by Maisey Yates
She was willowy, and at first glance she might be easy to write off as fragile. Until you saw the glint of steel in her eyes.
“I was looking for you,” she said, directing that comment at Sabrina.
“Is that good or bad?”
“I hope it’s good. Because I have a new opportunity that I want to talk to you about.”
“Actually, I was hoping to have a talk with you too,” Clara said to Lindy.
“What’s up, Clara? Is everything okay? Everything going all right since...?”
“As well as it can be, thanks,” she responded. “But I wanted to talk to you about taking an extended amount of time off. The payment from the military came in today and...”
“Of course,” Lindy said. “Take as much time as you need. I could never tell whether you needed the work to keep busy or whether you needed a break... Anyway, whatever you need...and you know that the job is always here for you.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Now,” Lindy said, turning her focus to Sabrina. “I just got off the phone with the Donnellys. We’re going to be working on a partnership with the Laughing Irish.”
The color leached from Sabrina’s face. Clara felt her heart crumple for the other woman, even though it shocked her that her heart was able to crumple more than it already had.
“Of course,” Sabrina said, her voice sounding strange, almost automated. “Whatever you need me to do.”
Lindy looked back at Clara. “Can you hold down the fort for a bit?”
Clara nodded. “No one will be in for at least another half hour, I imagine.”
“Thanks.” She put her hand on Sabrina’s shoulder. “Let’s talk in my office.”
That left Clara to her own devices. Left her to ruminate on everything Sabrina had said. That Alex was mostly protecting himself under the guise of protecting her. She didn’t disagree. But it still didn’t make any of it untruthful.
It still didn’t change her plans.
She had fully intended to become a more self-sufficient woman in part through this relationship with him. And she wasn’t going to waver on that now. No matter how much it might hurt.
It was a strange thing to realize, that while she had experienced some of the worst pain that life can throw at a person, her heart had never truly been broken before.
It was broken now.
And it made it hard to breathe.
But she was going to move on. To keep on moving.
The alternative was unthinkable.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ALEX FELT LIKE the biggest ass in all of creation. More than that, he was pretty sure he was dying. At least, he imagined this was what dying must feel like. Waking up this morning without Clara in his arms had been awful. But the crazy thing was, it wasn’t unusual. He had spent thirty-one years waking up without Clara, and only a few days waking up with her. There was no damn reason that doing so should feel so normal. So right. He’d never had the expectation of someone in his life being permanent before. Why he should think it now was beyond him.
He hadn’t been wrong when he told her she needed to go out and experience life. He hadn’t been. He couldn’t just be another thing that happened to her. He refused. He was the collateral damage in too many people’s lives already. His father’s. His mother’s. His own damn best friend’s.
He bit back that familiar pain, that familiar resentment, and put his mind back to the work at hand. He was trying to patch up some damn barbed wire, and he kept putting the fencing through his finger. But then, there was something good about that. About the punishment of sending that hard steel straight through his flesh. He deserved it. That was the thing. Because he hadn’t been enough for anyone. Ever. Not his mother, not his father, not his friend, and not his brothers.
And in the end, he sure as hell hadn’t been enough for Clara. Clara, who deserved a damn sight better than a man who was little more than a failed experiment as a son, as a soldier and as a lover.
“Hell!” he shouted as the barbed wire went through his finger again, not so much because it hurt, but because sometimes that word just needed to be shouted.
“What’s going on over here? Doesn’t sound family friendly, that’s for sure.”
Alex looked up and saw Liam coming his way. Ironic that it would be Liam who found him like this. Especially considering it was Liam who had been on his mind so much lately, as he rehashed the past. As he tried to dissect what the hell had gone wrong in his life to bring him to this point.
“It’s called hard work, asshole,” he said. “But I doubt you would know much of anything about that.”
“I know enough. Why are you out here working by yourself and cursing up a blue streak?”
“Since when do you care if I work by myself?”
Liam released a sigh and bent down, picking up a pair of fence cutters as he did. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“No.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Alex. Tell me what the hell is happening.”
“Why should I? It’s not like you and I were ever that close. The both of us ending up here kind of forced a relationship...”
“There was no forced relationship. You’re my younger brother. You always have been. We have a relationship. By birth. Through blood. No forcing required.”
“We are blood related. I’ll give you that.”
“Look. You’re in a mood. You look like you would tangle with a pissed-off bull if you were given half a chance right about now, so I’m going to go easy on you. I’m going to go ahead and let you have all this unfair pity party crap you keep spouting. For a second.”
“You don’t think it’s fair?”
“We’ve been here for a while now, and you haven’t said a damn thing to me about not feeling like we’re close. Hell, we hit the bars more times in the last couple of months than we ever did in the past few years. You were my wing man.”
“You were mine.”
Liam laughed. “Doesn’t matter since neither of us got laid, right?”
Alex’s lips twitched. “Guess not.”
“Anyway, you could have punched me when I got here. Or any time in the past four months. And now you’re up in my face?”
