The Southern Comfort Series Box Set

by Clark O'Neill, Lisa

  But he wasn’t going there without her.

  He slid down, skin to skin, brought her other leg around his hips so that there was no part of them that wasn’t touching. She arched against him – oh God, yes – and he gritted his teeth to stay in the moment. Anchoring a hand in her hair, he dragged her head back, looked hard into her dazed eyes.

  “Come on, Sadie. Come for me.”

  He saw the storm swell a second before it broke.

  Then she exploded, and it was Sadie – Sadie’s nails in his back and Sadie’s muscles convulsing around him, Sadie’s sweet lips falling open with his name – and he came so hard that it was like a two-by-four to the head.

  He blacked out, if only for a moment. One blissful moment of sheer Nirvana on a four-poster bed.

  But then the bed stirred beneath him and he thought, no, shit that was Sadie, and the implications were almost as bad as the sex had been good.

  He cursed violently, if silently, in his head.

  What the hell had he gone and done?

  And then he shifted because she was little and he was not, so he had to be crushing her, but the resultant sensation of wet heat was a little more potent than he’d expected.

  It felt like there was nothing between them at all.

  So he eased back, pulling himself out and levering his weight onto his elbows, and then slowly glanced down to see his still-twitching flesh poking right through the top of the condom.

  The condom that was clearly torn.

  And the implications of that were even more horrible than the realization that he’d just had sex with his neighbor. With his friend. With the only woman he’d ever cared about enough to stay away from.

  He’d fucked up but good, hadn’t he? All that hullabaloo about protecting her, and then he puts her at risk. Because as usual, he’d put his own selfish interests first.

  He had an image of her, round with his child, slipping off a ladder because he couldn’t be bothered to paint the nursery walls.

  Then looked at those baby-doll eyes, all sleepy and guileless.

  “Wow,” she breathed, smiling.

  And he leapt from the bed and ran to the bathroom to throw up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WELL this was… unexpected, Sadie thought, not for the first time that evening. She’d just had uninhibited – holy cow, had it been uninhibited – sex with her childhood nemesis, but instead of basking in the afterglow or crowing at his conquest he runs to the bathroom to get sick. She listened to the sound of him heaving, winced sympathetically, and tried to figure out whether she should be concerned for him or insulted.

  Pretty much her relationship with him in a nutshell.

  Surely the sex hadn’t been that bad. No, wait. The sex had been great. There were some things a man couldn’t fake.

  So this was… what? Regret and recrimination?

  Did she seriously believe that Declan was the type of man to become physically ill because he felt guilty? Ha! That was a good one.

  Except that she remembered the privacy fence, now neatly laid out in a pile of firewood and kindling.

  Okay. So he obviously felt things more deeply than he let on. But there was no reason to beat himself up over it. She’d been perfectly willing, after all. It was just some healthy sex between friends, which was good because it avoided expectations.

  In fact, the lack of expectations was probably what had made it so damn spectacular. It had simply been about two people enjoying each other’s bodies.

  And it wasn’t like there were real feelings involved…

  She closed her eyes when her inner prude called her a liar. She was not a woman for casual sex, errant hormones, rebound issues and crisis-induced closeness aside. Her feelings for Declan went deep, rooted as they were in childhood. But they’d grown recently, blossomed in ways she hadn’t expected, or they never would have ended up in this bed.

  Sometimes beautiful things bloomed in the most inhospitable places.

  What was between them wasn’t… easy. They challenged each other too much. But neither was their relationship an effort. It might seem antagonistic on the outside, because there was no subterfuge or pretense. They weren’t inclined to pull their punches, because they knew each other bone deep. Sure, they’d each had lots of experiences, added various layers over the years, but at the core they were still Sadie and Declan.

  Sadie and Declan who’d just had sex.

  Right before he started tossing his cookies in her bathroom.

