beside her. “Nick, I want to know what you think.”

  The ringtone quit early. The distraction pulled her attention away from Nick for a moment as Thea hoped that this meant that Becka had finally given up for a while, but three seconds later It Wasn’t Me started playing again.

  She resisted the urge to hurl the phone across the room and returned her focus to Nick. “What’s wrong with my idea?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it!” Nick assured her. “I just don’t think you’re going to get what you want out of this.”

  “What? Why?” Thea could feel her anger and frustration shifting from Becka and her mother to Nick.

  “Look, this is supposed to be a quiet day for you and me to get to know each other better. Do we really have to do this?” Nick pleaded.

  There was no way that Thea could quit talking about the subject now. “Yes!” she told him. “I really want to know what you think about all of this.”

  Nick considered that for a moment. “Okay,” he finally agreed. “I’ll tell you on one condition. You turn off that phone and leave it off for the rest of the night.”

  “But?”

  “Thea, I really care about you! I… I think we both know that I more than simply care about you. But if you’re going to spend this whole evening fighting with your family, I might as well go in to work.”

  “You might as well…” Thea repeated. Then her eyes flashed as the full meaning of his words sank in. “Why the hell did I come over here if—”

  “This is exactly what I was afraid of!” Nick broke in. “You’re having a fight with them, but you’re starting to take it out on me!”

  “But you said you wanted to—”

  “Spend the next twenty-four hours making love to you, talking to you and getting to know you one hell of a lot better than I do now!” Nick interrupted.

  “You…oh,” Thea said. She smiled sheepishly. “That is what you said, isn’t it?”

  Nick got to his feet again. “Are you going to turn off that phone?”

  Thea made up her mind. “Yes!”

  She pushed the power button until the phone went dead.

  “Thank you,” Nick told her. “Now let me fix myself a drink.”

  Thea made herself take another sip of her own drink, trying to calm herself down. The tart taste of the cranberry juice filled her mouth and her tongue began to tingle again. After she swallowed, she asked Nick another question. “Why don’t you think my mother paying me half of all of those mortgage payments is a good idea?”

  Nick poured half an inch of Grey Goose into a glass. “I want to preface this by saying that it probably woul
d be a fair solution, but I’d be shocked if either your mother or your sister will agree with you.”

  “But why not?”

  “Well, from your sister’s perspective,” Nick answered as he opened the refrigerator, “all of this is about money. So your mother giving you half of those mortgage payments is functionally the same thing as giving you more of the house than the third she thinks you deserve.”

  “But—”

  “I didn’t say I think she’s right,” Nick assured her as he poured the cranberry juice on top of the vodka. “I said that she won’t like this solution. And I don’t think your mother will either.”

  “But why not? It’s fair!”

  “Fair is often a matter of perspective,” Nick repeated as he put the carton of juice away, “and I’ve been a bartender listening to my customers complain long enough to know that people can convince themselves that anything they want is fair. So let’s forget about your sister for a moment. She wants half—or a third I guess—of your Mom’s money one day. What does your mother want out of all this?”

  “She wants my money, too!” The bitterness in Thea’s voice was not pretty.

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Nick told her, “but I’d be very surprised if it’s what’s most important to her.”

  This really surprised Thea because right now the entire family fight seemed to be about money. “What do you think this is about then?”

  Nick carried his drink over to the couch and sat down on the floor beside her. His eyes immediately focused on the patch of her pubic hair still peeking out of her open jeans and disarranged panties.

  Thea tried to be annoyed by Nick’s clear preference for her body rather than this fight between her and her family, but the truth was, it flattered her in a weird sort of way. She was more than ten years older than him, after all. It was great that he lusted after her this way. Still, she wanted his mind on their discussion, not her pussy, so she lifted her butt, pulled her panties up properly and zipped her jeans. “You were saying this fight isn’t about money?”