From Our First: A Promise Me Novel

by Carrie Ann Ryan

  Her honey-blond hair had been curled back from her face, the tips brushing her shoulders. She looked gorgeous, sweet. And I knew that once she looked up, I would see those blue eyes. And I would fall.

  I would hate myself.

  “Here you go, Mr. Smith.” The hostess walked away as Myra’s gaze shot up. Her mouth dropped in surprise, and I saw…mortification in her eyes.

  “You,” she stuttered.

  I didn’t want to make a scene, but I had no idea what I was supposed to do. If I ran, there would be fucking clucking noises. I had a feeling that my brothers had either bribed the hostess well, or the woman was somehow friends with our friends. I wasn’t sure. But, Jesus Christ. I couldn’t run now.

  Though if I sat down, I wouldn’t be doing so in front of the woman who was friends with my friends. No, I would be sitting down with my ex-wife, our past between us like a third person in our party.

  However, I didn’t have a way out of this, and I wasn’t sure I could outrun the chickens, let alone my past. No, there was no turning back. And, honestly, I didn’t think there ever had been—not since I saw Myra across the room after so many years that first time.

  So, I took a deep breath and sat down across from her, ignoring how her hand tightened around her phone. “Hello, Myra.”

  “Did you set this up?” she asked, her voice a hiss.

  “No, your friends and my family did. Because they have a cruel sense of humor.”

  She flinched. Tonight wasn’t what I had expected, and yet, there was no going back.

  “They told me they had lists of dozens of names for me to go through for this pact so I could find my date and happiness. But, apparently, you were first on the list. Now I’m a little worried to see who’s next.”

  My head hurt, and I couldn’t reconcile my lack of control over anything. Which was probably why I sounded like an asshole when I next opened my mouth. “Apparently, I am your list, baby.”

  “Don’t call me baby,” she snapped before closing her eyes and letting out a breath. “We need to stop doing this. We told ourselves that we would stop doing this.”

  My hand fisted on the table, and I nodded, forcing myself to relax. “You’re right. We may hate each other, but we have to be friends.”

  Once again, she flinched, but it was the truth. We did hate each other. We had thrown the words at each other before. There was no taking them back. “How are we going to do this?”

  “We did just fine when we were watching Joshua when Dakota lost all her babysitters.”

  Her lips went white under her gloss as she tightened them. “Because we had a common purpose—to keep him safe. But we still fought.”

  I nodded, frowning down at the menu. “True. But why do I feel like the animosity has only increased since?”

  “Maybe because it has?” she asked and then sighed. “I hate this. I hate that I don’t feel comfortable in my skin when you’re around.”

  I frowned.

  “Not like that,” she corrected. “Because I feel like I’m two steps behind, and we have so many secrets. Huge secrets, Nate. And we’re keeping them from our friends and family.”

  “We are,” I said, knowing where she was going with this.

  “They don’t know why this is so horrible for us. They don’t realize that we shouldn’t be together across from each other at a table. Alone.”

  I sighed. “Are you saying we should tell them?”

  She played with the wine glass as the waiter came. She looked up and put on her best smile, though I knew it didn’t reach her eyes.

  “If the gentleman is ready to order, I am,” she began.

  “Sure, I can find something quick.”

  “I’ll have the salmon, only be sure there’s no shellfish.”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  “I’ll take the filet,” I said, looking down at the side dishes. I recognized a few things, but I wasn’t sure I had ever had them together. This wasn’t a place where you picked your sides. It was up to the chef, so I went with it.

  “How would you like your steak cooked?”

  “Medium-rare?” I asked, and Myra gave a slight nod. I hated that I felt relieved at that.

  Whenever we went out when we were younger, especially when we went to the fancy places for an anniversary or something, she helped me order. After all, she had grown up in that world. I was good at ordering from Applebees, not so much for places like this. Every once in a while, I went out to similar places with people I occasionally worked with, but it wasn’t the same since it was a work thing. And while I always liked my steak medium-rare, apparently, being in front of Myra meant I felt like I needed confirmation.

  I hated that feeling. Like we were stuck in the past, yet somehow needed to be in the future.

  It made no sense.

  “We’ll get that right out. Would you like bread?” the waiter asked.

  “Sure.” I didn’t move my eyes from Myra.

  “Their bread is delicious,” Myra said, playing with her wine glass stem. “And back to if we should tell them… I don’t know.”

  “If we do, maybe they’ll stop trying to set us up,” I countered.

  “Perhaps. Or maybe the betrayal will be so great that they’ll want nothing to do with us.”

  “Arden already knows.”

  Myra winced. “I know. But there was no keeping it from your twin. Especially not when she saw my ring.”

  “True. If we tell the rest of them, they’re going to get upset with her, too.”

  “They damn well will not,” Myra said. “We will take the blame for everything if and when we tell them. Arden does not get touched.”

  I tried to ignore the pride I felt at Myra stepping up and protecting my sister. I didn’t know who I was to Myra, not anymore, and I didn’t even know how I felt about her.

  I hated what she did to me and who we were in the past, but I really didn’t know this woman in front of me.

