After nearly a full minute of silence, during which I couldn’t look at her, but I could feel her watching me, she stepped past me and left the library without a word.
That could have gone better.
Twenty-Four
Blake
I waited until I got home before I sent my mother a text telling her that I’d borrowed her car. The moment I walked out of the library, I’d known that I had to leave the retreat as soon as possible. I’d planned on going back to my apartment in Rawlins anyway, but now I planned on staying until Blake had gone home.
As flakey as my parents could be, I knew I couldn’t tell them what had happened. They’d be pissed at Blake, and that wouldn’t be good for the business. They needed to see the Hunter brothers as guests, and that included their grumpy neighbor.
Are you sure you’re okay?
I smiled, but I didn’t really feel it. It was nice of Blair to be worried about me, but I wasn’t much in the mood for motherly comfort. Still, I sent back, quick thanks and let her know that I’d call her tomorrow. I’d have to tell her then that I wasn’t coming back until the Hunter brothers left, but at least I’d have tonight to think things through.
I set my phone down on the counter, determined not to look at it again until tomorrow. Right now, I wanted to be alone, and that included carrying on conversations with my mom or dad, or whoever else might try to contact me. It wouldn’t be Blake, of course, because we were done.
I swallowed hard, my eyes burning. I wasn’t going to cry over him. That wasn’t really my style. Especially not the way things had gone down. When my other relationships had ended, they’d done so on good terms. There’d been some sadness when we’d parted ways, but it hadn’t been something devastating because I’d already known that we wouldn’t be going anywhere.
I hadn’t braced myself for that with Blake. I hadn’t braced myself for anything with him. What happened between us had been so abrupt, so intense, that I hadn’t been able to form a complete picture of what we’d been, let alone what we could have been.
I took a shower and let the white noise help clear my head. Lavender scented body wash helped too. By the time I stepped out of my steam-filled bathroom, wrapped in a plush pale blue robe, I was feeling a bit better.
Not a lot, but enough to think things through with a clear head.
I pulled a bottle of beer out of my fridge. Beer and music were vital to ‘me’ time. And only one type of music would work: my favorite bad-ass violinist. Once her music was coming through my speakers, I took my beer over to my overstuffed chair and settled in to try to relax.
I probably should’ve just gone to bed, but I knew if I did that, I would’ve spent the night staring at the ceiling. At least here I had beer and music to help me go through all the shit in my head. It was the only way I’d be able to move on.
The first thing I needed to do was decide if I was going to stick with my shop at the retreat. In Rawlins, I’d managed to go for two years without speaking to Blake or seeing him face-to-face. I would be safe in my store. Out at the retreat, things wouldn’t be so easy. He lived next door. Granted, there was a lot of space between the two properties, but it wasn’t out of the question that I’d see him if I went out walking. That was how we first met, after all.
I wished I’d never agreed to have a shop out at the retreat. Things with Blake probably still would’ve fallen apart, but it wouldn’t have been like this. He never would’ve accused me of seducing him for my parents, and he wouldn’t have been there when I’d been with Steve. Hell, I probably wouldn’t have gone out with Steve in the first place if I hadn’t needed to get Blake out of my head.
But what could have been and what was were two different things. I couldn’t go back in time and going over all the possible ways things might have gone wouldn’t do anything but ruin my sleep. I needed to let it go.
Except I wouldn’t be able to completely move past it right now because I’d have to eventually tell my parents why I wasn’t going to be around for the next couple days. I’d already decided that I couldn’t tell them everything for business reasons, but I also knew I couldn’t talk to my mom about the personal side of things. She wouldn’t understand. She met Kevin when she was eighteen, and they’d had an open relationship the entire time they’d been together. She’d never understood why I’d never been into casual sex or why I ever wanted to get married.
Besides, to tell her the personal side of things, I’d have to know myself how I felt about Blake, and that wasn’t something I wanted to admit to anyone. Because it couldn’t have been anything more than sex and small talk.
Twenty-Five
Blake
I stomped back upstairs, not caring who heard me. It’d serve them all right if I woke them up. Kevin and Blair with their fucking retreat. My brothers and their damn control issues. If everyone would’ve just left me alone, things wouldn’t be so fucked up. I’d be home right now, having a beer and watching TV after a long day. I’d be going over commissions to decide what to do next and checking the weather to see if it’d be safe for me to go for a ride tomorrow.
Why wouldn’t people let me be? It was my fucking life.
I opened the door to the suite, fully intending to slam it behind me and hope it woke my brothers. Seeing them all sitting in the main room caught me enough off-guard that I closed the door normally. I started for my room, but Jax stopped me.
“Please sit down.”
My brother never asked me to do things, so the order wasn’t anything I hadn’t gotten a million times growing up, but the please was new. A part of me wanted to blow him off like I always had before, but a bigger part was tired of all of this. Tired of acting like our childhood hadn’t fucked us all up. Tired of them talking around me and over me but rarely to me.
“Why?” I asked.
