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“Why are you doing this? Why’d you come here? I mean, I understand you wanting the mountain, even stealing our employees, but this?! This is beyond business!” David shouted, standing firmly beside his family.
Colin looked down, his head shaking slightly, then back up—his eyes darting between the Carver brothers. “It’s not just business,” he said, fixing his gaze on David.
Gennie’s head whipped in his direction.
“Well I think you should leave,” Will stated firmly. “All of you.”
The Dowling crew looked to Colin, waiting to follow his lead. He just looked at her.
Gennie Carver.
Her face told him all he needed to know in that moment.
He turned on his heel, muttered, “Come on” and walked out through the crowd—Max, Michael, and Travis at his heels. The rest of the party filtered out shortly after them, in the wake of the chaos. They were nearly gone when he heard a voice behind him:
“Colin.”
He nodded at the kids to go ahead without him, then turned to face her.
“Gennie.”
She came to a stop in front of him, her hands hidden in her jacket pockets, red lei still around her neck. He looked down at her, trying to decipher her expression—her lips were pursed and her eyes were narrowed slightly, as if she were trying to study him.
“Gennie, we weren’t here to cause—”
“What did you mean when you said ‘it’s not just business’?” she asked, cutting him off.
His mouth parted as he ground his jaw back and forth. “It’s personal.” He meant for it to sound playful, but it came out more like a grumble.
She huffed out a single, harsh laugh and rolled her eyes as she turned to leave. The sound cut through him like a knife. He reached out and grabbed her arm, as gently as he could, suddenly desperate for her not to walk away.
“Gen, wait.”
She stopped, but didn’t turn back around at first. She glanced at his hand on her arm, as if his fingers were burning through the leather. He watched her back, waiting. Finally she lifted her head and turned to face him again. But when her eyes met his, he realized he didn’t actually know what he was going to say.
It was personal.
It was his mountain. It should have been all these years, passed down from his father. But his father lost it to the Carver family. This family he now found himself halfway between trying to crack like a nut and weave himself through like a thread.
But as he stared into Gennie’s eyes—a rich, beautiful brown, even deeper than his own—he wondered if it was truly about the mountain anymore.
He was successful without it. The Dowling name was already tied to an empire. What did he need Boundary Mountain for? Some ideal legacy he built in his head? To win it back for his father who wasn’t even there to see it?
His hand had fallen back to his side, but he was aching to reach out again—to touch her hand, her face, anything. To feel something.
But he knew Gennie Carver wanted nothing to do with him.
He stuffed his hands into his own coat pockets and cast his eyes down. He wasn’t ready to tell the tale of his father vs. her father. And he certainly wasn’t ready to tell her anything else.
So he repeated himself.
“It’s personal.”
This time a dull whisper, uttered as he turned to leave, unable to bear her reaction again.
She watched him walk away, her fingers tracing the warmth left on her arm.