by Violet Duke
But the biggest turn-on of all? The way she snuck in those big, blue, open-window-to-her-soul glances at him the few times she’d let her guard down. Because that right there was Emma just being herself. Uninhibited. Real. And more intoxicating than moonshine.
“If you stare at her any harder, you’ll set off my smoke detectors,” teased Megan.
He winced, both because he’d been caught and because of her choice of words.
As if reading his mind, she gave him an empathetic head tilt. “You’ll get used to it; I make a lot of fire jokes.”
He’d noticed. Since yesterday, she’d made at least a dozen. And from what he could tell, he was the only one in town utterly ill equipped to handle it well.
“It was a defense mechanism at first. You know, fight fire with fire,” she admitted, sounding pleased she was able to squeeze another in. “But then I just got really good at them.”
Despite feeling as if he were going to get a window seat to hell for doing it, he laughed. “You are nothing like I expected.”
“While you are everything I remember Emma going on about when we were younger.”
Her hushed tone was as effective as gravity in reminding him of his norm while he was here in Juniper Hills. Here, for the time being, he wasn’t the man with the “bad” past.
He was the one who’d agreed to have no past at all.
To be perfectly honest, the latter was harder to stomach at the moment.
“You can talk about the fire with me, you know,” she said, again reading him like a book. “That whole pretending to meet for the first time, that’s just Emma’s thing. What she needs, how she needs to handle this. But you and me, we can still be Jake and Megan from Riverside.” She shrugged. “So long as it doesn’t poke a hole in her plans, of course.”
Just as protective as her sister. Not surprising. “Meaning as long as I don’t blow my cover with folks in town, I don’t have to pretend that I’m not the person who saw your little face when you saw your own burns for the first time that night? That I’m not the one who sat beside you until the ambulance came, wishing I could rip my own skin off and make yours better?”
Tears filled her eyes almost as quickly as she blinked them away. “Yes. In fact, I’d prefer you didn’t. Because that’s exactly how I remember you. My hero.”
His breath hissed out in white-hot denial. “I’m not.”
“Yes. You are.”
A zero-to-sixty temper like her sister. About this at least.
“You saved my life that night, Jake. To me, it never mattered how the fire started. Heck, fires start for a million reasons. What mattered is that you made sure I made it out of there. Period.” A woeful angst hit her voice finally. But not over her wounds. “I’m just sorry your life got so wrecked in the aftermath.”
God, he hated it as much when she said that s-word as he did when Emma said it.
“I’m not my sister,” she preinterrupted his broaching of the topic.
Her bold, listen-here-mister tone trapped his attention. He raised a brow to give her the go-ahead to elaborate.
“I’m not Emma,” she emphasized. “So if I want to tell you I’m sorry, I will. For the most part, my sister is and will always be fiercer than I can ever hope to be. She’s a real-deal badass. But when it comes to the fire, and to you, let’s just say she’s a work in progress.”
His frown dissipated. “That’s the way she described herself when we first re-met.”
“Didn’t say she was an unenlightened work in progress.”
Smothering a reluctant smile in his beard, he shook his head and sighed. “So you’re saying you’re going to keep saying the s-word around me.” He wasn’t so much asking as he was accepting the reality of the situation.
“I’m saying”—she gazed over at her sister, sadness clouding her eyes—“that I may have come out of that fire with the visible scars. But Emma is the one with deeper ones.”
Damn. He’d suspected as much. Grief engulfed him. “What can I do to help her?”
“Just be you. And . . .” She exhaled heavily. “Just be ready. It’ll take a while, but Emma will eventually make herself deal with Jake from Riverside and Jake 2.0 being the same guy.”
She didn’t have to paint him a picture beyond that. They both knew that when the time came, it would be hard for all of them to weather—
The peal of his cell phone ringing shattered their shared silence.
Carter.
Torn, Jake volleyed his gaze back and forth between his phone and Megan. Thankfully she made the decision for him. “The fact that you’re still sticking with a cell that sounds like it’s survived a drop in the disposal tells me you don’t need my advice on how to help Emma.” She got up and headed back to the house. “But I’ll be here to listen if you ever need to talk.”
And then she was gone.
Jake walked over to the side gate leading to the street he’d parked on, just barely managing to answer the call before it went to voice mail.
“You still pissed?” asked Carter, for once not using his Stepford brother phone etiquette.
Was he still? “Yes and no. Good call waiting me out those few days.” When Carter didn’t respond, Jake took the training wheels off. “Dude, what the hell were you thinking?”
A muffled, weighted sigh fogged the phone line. “Wasn’t. Thinking, that is.”
That much was obvious. Jake hopped in his truck and waited.
The silence lasted maybe a few seconds before Carter broke. “How is she?”