  Maybe he’d gotten hold of some bad shellfish at the restaurant…

  A noise from downstairs interrupted her musings and panic made her heart skip a beat. Dec had locked the door when he’d come in, hadn’t he? Surely he wouldn’t be so careless. But then he had been acting pretty strangely. Throwing her ladder out the window, for example.

  Another unidentified sound had the image of wet work boots drifting through her head.

  She shifted, thinking that she should get up and lock the bedroom door pronto, grab her cell phone and hit 911. Not to mention tell Declan that they might have visitors. Possibly of the homicidal variety. Which, when you thought of it, was perfect timing. She was sitting on the bed, naked, while her erstwhile hero was indisposed. They might as well hang a sign out saying We’re unprepared, burglars. Strike now.

  Forcing herself to marshal her nerves, she started to move just as she heard a familiar voice.

  “Sadie?”

  On the up side, it wasn’t the burglars. Not so good was the fact that it was Kathleen. Sadie realized she’d never called her back, so Kathleen had obviously decided just to stop by for a visit.

  Too damn many Murphys with keys.

  And the implications of having her best friend walk in right at this particular moment had her scrambling in a different sort of panic. What would Kathleen say about this? She’d probably keel over on the spot from the shock. It was like… finding a Hatfield and a McCoy on a picnic.

  With neither of them wearing any clothes.

  Sadie grabbed the tangled sheet and hastily wrapped it around her. Maybe she could stall Kathleen before she reached the stairs. She threw her legs off the bed to stand up. But the sticky moisture that trickled down her thigh had her stopping in confusion.

  Uh-oh. She frowned as she looked down. The condom must have broken.

  And if she had to make a guess, she’d wager that’s why Declan was currently making an offering to the porcelain god.

  Sadie’s eyebrows shot together. Concern – like her ladder – flew out the window – and insult got the upper hand.

  “SADIE? Did you realize that there’s a ladder out on your…” Kathleen’s question died on her lips as she took in the scene before her.

  Her best friend was wrapped in tangled sheets, looking mussed and confused, while awful sounds came from the bathroom.

  Then she noticed the clothes strewn all over the floor. When she recognized some of them as Declan’s, she had no trouble putting the messy little pieces of this particular puzzle together.

  The ladder. Sadie Rose.

  Kathleen could only shake her head.

  So, he finally gets the girl, but leave it to her brother to somehow screw it up.

  As if on cue Declan emerged from the bathroom, face white as the towel draped around his hips, startling to an actual blush when he noticed her presence.

  She raised an inquisitive brow his way.

  His gaze flew to Sadie’s and he grew grim as she’d ever seen him.

  Which was saying a hell of a lot.

  “Well,” he said, looking around at the paint-splattered room, the obviously ruined clothes, then more meaningfully back at Sadie. “A disaster of epic proportions. Looks like my work here is done.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  HE looked pitiful, Kathleen thought, when she managed to track down her brother the next day. Pitiful, and alone. The walls he’d erected had been breached, and she knew he was scrambling to repair them. He’d been AWOL ever since sh
e’d inadvertently walked in on him and Sadie, which had done wonders for his reputation. Declan the inconsiderate. Declan the rogue. Declan the heartless bastard.

  He’d dug so many holes for himself over the years.

  But this was one hole that she wasn’t going to sit by and idly watch him shovel. Seeing him now, shoulders hunched against the wind-driven rain and the cold, a sodden sweatshirt his only protection as he stood staring at the carefully tended rose bushes on their mother’s grave, she wondered how she’d ever let things go on this long.

  He needed a good swift kick in the ass.

  She trudged up the slight rise toward the sheltering limbs of the nearby oak, stepped carefully over the broken ground. Roots and weeds tangled around several headstones, plastic flowers striking a false note on others. The scent of freshly turned earth mixed with wet leaves to form the miasma of decay.

  Lingering grief hung like a pall.

  But even in the gray and the damp, their mother’s resting place seemed somehow warm and peaceful.

  Declan had always made sure it was so.

