“Because I thought this should be done in person.” Morgan had appeared at their table looking pale and shaky. “I need to tell you both something.”
And just like that, Elle knew the men really had been telling the truth. Morgan had been pulling a Morgan—she’d been holding back.
On everyone.
Archer nudged out a chair for Morgan. “I’m thinking you’ve got more than one thing to tell us,” he said evenly.
“Yeah.” Morgan sat like her legs were too weak to hold her and then dropped her face into her hands.
“Stop with the dramatics and just tell us,” Elle said with what she thought was remarkable calm. “Tell us what you’ve neglected to mention. You’re still in Lars’s life. Or he’s in yours.”
“How did you know?” Morgan asked, voice muffled.
“I know everything,” Elle said, wishing that was really true. For instance, she’d like to know if she’d get straight A’s this semester. Or if she had a big enough tax refund coming that she could buy a new pair of boots.
Or if she was really doing as she feared and starting to trust Archer with the one thing she’d always promised to withhold—her heart.
He met her gaze and she tried like hell to hold it, to be cool, but he was scruffy and delicious sitting there all badass and pissed off that she’d gotten hurt, and she wanted to jump his damn bones, so she broke eye contract first. “Talk,” she said to Morgan.
Archer watched as Morgan lifted her pale face and snatched a muffin from Elle, who gathered the basket close to her like it was a pot of gold.
Even he wasn’t dumb enough to take food from Elle. And the most ridiculous thought came to him. If she was pregnant, say with a silky haired, blue-eyed little girl, he was a dead man.
Morgan sighed, took a huge bite, and swallowed. “I told you I’d gone to rehab a couple of times and that was true. What I didn’t tell you was that in between I had a few rough patches where I . . . well, continued on in the family business of grifting to keep myself afloat.”
“Hey,” Elle said. “Not everyone in the family is a grifter.”
“Fine,” Morgan said. “I’m the only screw-up. But I’m serious about that all being so last year. I’ve been working hard at the jobs I could get, but nothing’s paid enough to support myself. I can’t do it on my own. I need a village. I need my village . . .” She looked at Elle.
But Elle shook her head. “You know,” she said. “Yesterday I might’ve believed you. Why are you here, Morgan? What do you really need from me, because clearly it’s not just a job referral.”
Morgan sagged like her lungs were balloons that had just popped. “Lars contacted me and asked for my help, one last time.”
“To which you said, ‘when hell freezes over,’ right?” Elle asked.
Morgan bit her lower lip.
“Right?” Elle repeated.
Morgan blew out a sigh.
“Oh my God, Morgan.” Elle tossed up her hands. “Seriously?”
“Listen, I wasn’t thinking straight, okay? I was having trouble making rent. I don’t have any friends I can trust and you . . .”
“I what?” Elle asked, eyes narrowed.
“You deserted me.”
It wasn’t easy to catch Elle off guard, Archer knew, and given that she probably still had adrenaline overloading her system from what had happened upstairs, he set a hand on her arm. Not that he would stop her from jumping over the table to go for Morgan’s throat—hell, he’d help her hide the body if that’s what she needed from him—but he just wanted her to think it through first.
“I didn’t desert you,” Elle said to Morgan, possibly through her teeth. “You deserted me, remember?”
“I was trying to protect you.” Morgan eyed the muffin basket that Elle was still hugging.
“No muffins until you tell me the rest,” Elle said. “Tell me what you did and I’ll buy you your own damn basket.”
Morgan hesitated.
“I just beat a man over the head with my stapler,” Elle warned. “Start talking or I’ll do the same to you.”
Archer lifted a brow.
“What?” she said defensively. “She’s my sister. I can talk to her like that.”
Morgan stilled, her eyes going suspiciously watery.
Elle narrowed her gaze. “What now?”
“You just called me your sister,” Morgan whispered and put a hand over her own trembling mouth.
Archer watched Elle struggle to hold on to her anger and fail. She could be as cold as ice when she needed to be, but she also had a heart of gold. He’d always thought that a weakness, but now he was starting to see it was really the opposite. It was a strength. And it made her a far better person than he could ever be.
Elle reached out and slid her hand into Morgan’s. “You are my sister,” she said gruffly. “You’ll always be my sister. And if you meant any of what you said when you first came into town—”
“I did,” Morgan said fiercely.
“Then tell me everything,” Elle said. “Everything, Morgan, or so help me—”
“I know, I know. Stapler upside the head.” Morgan nodded. “Okay, so you know Mom and Lars worked together back in the day. He had her doing cons for him, for a bigger payout than she could get by herself. She often pretended to be a Russian gypsy who could read fortunes. She went around finding ‘family curses’ and promising to remove said curses, which of course she always located in their priceless, heirloom jewelry. Sometimes she had me play the part of the curse expert on the phone—”
Elle frowned. “How did you let him sucker you into that?”
“It was Lars. But all I had to do was make a few calls to the mark. And again, this was years and years ago. But as we both know, one of the cons went bad. The police got involved and Mom rolled over evidence to stay out of jail. Lars wasn’t so lucky. He was out on bail and then the case got delayed but eventually he went away for a few years. When he got out, he immediately messed up and violated parole and then went back for a few more years. He just recently got out again, and he somehow has it in his head that I still have the pot of gold—or in this case, a suitcase full of jewelry from that job.”
“Which you don’t,” Elle said. “Because all you had was the brooch, and I returned that the night we all got caught.”
The now infamous night, a night Archer had always looked at as a tragedy but that wasn’t true at all. It was the night that had brought Elle into his life.
“You don’t still have the loot,” Elle repeated tightly to Morgan. “Right?”
Morgan sucked her lower lip into her mouth. “Not a whole suitcase.” She grimaced. “But I do have a nineteenth-century pocket watch that supposedly belonged to Russian royalty.”
Shit, Archer thought. Here it came.
Elle stared at her sister. “Why?”
“You’re not going to understand.”
“Try me,” Elle said tightly.
“You don’t let emotions rule over logic,” Morgan told her. “You have a healthy mistrust of feeling deeply for anyone, and honestly, I wish I was more like you.”