The Brody Bunch Collection: Bad Boy Romance

by Sienna Valentine

She said, again to Beth, “Tell Wyatt it’s time to get going soon. I think we’ve all had enough fun for one night. And if I know Sarah, she’s gonna need some time to recuperate.”

  Beth nodded, never once losing her eternally chipper demeanor as she hopped off the seat and exited through the other side of the photo booth. Hannah didn’t say anything to me—not right away. She just shook her head again in a small way, like whatever burden she was carrying on her shoulders was becoming too much to bear.

  “Is it an outsider thing?” I asked her, referring to the barrier she kept putting up between me and my brothers, and her sisters and herself. “Or is it something else?”

  She raised her gaze to meet mine. “Yes,” she said. And she left it at that.

  I sighed and carded my fingers through my hair. I’d thought this was going to be a challenge before, but now? Now I knew there was much more at stake than just some innocent Amish girls getting in over their heads with my brothers.

  There was more to this story, more to this job, and more to Hannah than I’d imagined. And I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the only way of making sure everyone got through this whole thing safely was if I solved the puzzle that was the Miller girls.

  7

  Hannah

  This was not the way I had wanted the evening to go.

  Granted, it seemed like my sisters were pretty happy with how their nights had turned out. Happier than I was, at least. But then, they had no idea about what had happened at the funhouse. Not the sexy part with Ash—the bullshit that came after.

  Well, Beth did. But she only knew what I wanted her to know. That was par for the course with me—withholding all but the most relevant information to ensure my sisters didn’t worry about me. I was the eldest. I was the caretaker. That was my job.

  And what really, really worried me was the knowledge that some guy had grabbed Sarah, not just because drunk assholes with personal boundary issues pissed me off, but because part of me wondered if that was all there was to it.

  No, Hannah. It’s been years since you last had a run-in. You’re being paranoid.

  But was I? It was hard to tell anymore—I suppose that’s what years of being told you’re not rational because you’re a woman will do to you. Gaslighting was common where I came from, especially for young girls with secrets—secrets that could potentially ruin everything for those who held positions of power. I considered the possibility that I was wrong, that it really was just happenstance. Something the English and Amish world had in common was that when intoxicated, people did stupid things all the time. Could it be I was jumping at shadows?

  Fuck. I had let myself forget for a while that I needed to keep my guard up. Ash had done a fine job of convincing me that I could let go a little, maybe not clutch the reins so tightly. And honestly… I’d liked it. Those precious moments where I had surrendered to the present instead of the past, where I’d allowed myself to experience life without looking over my shoulder, had been some of the best of my entire life.

  But look where it had led me. And where, potentially, it had led Sarah.

  While I obsessed about all the awful possibilities in the front seat, my sisters tittered in the back, exchanging stories about their time at the fair. Beth was talking so quickly her sentences almost came out as a single word; I’d never understood how she managed not to trip over her own tongue. She was doing that thing with her hands, moving them in a flurry that matched rhythm with her speech, almost like she was rapidly constructing a very intricate cat’s cradle. Her blue eyes shone in the lights from the street lamps we passed, but what shined brightest of all was her smile. It stretched from ear to ear. Without even having to eavesdrop, I knew things with Wyatt had gone well.

  I mustered a rueful smile. I only wished that I could say the same for me and Ash. But it looked like my first instincts about him were right, too. He was a player. I had to stop hoping this thing between us would turn into anything different and start treating him like one.

  Sarah, for her part, was a little more subdued and yet no less delighted by how her evening had gone. Her cheeks were enflamed, rose-colored, hot as the sun. When she talked about Reid it was with her head down, her eyes fixed on her hands as she wrung them uncertainly. Such a nervous little thing, and yet already, I could see that this particular Brody brother was going a long way to pulling Sarah out of her shell.

  “The stars were so beautiful up there, Beth,” she was saying in a dreamy tone I knew all too well. “They were so bright, and so clear. Everything else just seemed to fade to black around us—like the night sky itself. And then it was… just us. Us, and the heavens.” She trailed off into a giggle. “I… I let him kiss me.”