  Maybe that was the problem.

  “Your best friends are with my brothers. Every single one of them.”

  Myra nodded tightly. “There’s no escaping that fact.”

  “I don’t know how I can keep from being in my brothers’ lives.”

  “I had to walk away from my life before. I’m not sure I can do it again,” Myra said.

  The truth of her words was too much of an echo of what had happened years ago. I didn’t want to go down that path.

  Not again.

  “You’re not my favorite person,” I said, and she raised her glass in cheers.

  “Ditto.”

  “But despite that,” I continued, “I don’t want to take away what you have with them. I couldn’t do that. Not even to you.”

  “You’re really good with the barbs.” She took a sip of her wine.

  I took a sip of mine, letting it settle on my tongue before I swallowed. “I need to stop that. We aren’t those people anymore, Myra.”

  She set her wine glass on the table and studied my face. “We aren’t. And maybe it’s time we remembered that.”

  “So you want to what? Clean the slate?” Because I wasn’t sure I could do that. Not with the pain I remembered.

  “I don’t think there’s ever going to be a fully clean slate between us. But maybe we can move past it, at least when we’re forced into each other’s circles. We’ve been doing that for how long now? Perhaps we need to continue and do it better.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “I say we follow through with our truce. We talked about it at the cabin, but not enough.”

  I nodded. “I had a shitty headache that day, so I don’t remember much of what we talked about.”

  She frowned. “A headache?”

  “From the accident.”

  “Accident?” Myra asked.

  It was so funny. The woman in front of me had been with me during an important part of my life. She had been an important part of my life. But she didn’t know what had happened in the
years between then and now.

  “I was an EMT. Our ambulance got T-boned, and I got a severe concussion. To the point where I will probably have symptoms for the rest of my life. Traumatic brain injury does that to a person.”

  Her eyes widened, and she reached out as if to grab my hand but pulled back at the last minute. I didn’t know what I would have done if she had touched me. I never knew what to do when it came to Myra. And that was the problem.

  Her face paled. “I didn’t know. I always wondered why you weren’t an EMT anymore, but I didn’t want to ask.”

  “I love my job now. But no, I’m changed.”

  “And I’m not the girl that I was before either.”

  The silence the fell wasn’t as awkward as it had been before, but it was still far too strained for my liking.

  “So, what do we do?” I asked.

  “I think we need to get over ourselves,” she said and took a big gulp of wine. I did the same, reaching for bread as our waiter set it down.

  She took a roll, carefully placed it on her plate, slice it open, used a slight corner of salted butter, and gently spread it over her bread. She was always so meticulous with her food as if she needed to be picture perfect. I knew it had come from her mother, but I tried my best not to notice what she did now. I didn’t want to notice.

  “So, we have a truce?” I asked into the silence.

  “We don’t have to be friends, Nate. I don’t know if we can be friends.”

  I ignored the odd hurt that statement brought. Because her thoughts ran along the same lines as mine. I shouldn’t feel any pain when it came to her and the feelings she evoked. “Okay. But we can be acquaintances. We can be part of the same circles. But we don’t have to lob barbs at each other.”

  “We don’t need to be cruel,” she whispered, echoing my word from before.

  “I don’t think it’s healthy for either of us to continue down a path where hatred burns between us.”

  She let out a breath and gave me a tight nod. “I agree. We’ll figure out what we need to do in each situation, but I can promise that my first inclination will not be to sneer at you every time I see you.”

  I smiled at that. “And I will try not to be rude to you or get through doors before you.”

  “I always wondered if you did that on purpose,” Myra said, smiling. This time, it reached her eyes, and I hated that I noticed.

  “It was a little petty.”

  “We don’t need to be friends. But we need to be kind,” she said. “I think kind is a good word. Because our friends need that, they’ve been through so much. We can do that for them.”

  “I agree.” I cleared my throat. “And since we’re being kind, we’re splitting the check.”

  “Oh, good, because you got the steak, and I got the salmon. Your meal is like twice as expensive as mine.” Myra took a sip of her wine.

  “That’s fine with me.”

  “My next date will have to pay for my meal. For propriety’s sake.”

  My stomach lurched at that, and I did my best not to frown. “I see. The girls are really going to work through their list?”

  An odd look crossed her face, and then she smiled. “Of course. I’m the last part of the pact. It’s their turn to find me the perfect date.”

  “And I’m not it,” I said dryly, starting it off as a joke. But when her eyes filled with hurt for an instant, I immediately regretted the words.

  Instead of saying something, not knowing what to say at all, I lifted my glass in cheers. “To you finding your perfect romance.”

  She clinked her glass to mine, her face carefully blank.

  “And for it not to be you.”

  “Ouch.”

  “A final barb. And now, the truce is on.”

  I sipped my wine and hoped like hell I knew what that meant.

  Chapter 3

  Myra

  * * *

  “What do you mean it didn’t work out?” Paris asked, and I pinched the bridge of my nose.

  “It’s what I said. I know you all had good intentions, but how about we go through the rest of the list and ignore anybody related to the Bradys?”

  Hazel frowned, took out her notebook, and crossed off a few names.