Somehow Jake knew he wasn’t talking about Emma. “Megan’s doing good. Sweet girl. An interesting combination of shy and ballsy. She looks happy, far as I can tell.”
Another pause. “And her burn wounds?”
Jake answered that one as gently as he could. “About as bad as we’d thought.”
“She’s still badly scarred?”
“Yes. But . . . just on the outside seems like.”
A ragged breath was Carter’s only indication he was still listening.
“So, how long have you been keeping tabs on her?” A few days ago, the first thing Jake had wanted to ask Carter was how he’d managed to even find the Stevens girls. But the longer he’d thought about it, the more he was certain this entire thing had deeper roots.
“Since the fire,” Carter replied quietly.
That explained a lot.
There were times Jake used to question why Carter hadn’t taken a more front-seat role in his own corporation. From its inception Carter had always been the brains and muscle behind SME Enterprises but not the face of the company. Never that. Even though he was the majority shareholder. Instead he’d appointed his college buddy and cofounder of SME, Geoffrey, as the more visible co-CEO, choosing to stay practically anonymous over the years. As a result very few knew who Carter was, let alone that he ran SME while Geoffrey took all the credit.
On Jake’s part, he’d always respected Carter’s choice to be a success in private instead of flashing it around in the public eye. At first he’d suspected it had to do a little something with pissing their dad off, though Carter neither confirmed nor denied one way or another. But now he wondered if Megan was also one of the reasons he’d maintained his anonymity. Carter couldn’t exactly do things like pay to renovate her crumbling library if his name was out of the shadows.
“Is this the first time you’ve helped her out without her knowing?”
Carter ignored the question and asked one of his own. “Tell me the truth. Do either Megan or Emma even know you have another brother besides Daryn?”
Ouch. He hadn’t expected Carter to want that much truth. “No. They don’t.” The technical reason why was simple. The fire had happened about a month after Jake and his family had moved to Riverside, and Carter hadn’t made the move with them since he was already in California starting his freshman year of college early in a summer program for superhigh achievers (that wasn’t the actual name for it, but it was close enough).
Since Carter wanted the brutal truth, Jake gave it to him. “That summer was the first time you weren’t the center of attention in our house, our town. It was the first time I was out from under your shadow, with a great girl seeing me and not just all-star-everything Carter’s younger, less awesome brother. So . . . I never brought you up in conversation with Emma.” Because his time with Emma was the first and only thing that had ever been his and his alone.
Of course, he’d never begrudged the Carter hand-me-downs of clothes and toys—and as he got older, the hand-me-down shoes to fill, as well. But unsurprisingly, none of it had ever fit as if it were made just for him. Not like Emma had.
“Then after the fire, Dad made sure the Carmichael name—and you—had complete insulation from everything that went down that night with the fire and Peyton’s death. By the time Dad got done calling in favors and strong-arming court orders and getting paperwork signed in blood, the three Rowan kids had a pet gerbil more closely related to us than you were.”
In a way there was a certain poetic justice to it all. That summer the girl of his dreams had lost a brother because of a tragic fire. It was only fair that, in effect, Jake had, too.
Analyzing it all here outside Megan’s home was just too much. Jake couldn’t keep the sharpness—or bluntness—out of his next words. “To think, all these years of your dogged bimonthly calls and look at us now—you’re relieved they don’t know you’re my brother.”
“That’s unfair, Jake, and you know it,” Carter all but snarled in frustration. “Dad may have been the one to get you to falsify that confession and change your last name, but you’re the one who decided I was no longer your brother. You never gave me a chance to fight for you!”
That knockout punch opened up an acid-laced hole in his chest Jake thought he’d cauterized long ago. Of course Jake remembered how stricken Carter had sounded when their dad had discussed his plan with them, how Carter had thought it inconceivable to sacrifice even a single minute of Jake’s life for his. And Carter was right; Jake hadn’t let him oppose it harder. “It’s not that I didn’t want you to fight for me; it’s that I knew you wouldn’t have won that battle.” Not with their dad rebutting Carter’s protests by describing—in detail, right in front of them—how Jake’s life and future were basically insignificant in the grand scheme of things, an expendable liability that would run its course and become a sad but acceptable casualty.
Quote, unquote.
It didn’t matter that the time he’d spent in juvie was a far lighter sentence than what Carter would’ve served in prison as an eighteen-year-old tried as an adult. It didn’t matter that he loved Carter enough to take the fall for him all over again if history were to repeat itself.
What did matter was that when their father chose to sacrifice Jake’s future for Carter’s, chose to value Carter’s life over Jake’s, their relationship as brothers didn’t just get strained. It broke. Severed. Shattered.
So, yes, Carter was also right about the role Jake had played in severing their relationship. It had been Jake who’d wanted that bullet of betrayal their father had fired to be a through-and-through gunshot wound, instead of one that kept the bullet lodged inside him forever.