  Beth’s eyes widened. She made a startled sound that quickly bubbled into an effervescent laugh. “Sarah! Really?”

  “Oh, God,” Sarah murmured, covering her face with her hands. Though the sound from her mouth was muffled, I could tell she was still smiling. “I’ve been so… so immodest. So… unvirtuous!”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. Despite everything we were dealing with, Sarah’s innocence was frankly adorable. And kind of hilarious.

  “Doesn’t it feel good, though?” I asked her, taking my eyes off her in the rearview mirror. I knew this town well, and the streets weren’t exactly dense with traffic this time of night, but I still needed to pay attention to the road. “Letting down your guard, I mean. Doing what feels right for you in spite of what someone else has told you.”

  “I…” Sarah shifted in her seat. I knew the conversation wasn’t likely to make her comfortable, but it was important. “I guess so…”

  “You guess?” I lifted my brows. “Was Reid a good kisser, or not?”

  Beth snickered. “How would Sarah know?”

  I clicked my tongue at her and she laid off, but I could still see the smirk on her lips. Beth was utterly incorrigible. Her teasing was good-natured, but Sarah was easily spooked and I didn’t want her clamming up just as we were about to make a breakthrough.

  “Well?” I prompted her. “Was he?”

  “Um…” She fidgeted with a strand of her hair, averting her gaze out the window. “As far as I know… yes. He was… very good.”

  I grinned and shook my head. Technically, it wasn’t Sarah’s first kiss—that honor had gone to an Amish boy when she was much younger and even more innocent—but it was assuredly her first one of that caliber. There wasn’t exactly any sex ed in the village, and Amish teens didn’t play a lot of Spin the Bottle, either. Physical affection, by and large, were for couples who were already married. That lack of experience didn’t exactly breed a lot of Don Juans.

  Reid was undoubtedly experienced, though. The good-looking, cocky pricks usually were. Although judging by the bits and pieces I’d picked up from what Sarah had recounted to Beth, Reid had been pretty considerate of her. She made him sound almost patient. A little romantic. Maybe the Brodys weren’t just a bunch of players, after all.

  Besides Ash, that is.

  I pushed the memory we’d made in the funhouse aside. The important thing to focus on now was getting Sarah to embrace these new experiences rather than run from them, and I couldn’t do that if I was dwelling on what happened with Tanya. Still, I made a mental note to talk to the girls about not letting the Brody boys walk all over them. Beth was a spitfire, but the way she fawned over Wyatt worried me a little.

  To Sarah, I said, “The world’s so much bigger outside the village. And the things they told you, the horror stories you were fed—it just doesn’t add up, does it?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that,” Sarah replied, now braiding that wayward strand of her red-gold hair. “Father told us sin would be everywhere. And it is. Temptation, as well.”

  “But what is sin?” I asked her, allowing myself to get a little philosophical. “Something bad, right? The kind of bad thing that hurts others, hurts ourselves?”

  Sarah nodded. Beth glanced at me from the corner of her eye. I saw a twin
kle. She knew where this was going.

  I continued. “So if that’s true, how is kissing Reid a sin? Did it hurt him? Did it hurt you?”

  Sarah frowned. “No, but… modesty is a virtue. And being pure for your husband…”

  “If kissing made you impure,” Beth butted in, obviously on my side, “then you’d be in pretty dire straits already, Sarah. Way before you left the village.”

  “That was not the same,” Sarah argued, but I could hear the falter in her voice. We were getting to her. “The way that Reid and I kissed, tonight… mouths open… hands upon each other… it wasn’t proper.”

  “According to who?” I said. “Look, Sarah—people out here, they kiss like that all the time. It’s no big deal.”

  She cast her eyes to the floor. “It was a ‘big deal’ to me.”