  She’d expected the bottle of whiskey at his side, but had to admit she’d expected it empty. Capped and full, it sat within reach but unavailable, a crutch he wasn’t quite disrespectful enough to use.

  But then Colleen Murphy had taught her children better than to drown their sorrows.

  His eyes, when he turned, were ravaged. But with characteristic stubbornness his face bore a sardonic mask.

  “Oh good,” he said when he caught sight of her. “I hope you brought the tar and feathers with you. It might be some protection against the rain.”

  Ignoring his attempt to engage her, Kathleen moved close enough to shelter them both with her umbrella. And stood looking, for a moment, at the granite headstone that marked the grave. The pain she felt was an echo, like the way a bone once broken tends to ache when it rains.

  But what must it be like to have that bone re-broken from year to year?

  “You think this is what she’d have wanted for you?” She gestured to the letters etched on the headstone, proclaiming the loss of a Beloved Wife and Mother. “Pissing your life away with wasted guilt?”

  The shock of the direct confrontation was like a mule kick to the gut. Declan’s breath sucked in, his face went white, and he flinched as if she had struck him. Kathleen knew he was accustomed to people tippy-toeing around him, but that was just too damn bad. The taboo was out in the open, to deal with as he would.

  A beat passed in which there was no sound but the steady cadence of the rain.

  Water dripped from his cheeks like tears.

  The look on his face was so similar to that hideous day half their lifetime ago, that Kathleen was propelled back through the years. Suddenly he was a skinny teen, his brand-new bike lying forgotten where he’d dropped it, looking on with a mixture of horrified anguish and guilt while the paramedics worked on their mother.

  It had rained that day, too.

  Which was why she’d slipped and fallen off the extension ladder.

  “You know,” he whispered, stricken. There was a wealth of shame in the words.

  The burden hadn’t been just his to bear over the years. “I knew the day it happened. I was in the pantry, getting out the flour to make biscuits when you came tearing into the kitchen. I heard her ask you to get the ladder, start taking down the lights before the rain set in.”

  His throat worked as he tried to swallow, but ended up choking on his misery instead. “It was my half of the workload. Rogan put the Christmas lights up, I took them down. We’d flipped for it that year. Neither of us wanted the cleanup. Where’s the fun in that? So I kept putting it off. Plus, I wanted to show Seth Wheeler my new ten-speed while it was still nice out. So I told her I’d get to it later. I didn’t know she’d get impatient and try to do it herself.”

  “How could you?” she asked gently.

  “Because it was my responsibility,” he snarled, angry. Angry at himself. Angry at life. “She’d been after me to do it all day. If I wasn’t such an asshole, I’d have been the one up on that ladder.”

  “You were a kid,” she countered, easily enough. He needed facts now, not accusations. “Kids procrastinate. And her falling off that ladder, landing wrong, was nothing more than a terrible accident.”

  The raw sound that tore from his throat was a travesty of a laugh. “Nothing more than a terrible accident? I killed her, Kathleen. We’re standing at our mother’s grave, and you’re trying to tell me that it’s okay?”

  DECLAN shot a foot out and toppled the bottle. Watched the whiskey spill over the ground like his heart’s blood. All these years he’d secretly craved this confrontation, waited for someone to point the finger in blame, someone to tell him it was all his fault. And yet here she stood throwing his complicity right back in his face. “My stupid, selfish behavior cost our mother her life. How can you look at me, right now, and not hate me for what I did? Hate me for what I am?”

  She met his accusatory gaze. “Because you hate yourself enough for both of us.”

  With that truth so plainly spoken, whatever force of will had been holding him together came unraveled, crumpling him body and soul. He was like a float at the end of the Macy’s parade, ropes dangling, hot air gone. Even his sarcasm deserted him.

  Hate. Yes, he’d hated himself through the years. Hated himself enough to act like the undeserving asshole he secretly knew himself to be. Hated himself enough to push away his family, with their unfailing love and their good intentions.

  But not hating himself enough to abandon them completely. No, never enough for that.