  That made me blink. “Why are you crossing people off?”

  “You said nobody related to the Bradys.”

  “Are there cousins I wasn’t aware of?” I asked, a little weirded out.

  Hazel tilted her head as she studied her notes. “Yes, but that’s beside the point. There are also non-Brady ones, and since Arden has a boatload of cousins now through Liam, some of whom aren’t married, even though the rest of them seem to have all been paired off recently, I assume you don’t want those either.”

  “How about we go with no one connected to your love lives at all?” I asked, doing my best to take deep breaths so I wouldn’t stress out. It wasn’t their fault that I wasn’t handling this well. It wasn’t their fault that I had no idea what I was doing or what I wanted.

  The primary thing was that I needed to get Nate out of my mind. And to do that, I had to date someone else. I had already said that I would try so I wasn’t alone. This was simply an extra incentive to do so. It didn’t need to be the end of the world.

  “Okay, so no Montgomerys or Bradys. I think there are probably a few other single men that our guys might know, though,” Dakota said, looking down at her pad of paper.

  “How about we draw the line at people not related to the Bradys? Your men can know of them,” I said, knowing a headache would be coming along at any moment. That, of course, made me think of Nate, and I pressed my lips together. I couldn’t believe that he’d gotten so hurt, and I had no idea. It shouldn’t have surprised me that he’d had major life moments without me, but the idea that he’d almost died from what sounded like a horrible accident, and I’d never even known, made me feel something that I wasn’t sure I was ready to deal with.

  “That’s a good caveat,” Paris added. “Mostly because the guys seem to know a lot of people. And we don’t want to cut off the entire Boulder area because of your arbitrary rules.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t know if you’re making fun of me or agreeing with my rules,” I said slowly.

  Paris shrugged, looking at her big planner and the notebook she had stuck in there with some magnetic clip thing that I didn’t understand. The woman had gone full tilt into the planner world, and I had a feeling if Paris ever changed her career, she could probably have a planner empire.

  “It can be both.” Paris smiled.

  That made me laugh. “I went on one date. I guess that counts for something.”

  “Of course, it counts,” Dakota said.

  “You and Hazel didn’t have to go on multiple dates with different people.”

  “Ours were special circumstances,” Hazel added. “Plus, I never actually met the guy I was supposed to go on a date with.”

  “He’s a great guy,” Paris said, and we all looked at her. She shrugged. “What? He is.”

  “However, since he’s currently back with his ex-wife, we don’t need to add him to any of my lists.”

  “True. I was just thinking of the what-ifs…” Paris trailed off, and Hazel snorted.

  “You mean what if I had gone on a date with that man? Then I wouldn’t be with Cross, most likely. And that means you wouldn’t be with Prior, and Dakota wouldn’t be with Macon. But sure, let’s think about what would have happened if I’d gone on a date with…what’s his name?”

  “It doesn’t matter. And I don’t like that.” Dakota paused. “You being the first one to meet a Brady brother changed everything.”

  The hot tea splashed over the side of my cup, and I cursed.

  “Are you okay?” Dakota asked, helping me clean up my spill.

  Paris gave me a weird look. “You’re never sloppy. What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I shook my head, ignoring her. They didn’t need to dive into why I felt guilty. Maybe Nat
e and I had been wrong. Perhaps we should tell them the truth about our past. But what good would it do? I wasn’t sure it would do any good, other than to maybe keep some of this guilt off my shoulders. Or perhaps it would stress me out more than I already was and give me even more guilt. It wasn’t as if Nate and I were going to pick up where we left off. So, it didn’t matter what our past was. And we weren’t lying. Not really. We were simply keeping part of the truth out of our daily conversations.

  “Anyway, while Nate is a wonderful person, we’re not going on another date,” I said, trying not to trip over my words. I still hated him, even if I was forced to spend time with him. He had broken my trust and had changed the way I thought of myself. So, no, I would never be his number one fan. And I never wanted to go out on another date with him.

  “I can’t believe Nate was a dud.”

  “Is it Nate or Nathaniel?” Paris asked. “I’ve always wanted to know, and it just never came up.”

  “It’s actually Nathan.” I froze as the other women looked at me.

  “How do you know that?” Hazel asked, studying me closely. I did my best to look nonchalant.

  “You made me go on a date with the man. I picked up on a couple things.”

  “It looks like the two of you talked, at least.” Dakota shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t too bad.”

  “For a woman who pushed away from the idea of dating more than any of us did,” I began, “you sure are pushy now.”

  “You pushed just as hard to get me to go in that direction,” Dakota said tightly, even though her tone was still sweet.

  “Maybe. And I won’t say I regret it because look how happy you guys are. But perhaps I didn’t need to push that hard.”

  Paris snorted. “You’re only saying that because you’re on the other side now.”

  “That is the truth.” I laughed. “However, Nate and I are just friends.” I swallowed hard at the lie and hoped the others didn’t notice.

  Dakota nodded. “That’s fine. As long as you can get along while we’re hanging out with the group. We will find you the perfect someone. And when Nate finds someone for himself, we can expand our group.”