“So we can talk,” Jax said, not reacting to my tone.
I laughed. “You mean so you three can talk, and I can listen. I think I’ve heard enough about how great your lives are and how much you love your girlfriends or whatever. Let’s not pretend this has anything to do with talking.”
Jax opened his mouth to say something, but Cai put out a hand. “What do you think we’re here for then, if it’s not to work on making things right between us?”
I ran a hand through my hair. “Honestly, I have no fucking clue. But that’s not surprising since you’ve never actually bothered talking to me. You showed up at my house and brought me here without asking what I wanted.”
“Blake–” Slade interrupted.
Now that I’d gotten started, I wasn’t about to stop, not even for the brother I’d always gotten along with best. I was just so fucking tired of all of it.
“Don’t Blake me. I’m not a fucking child anymore. Not that any of you would’ve noticed anything about who I am.” I glared at all three of them, enjoying the surprise on their faces. “You never have. You’ve all gone on with your lives and your women, and this whole reconciliation shit is just you checking one more thing off your to-do list, before you go back to your perfect lives.”
“Our lives aren’t perfect,” Slade said, his face serious. “And we haven’t moved on from what happened. It fucked us all up.”
“Yeah, well, at least you guys actually remember what it was like to be a real family.”
“I always thought you had it easier,” Jax said quietly. “You said you didn’t remember anything from before, so this was all you ever knew.”
“How could you think that would be easier?” I stared at him, incredulous. “I never knew what it was like to have a mother or a father. I had Grandma Olive for a few years, and then she was gone, and it was the three of you and Grandfather telling me what I was doing wrong and how I needed to behave because I was never good enough.”
“I never thought I was good enough,” Cai said. He leaned forward, expression serious. “I spent my whole life in Jax’s shadow, thinking that Grandfather was disappointed in me because I didn’t want to f
ollow in his footsteps like Jax.”
“We all have baggage,” Jax said.
Baggage. That’s what Brea had said too. I gritted my teeth. No one understood. “I don’t give a shit about baggage. I made my own life, my own money, and I did it all on my own because I wasn’t following the path you all thought I needed to take. I’ve been alone my whole fucking life, and I’m tired of people acting like I need to change to fit some idea of who they think I am when they’ll end up leaving just like everyone else.”
I’d said too much, but it felt damn good to finally say it. I’d held back all these years because it was easier to just hold it in when I was around them, and then forget about them when I went home.
“You guys came here like all we had to do was sit around for a day and hold hands while we talked about our childhood and we’d be good again. Except we weren’t good in the first place. I can’t say that I want us to get back to the way things had been because I don’t have a ‘had been.’ All I’ve ever had is this, and I gave up wanting more a long time ago. I’ve worked my ass off to do what I wanted to do. I don’t give a fuck about Grandfather’s money, and I don’t give a fuck about ‘making things right’ because you guys have no idea what it would take to make things right with me.”
They stared at me, not even trying to say anything. Not that there was anything they could say. I meant every word. There was nothing they could do to fix what was broken between us because there hadn’t been anything there to break.
“Do whatever you want,” I said, exhaustion hitting me as my adrenaline rush faded away. “I like my life the way it is.”
I turned and walked away, shutting myself in my bedroom before any of them could speak again. I just wanted this weekend to be over, so I could go back to my life and not have to think about them or Brea or the way things could have been if it hadn’t been for a patch of black ice and shitty tires more than two decades ago.
Twenty-Six
Brea
“Are you sure you don’t need me to bring you anything?” Blair asked. “I have some wonderful healing crystals, and I’m sure I can find a few things in the shop that I can use to cleanse your apartment of negative energies.”
“No, Mom, I don’t need any of that,” I said as I picked at some sticker residue on one of my glass cases. “I’m just going to take it easy today. Things are always slow on Sundays.”
That was an understatement. I only opened every other Sunday, and the hours were always shorter. Today was different though. Today, I needed to pretend that I was doing something worthwhile or I’d be tempted to spend the day in my pajamas, drinking hot chocolate, and reading the same page, repeatedly. That meant I’d opened at my usual weekday time, and I planned on staying open until my weekday closing time, even though I wasn’t supposed to be open at all.
“Kevin and I don’t mind keeping the shop closed if you want Lamb to come back to help you,” she offered. “She’s a darling, but I don’t think the young men here are very interested in homeopathic remedies. One of them came down to the shop while I was talking to Lamb, and he barely said a word to either of us. When I offered him some suggestions to promote relaxation and mental stimulation, he just smiled and excused himself.”
For a moment, I’d thought she’d been talking about Blake, but then she’d said he smiled and I knew that wasn’t the case. He hadn’t come looking for me. Why would he? I’d given him a chance to put all that he’d done behind us. I would’ve let it all go if he’d simply opened up to me.
“I’m fine, Blair,” I said. “I’d rather have her there just in case you need her for something. I’ll be back out in a couple days.”
As soon as I was sure the Hunter brothers were gone.
“All right,” she said reluctantly. “If that’s what you think is best.”