  Because besides being an undeserving asshole he was also a fucking coward.

  His family meant too much to him to remove himself from their midst. No matter that he didn’t deserve them. Especially after what he did. He was entirely too selfish a bastard to cut the apron strings for good.

  And now, here his sister stood, telling him that she’d known the black depths of his soul all along.

  And typical of his family, loved him anyway.

  The weight of that love was too much for his eroded foundation to bear. He collapsed to the ground, silent at first, until great heaving sobs broke through the dam of indifference which could no longer hold.

  HALLELUJAH, thought Kathleen as she sat beside him, pulled him against her. All these years he’d coated his grief in a thick layer of guilt and swallowed it down as a bitter pill. And it had eaten at him like acid.

  She soothed him with nonsensical murmurs, abandoning the umbrella to better take him in her arms. So many times she’d wanted to confront him this way, so many times she’d either lost the nerve or been stonewalled by his shell of bitterness. Held back by her own. But that shell had been cracking since Sadie came home, and she couldn’t let this dictate the course of his life any longer. Couldn’t let her own bitterness keep her silent.

  He needed absolution. Both of them did.

  The sobs lessened, coming in weakening bursts, until finally his heaving chest rose more evenly against her own. She tried to find the words that would further ease his conscience, but found herself pointing out the irony instead. “You were always her favorite, you know.”

  The rain eased, falling across their shoulders in a chilly drizzle, but the warm exasperation in her words helped hold the bite of the cold at bay. “I’m the baby,” Declan replied shakily. “And the cutest.”

  “Smart ass.” An indulgent smile lifted her tear-stained cheeks. This was a shade of the brother she loved, and had missed. “I’m sorry.”

  That brought his head up from her shoulder. “You’re apologizing to me?”

  “I could have put an end to this shit years ago. But I just… brushed it under the rug. Let you go on mucking things up, not quite knowing how to fix it. There was some hurt there, I think. Resentment. Sibling stuff that nobody ever cops to.”

  He surprised her by saying “Good. That makes it better, somehow. It’s tough, sometimes,
to be so human, in a family of freakin’ saints.”

  A laugh ripped up from her gut. “You might want to take off those rose-colored glasses, sonny. All of us have messed up, too many times to escape your notice.”

  “Yes, but none of you have managed to elevate it to an art form, the way I have.” And the distress plainly written on his face made Kathleen realize there was another issue they had yet to discuss.

  “Excellent game plan, running away. And bonus points for first hurling all over her bathroom.”

  He winced. “I screwed up,” he acknowledged. “Start to finish last night. Bolting like that… I’m not even going to try to offer an excuse other than sheer panic. I, uh…” it might be only the second time in her life Kathleen had ever seen her brother blush, “guess you know about the broken condom.”

  She did, and she also knew from previous discussions that Sadie was on the pill, but she’d leave it to her friend to let him off that particular hook. He deserved to wriggle on it a bit in the meantime.

  “It was just a shock. That’s never happened to me before, and of course it had to happen with Sadie. Wouldn’t that be the welcome home present that never quits giving? It was bad enough that I couldn’t keep my hands to myself, let alone permanently screw up her life. She deserves… anyway.” He let that thought drift off and cleared his throat, obviously embarrassed. “I never should have gone over there in the first place. It was a huge overreaction. Stupid. But her bedroom light was on, and I could see her standing on that ladder and I just –”

  “Freaked out that you might lose the second woman you’ve loved to a fall.”

  He didn’t try to deny it. To his credit and Kathleen’s surprise he didn’t even attempt to sidestep.

  He did, however, wince. “I spent a lot of sleepless hours last night reflecting on what the hell happened. What’s been happening, since she came home. And as much as I’d like to pass it off as an aberration, I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Seeing Sadie again….” He shook his head, and his tone was rueful. “Well, I’m not one to get fatalistic, but looking back, I suspect it was inevitable. Hell, I think I’ve been in love with her since we were kids.”