  I sighed. “That’s not what I meant. What I meant was that people kiss each other, hold each other, and even fuck each other without being married all the time in the English world.” She visibly flinched at my use of the “F-word” and I rolled my eyes. Though I didn’t say it, I thought, C’mon, Sarah. Don’t be such a baby. “Father and the church may tell you that’s a sin, but that’s not what gets people hurt. The real sin is when they do all that under false pretenses.” I felt the muscle in my jaw begin to twitch. “When they lie. When they pretend to be something or someone they’re not.”

  Fuck. Why couldn’t Ash have just been upfront with me? Why did he have to pretend like he cared, like I was… I don’t know, special? He was already in my pants. There was no reason for him to stab me in the back like that. And now I was questioning what I was telling my sisters about the rest of the Brody Bunch. They were outsiders, after all. And I could tell from Beth’s reversion to Dutch, and her avoidance of Wyatt earlier, that she still trusted me—an ex-Amish—above the “English” boys. And that was saying something, given how I could tell she felt about him. Was I really in the right to be telling them to ignore their instincts, ignore everything they were ever taught, and blindly accept what Reid and Wyatt were trying to sell them?

  When I glanced in the rearview mirror again, I could see Beth was looking at me with pursed lips. She knew something was going on inside my head. Damn her intuition.

  “This world… it’s not as bad as you think,” I said, trying to bring the topic of conversation back to Sarah. “It’s actually a lot better than the village was. Out here, you have choices. Out here, you’re not somebody’s future wife and nothing more. Sarah, you could be somebody.”

  “I am somebody,” she began, but Beth cut her off.

  “Of course you are. But are you the somebody you want to be, or the somebody you were told to be?”

  Sarah frowned. “You’re on her side?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “We’re both on your side, sister. I’m just trying to show you that you have options. I’m trying to convince you to look past the gruesome tales you’ve been told about the English world and enjoy your time here. Live a little. And when it’s time to go back, if you want to stay instead… I’m here for you. Okay? You have a choice.”

  “I know,” Sarah replied, avoiding my gaze again. “I just think you’re trying to tell me what to choose.”

  “I’m not sure you fully understand what you could have here.”

  “And I’m not sure I see our village—our way of life—as the burden you clearly do.”

  I snorted. “That’s because you’ve lived your whole life around people who would never tell you otherwise. Why do you think our Father banned Rumspringa? Why do you think you had to come here under the cover of night, just to claim a right that should have always been yours?”

  “Because you never came home,” Sarah snapped, and suddenly it was like my Toyota’s A/C had kicked up on high. “And that changed a lot for us, Hannah. That changed everything.”

  My knuckles strained around the steering wheel. I felt like they might burst through my skin at any moment with how hard I was clenching. “Why are you defending the man who has kept me from you for the past two years? Who has, I’m sure, erased all evidence of my very existence from your lives?”

  “Because you knew the consequences when you left, sister,” Sarah said to me in Dutch. She was practically spitting the words. “Why are you pushing so hard?”

  “Because I care about you!” I screamed, making even Beth shrink back against her seat. “I care about you more than he ever will!”

  I had been trying so hard not to give in to the rage building inside me. I thought I could get through this conversation without yelling, without fighting, without losing my cool. I’d been bottling these feelings up inside myself for years, and the force with which they now came spilling out made my vision blur.

  Violently, I pulled the car up onto the shoulder of the road and threw it into park, slamming my head against the steering wheel. Pain bloomed in my chest. My throat was tight. Every cell in my body was screaming on a frequency nobody else could hear. I felt so alone in my fury, so isolated—the only one of us who knew the truth about our “simple lives.” I carried that burden for all three of us, and it was becoming too much to bear.

  “My fault,” I murmured to myself. “It’s my fault.”

  And it was. This separation from my sisters—it was self-imposed. Nothing was keeping me from telling them the truth. Nothing but myself and my fear of what would happen if I said it out loud. The last person I’d tried to tell had insisted I was mistaken. Lying. Making things up. These were just the imaginings of a teenage girl. Young Hannah Miller, stirring up trouble.