I smiled. Blair had never been the mothering type, but occasionally, she’d do something that almost made our relationship seem normal. I loved her, and most of the time, I appreciated the independence I’d always had, but I still liked these little moments of normalcy.
“I promise I’ll call if I need anything.”
“Thank you,” she said. After a moment’s pause, she added, “I just sometimes worry about you, not having anyone to ease some of your burdens.”
“That’s why I hired Lamb.” I purposefully misunderstood her. Before she could correct me, I said, “I have to go. I’ll talk to you later, all right?”
“Okay.”
I breathed a sigh of relief when I ended the call. Neither of my parents ever made me feel like I was defective for not being in a relationship, but they also didn’t understand how I could tolerate being alone so much of the time. They’d never said anything, but I’d always suspected that part of the reason they’d never gotten married and had always kept the relationship open was because they never wanted to risk being alone. If they always had a couple people on the fringes, they’d always have someone to turn to, to spend time with.
If that’s what they wanted in their lives, I supported their choice, but I could never do it. Sometimes I needed the silence, but more than that, I preferred to be alone rather than be involved in a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere.
I picked up my all-natural glass cleaner and went back to cleaning off the new case Lamb had brought out from the back room. I’d completely forgotten I’d had it, but when I’d called her early this morning to ask her to cover for me at the retreat, she’d told me that she’d found something to replace the display case she’d broken. She was right. It was exactly what we needed.
If only it was that easy to replace people. Some people liked to pretend they could swap friends and lovers, but even my parents – who’d had more partners than I ever wanted to think about – didn’t act like the others were interchangeable. Maybe there were people who didn’t need that deep, individual connection, or they had some other way of making it so that when one person left, they had another one waiting. All I knew for certain was that I wasn’t that sort of person. If I had been, I would’ve replaced Blake with Steve, and I wouldn’t have even blinked.
But I couldn’t do that.
Even worse was the fact that Blake’s rejection hadn’t made anything I felt go away. He’d behaved like a total and complete ass, hadn’t apologized, and then he hadn’t even had the courage to tell me that he didn’t want me. He’d simply let the seconds drag out until I’d been the one to walk away.
I should’ve been pissed at him.
I was pissed at him.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
I finished wiping down the outside of the display, but my mind was remembering how it’d felt to run my hands over all that firm flesh. The cleaner made me sneeze, but all I could think about was how amazing he smelled, even when he’d been sweaty from working. When I bent over to brush away some cobwebs, I could almost imagine him coming up behind me to grab my hips, pull up my skirt, and take me right there in the middle of the store…
The light ringing of the bell above my door startled me out of my daydream. Flushed, but grateful, I turned to greet my unexpected customer.
“Welcome to Grow ‘n…” The words died as quickly as my smile when I realized I knew the man standing in front of me.
Well, not knew, but I recognized him and knew his name, and that was enough. Jax Hunter. One of Blake’s brothers.
I bit back a curse and waited for him to tell me why he was here.
“Brea, right?” He gave me one of those smiles that I knew was supposed to be overly charming, but I wasn’t in the mood today.
“Brea Chaise,” I said. “How can I help you?”
“I want to talk to you about Blake.”
Yeah, that’s what I’d been afraid of. I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Let me rephrase. I need to talk to you about Blake.” Jax’s expression changed, but I couldn’t doubt the sincerity I saw there. “How much do you know about my brother?”
&nb
sp; I sighed. I needed to just get this over with. “A lot of superficial stuff that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Has he talked about our family?”
“No.” I tried not to let myself feel the hurt that came with that honest admission.
Jax nodded like that didn’t surprise him. “Blake should’ve been the one to tell you this, but he doesn’t talk about it, and you need to know.”
I didn’t know why I needed to know. It wasn’t like the two of us were anything anymore. If we even had been to begin with.
“Our parents and our sister died in a car crash twenty-four years ago,” he continued. “Aimee was Blake’s twin.”
My stomach sank. He’d been an ass, but I wouldn’t wish that sort of thing on my worst enemy.
“Blake was in the car.”
Fuck.
Jax leaned on the counter. “He was barely four, and he doesn’t remember anything, but everything changed for us when it happened. We went to live with our grandparents, and they tried their best, but after Grandma Olive died, we fell apart. Grandfather worked all the time, and the rest of us, we were just kids. We made a lot of mistakes, and Blake, he suffered the most for them. He’s felt alone all this time.”
Dammit. I didn’t want to feel anything for Blake. It didn’t matter that he’d had a shitty childhood. He was an adult and how he behaved was a choice. I couldn’t excuse him just because he’d lost everyone. Maybe that made me a horrible person, but I just couldn’t do it. Not when he refused to try.
“I’m sorry for your losses,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even. “But some people are alone because they want to be. I can’t help him anymore. I gave him a choice, and he didn’t choose me.”
“You’ve gotten through to him,” Jax said. “And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few months, it’s that a good woman can always get through to a Hunter man.”