“Because I’m trying to figure out where the hell my life went wrong. What is wrong with me, Liam? What the hell is wrong with me that a few fistfights at school were so god-awful that our father left?”
Liam just stood there staring at him, so he continued. “I was getting in trouble at school. Beating up other kids. Dad said he didn’t have time for my crap. He said he’d already raised one kid, and he didn’t need to do another one. He was done with my teenage bullshit.”
“That’s what Dad said to you?”
“Yes. And when he left, he made sure that Mom knew it. That Mom knew that her great hope for keeping the two of them together had failed. That I had failed.”
“That’s absolute bull,” Liam told him. “It was never fair for Mom to put that on you. Another kid has never kept a couple together—if anything they only drive them apart. That’s just common sense. Kids don’t make life less stressful. They screw it up more. That is what kids do. That had nothing to do with you.”
“It had everything to do with me, Liam. Everything. And at that point, even you were hardly ever around. And the minute you could leave, you left. And you never came back at all.”
Liam’s eyebrows locked together, his expression hard. “Are you mad at me for that?”
“I’m mad at everybody. I’m mad at everybody who had a hand in that ridiculous mess we called a house growing up.”
“They’re not my favorite people either,” Liam said. “Believe me when I tell you that you don’t know everything that went on in that house.”
�
�Liam...”
“No. You listen. You didn’t see all of it. I’m glad. Because I damn well wanted to make sure that you kept smiling, Alex. Remember that.”
“I do,” he said. He gritted his teeth. “It was the last thing you said to me before you left. Keep smiling.”
“Yeah,” Liam said. “Well, I meant it.”
“It wasn’t enough to make Mom forgive me,” Alex said. “After Dad left. There was no amount of good behavior that could redeem me at that point. So I figured I’d have to go redeem myself away from everything else. Become a soldier. That didn’t seem to work either. It sure as hell didn’t fix anything in me. If anything I ended up more broken.”
Silence settled between them and then Liam spoke again. “Does she love you?”
“Yeah. She does. I mean, she thinks I’m a coward and that I’m a liar. That I’m just protecting myself. That I can’t deal with things.” He paused, his throat working up and down. “I don’t know how to deal with things,” he said, dropping the wire cutters and punching his own fist. “I wanted to keep it together for you. I wanted to fix things after I screwed it up so bad with Dad. I wanted to make my life count, Liam. I tried to find something. I went into the military. My best friend died for me. Me. I’m nothing more than a hollowed-out husk of a person. Fake smile and all. And he died for me. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
“Why not?” Liam asked, folding his arms over his broad chest.
“You would feel comfortable if a man sacrificed his life for you? Jumped in front of a gunman to save you?”
“Hell no. But I’m asking you why you don’t. Because here’s the thing—nobody took a bullet for me. But somebody did it for you. He’s not here. You are. Why can’t you accept that?”
“Because it’s not fair.”
“Life isn’t fair, Alex, or were you absent on the day they handed the lesson out in the school of hard knocks? Because I was there. I was pretty sure you were too.”
“It should’ve been me. Bottom line. Nobody cares whether I live or die, and I’m not being self-pitying when I say that. It’s the truth.”
“I care,” Liam said, his voice rough. “I care, Alex. Our house was a living hell, and the only reason I stayed there as long as I did was because of you. You think our mother hated you? I was the reason she was tied to Dad in the first place. I was the reason she had to have you so that she could try to keep the man. Even though I don’t think she wanted him all that much. She despised me. She would have left me for dead if given the chance, and believe me, she tried.”
Alex didn’t know what to say. He and his brother weren’t the kind that shared a whole hell of a lot. And this was news to him. He had always assumed their mother had a better relationship with Liam. Not that he believed she had a warm fuzzy relationship with either of them, just that maybe she hadn’t made him feel as much like he was the world’s biggest inconvenience.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You’re worth it, you dumb asshole. You’ve been worth it. Every step of the way. Everything I shielded you from, everything he protected you from in the military...”
“I didn’t ask for it,” Alex said. “I didn’t want it. I didn’t—”
“Why is it the worst thing to you? Why is it the worst thing in the world to admit that you’re worth something?”
Alex felt like he was standing on the edge of a cliff. On the edge of something he couldn’t see the bottom of. Maybe it was the open, empty cavern of his soul. This dark, hollow black space that he felt nobody would ever want to jump into. That nobody would ever want to deal with. Hell, he didn’t like dealing with it. Why would anybody else?
“If I was worth dying for...then why the hell couldn’t Dad come down to the school one more time and talk to the principal? Why was what I did so damn bad that he left? Why was there no amount of good behavior, no amount of bad behavior, to get them to see me as anything more than an inconvenience?”