  “Sister?” Beth said in such a quiet voice it broke my heart. Still leaning against the wheel I gave a little shake of my head. No. I needed a moment. I needed to breathe.

  Both Sarah and Beth remained silent, giving me the space I needed. My little car felt stifling, but my legs were shaking too badly for me to get up and get out. I rolled the windows down instead, letting in some fresh air. Well, fresh was a strong word for it. It smelled mostly like asphalt and car exhaust.

  But it was something. Enough to fill my lungs and remind me that I wasn’t back there in the village. The village smelled like grass and hay, firewood and animals. The air was clear and the sky was too, the stars not occluded by the city’s ambient light. When I glanced up through my windshield, I could see the difference. That brought me back into the moment, back into my car, where I’d allowed an argument with Sarah to get out of hand.

  Of course she blamed me for Father’s cruelty. To her, it must have seemed like common sense. I’d run off and never come back. Mother had surely mourned me. Father had obviously imposed greater restrictions as a result. Certainly, my leaving was only an excuse for that, but the truth was that when I’d abandoned the Amish life, I’d abandoned my sisters too.

  They had a right to be angry. In fact, I was a little surprised that it hadn’t come up sooner.

  Minutes ticked by. Maybe ten of them before I could sit up again and not feel like I might faint, or my head would explode. From behind me, I felt Sarah’s hand brush my shoulder. My nerves were still fried and part of me wanted to shrug her off, until she said, “I’m sorry, Hannah. I didn’t… I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  I met her eyes in the rearview mirror. They were so earnest. So pleading. So devoid of the fire I’d seen in them a moment ago. My stomach dropped. I knew she was genuinely sorry, but I also knew part of it was because she’d been raised to kowtow to whoever was angriest—to apologize first, just as long as it would make everyone else happy.

  Folding my lips, I reached up and put my hand over hers. I still couldn’t tell her everything. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But there was something I could tell Sarah that she so desperately needed to hear.

  “It’s not you,” I whispered, my gaze never faltering. I didn’t even blink. I just stared into her eyes, making sure she knew. “It was never you.”

  And then, before she could answer, I took my car out of park and pulled back onto the road that would take
us home.

  8

  Ash

  It was well past midnight, and I was lying awake in bed, alone. This was not a sensation I was used to. Usually I’d have a woman or two at my side, and we’d either be deep in the throes of passion, or have passed out just after.

  Not tonight, though. Tonight, after everything that happened, I’d come back to my apartment after leaving Hannah without so much as a kiss on the cheek. She was still pissed. I could tell. Even if she wouldn’t say it out loud.

  But somehow, that just made her more beautiful.

  I rolled onto my back with a sigh, giving the ceiling a hard stare. I was exhausted. Hannah had given me a run for my money back in the funhouse, and the spat with Tanya afterward had drained me too, just not in the same way. You’d think being mentally depleted would make it easier for my brain to shut down, but all I could see when I closed my eyes was the look of utter disappointment on Hannah’s face. Her cold fury stole my ability to doze off, and some time ago I’d realized it wasn’t sheep I was counting, but sins I’d committed against her.

  Groping my nightstand in the dark, I found my phone and turned it on, squinting against the oppressive brightness of the screen. I’d called Tanya as soon as I left the fairgrounds, hoping to apologize in earnest, and she hadn’t returned that call. But she had sent a text, apparently. There was one word in the message.

  Asshole.

  I frowned, staring at it. Well… she wasn’t wrong.

  But that meant she was okay, right? At least, in the physical sense. She was home safe. And though that gave me some peace of mind, I knew my checking up on her didn’t absolve me of what I’d done.

  I’d been selfish. Thoughtless. And I was still being those things, because although I was relieved to hear from her, Tanya wasn’t the one I’d hoped would text me tonight. I had hoped it would be Hannah.

  “Why?” I muttered out loud as I opened and reread a few of the texts Hannah had sent me before this whole debacle had gone down. “Why can’t I get you out of my head?”