Alex shook his head, drew a breath and continued. “That man that knew me for just a few years jumped in front of a bullet to save me. Me. He gave his life for me. My own parents don’t remember my birthday. And maybe it’s better that way. I don’t want to hope there’s anybody who might love me, because dammit, I don’t want to need it. It’s easier. It’s easier to shut down and smile. Even if the smile is fake. You can pretend it’s real. And it is the easiest damn thing, Liam. To give nothing. To let nobody get close. But she...”
He cut himself off, realizing he was perilously close to crying all over his brother about their parents, about a woman. They just didn’t have that kind of relationship. He didn’t have that kind of relationship with anybody.
“I was going to leave,” Alex said finally.
“What?”
“Here. I was going to leave here. There’s a reason I only brought one bag of stuff. There’s a reason I barely unpacked any of it. I was going to leave. That was my plan all along, whether I fully acknowledged it in my mind or not doesn’t matter. I was always ready to pick up and go, no matter what. When it got too hard. When it got too real. I didn’t want to want this. I didn’t want to want this relationship with you, this relationship with Finn and Cain that we were never able to have growing up. Because I’m so tired, so desperately tired of hoping for something that I can’t have.”
“What if you could have it?”
“That is exactly the thing I can’t think about. It’s exactly the thing I can’t let myself want.”
“Why not?”
“Because I will be damned if I end up on my knees in the street again watching somebody I care about drive away while I cry like a little bitch.” He took a deep breath. “I made myself matter. I made myself a soldier. So that my life would be about serving the country, so that it wouldn’t be about fixing Mom’s pain anymore. That’s what I was to her. I was this thing that she created to fix her pain, and I couldn’t even do that. In the end, I made it worse.”
“I bet she said that to you too.”
“Oh yeah, she said it to me. She said it to me more than once. I was the worst thing that ever happened to her.”
“That makes me feel bad. She always said I was the worst thing that ever happened to her. So you’re the favorite even when it comes to being the least favorite.” Liam shook his head. “Unbelievable.”
He tried to laugh at his brother’s joke. He couldn’t. Couldn’t force that smile he’d spent half his life faking. “I can’t do this anymore.”
Liam shrugged. “Then don’t. You’ve been not doing it for a long damn time, right? You fill the void with army stuff. Random women. Moving from place to place.”
“What?” It was the last thing he’d expected to hear from his brother.
“Why try?” Liam continued. “The whole not trying thing, the whole fake smile thing, it’s served you well. I ought to know because I do a pretty similar thing.”
Alex frowned. “Yeah.”
“Of course, if it was still working so well, and if you were perfectly happy with it, you wouldn’t be out here stabbing your hands with a barbed wire fence.”
“I didn’t stab myself on purpose.”
“You kind of did.”
Liam made him sound stupid. Self-destructive. Alex had to wonder if he had a point.
“It doesn’t matter. You were right. It is better. What I’ve been doing this whole time works. There is no reason to ruin it now.”
“No reason at all. No beautiful, blonde reason.”
Alex gritted his teeth. “She’s too young. She’s only ever been with me. She doesn’t have any experience with other men. She doesn’t know anything beyond this town, her ranch and her grief. More than enough reason for me to encourage her to go and see more.”
“That’s bull and you know it. Someone who’s experienced the losses she ha
s is more mature than she should have to be. The life you live has more to do with your age than years.”
Alex knew Liam was right about that, and still, something in him resisted. “It wouldn’t be fair of me to throw my stuff on her.”
“But you want to,” Liam said. “You want to, or you wouldn’t be out here acting like a miserable son of a bitch.”
“What the hell do you know about women?”
Liam swung his arms wide, then brought them back together, punching his palm with his fist. “Absolutely nothing.”
But the nothing was weighted. Alex was about to press further, but Liam continued. “Look, I’m not one to talk about being emotionally well-adjusted, since, well, I’m not. Pretty obvious, all things considered. But it seems to me that you’re trying to protect yourself from getting hurt, when you’re actually already hurt.”
Alex cleared his throat, flexing his fingers. “It’s just a little barbed wire.”
“You know what I mean. She loves you?” he asked a second time.
“So she says.”
“You don’t want to hope that it’s true, because the fact of the matter is that you love her already. But you’re afraid. You’re afraid because you already know what it’s like to love somebody and have them walk away. You know what it’s like to love somebody and have nothing but poison come out of their mouth. But you also know what it’s like to have somebody care enough to throw their body in the path of bullets for you, Alex. And I don’t think he did that so that you could live a half life for the rest of the years he bought you.”
“I doubt he extended my years so I could screw around with his sister either.”
“Maybe not. But I bet he wanted her to be happy.”
“That’s why I sent her away,” Alex said. “That’s why I told her to go. I said that I would take care of the ranch, and she could go do what she needed to do. Because that’s the thing, even if I thought I was worth all her affection, even if I could hope to have it, she deserves to have some choices in life. And if I went at her, telling her that I loved her, well, right now she would say that she loved me too. Because she is twenty-one, because she was a virgin. Because I took advantage of her inexperience, of her innocence. She would stay with me, and she would regret it.”