Yet here they were.
“For chrissakes,” rumbled Carter, now sounding pissed, “you never even let me visit you in juvie. Not on holidays, not even on your birthday.”
Jake flinched. That was a direct hit where it hurt. Unlike his parents, his siblings had all wanted to come see him on his birthday. But he just . . . hadn’t wanted them to see him like that.
Hell, even now the mere mention of juvie between him and his siblings felt like an anchor that kept them from moving on with their lives. And at least where Jake was concerned, it was an anchor that kept him barely skimming the surface of life, bobbing for air, constantly having to make that active choice to keep kicking and fighting just to avoid going under.
“You know what?” Jake murmured tiredly as he tried blocking unwanted memories that now looked a whole lot different than they had back then. “I think Emma has the right idea. She wants to keep our history buried. Pretend like we just met. And it’s been working great for us.”
“Bullshit.”
Dammit, he hated how good Carter had always been at that card game. “I’m not bullshitting you. Everything is better now that she and I cleared the slate and started fresh.”
“You didn’t clear the slate. You two just dumped the old, tarnished, repairable one on the side of the road and randomly picked up a new one.”
Funny how hearing your own thoughts come out of someone else’s mouth make them sound so much harsher. “Well, the main thing is that it worked. We’re all good.”
“Yeah? So does that mean you don’t still have a massive crush on her anymore?”
See, this is why you should never tell family anything.
Rather than answer the obvious, he took a move out of Carter’s evasive maneuvers playbook and boomeranged the inquisition back. “This isn’t the first time you’ve helped Megan out financially, is it?”
Shockingly, after drawing in a deep, worn breath, Carter fessed up. “No. But it’s the first thing I’ve been able to do for her in a pretty long while.” His tone turned bristly. “The girl just doesn’t need much anymore. She’s too damned independent. And content.”
A crack in Carter’s polished outer layer. Unprecedented.
Studying the storybook cottage before him, Jake couldn’t resist poking at the unhibernated bear a bit more. “Let me guess. You’ve been brainstorming ways to pay off her house.” Actually, that didn’t sound too far-fetched—this was Carter they were talking about here.
“Yes,” Carter groused back, and Jake had to stifle a shout of laughter.
“I’ve contemplated just hiring actors and sending one of those giant sweepstakes checks to her home, but knowing her, she wouldn’t just turn down the money—she’d insist on finding another Megan Stevens who needed the money to give it to.”
This was a whole new side of Carter, and Jake couldn’t be more entertained.
“At least back when she had medical bills,” continued Carter like a runaway train, “all I had to do was make anonymous donations to the—” Carter cut himself off around the same time Jake felt his eyebrows nearly hit the ceiling of his truck.
“You paid for her hospital bills?” Jake asked quietly.
Carter hesitated, but eventually he admitted, “I saved up every spare penny I had to make small dents in her mounting debts. They weren’t really substantial donations until SME started doing well.” His voice deepened with emotion. “The day I saw the balance at zero . . .”
Dammit, the man really did deserve the paragon pedestal he stood on. This time there was no lingering bitterness in Jake’s voice when he reassured Carter. “Megan won’t figure out your connection to me. I’ll make sure she never knows you had anything to do with the fire.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel better, you’re failing pretty miserably.”
No. Of course his perfect brother wouldn’t feel good about that. “It is what it is. For both of us. I don’t mind, Carter, honest. I accepted my fate the day I signed that confession. I’ll continue to stand by my decision, and you’ll get to live to fight another day as Megan’s white knight in the shadows. That’s our status quo.”
A self-deprecating grunt was Carter’s only reply.
They sat there in silence for a while before Carter said gruffly, “Sorry I didn’t tell you more about the job before sending you down there. I just . . . couldn’t risk you not showing up.”
“Water under the bridge.” He paused for a beat to measure his next words carefully. “So are you going to keep this up forever?”
“Are you?” Carter retorted, sounding just as concerned. “This plan Emma has for you two to pretend you don’t have a past. How long are you going to go along with it?”
“As long as she needs. Don’t worry. I don’t have any grand illus
ions of finally getting the girl or anything. Emma made it abundantly clear that she and I are in a temporary Jake and Emma 2.0 unreality truce for a finite amount of time.” Depressing. But at least he knew where things stood. “Gave you my answer. Your turn.”
A tattered sigh vibrated over the phone line. “I honestly don’t know how long I’m going to keep this up. All I know is that her injuries are my fault. I’m responsible for her. And for the way your life went down, too. So maybe I’ll never be able to stop trying to make things right.”
Jake knew that telling Carter this wasn’t his wrong to right would just fall on deaf ears. So he didn’t try. Instead they sat there in their first nonawkward stretch of silence ever.
It was nice.
“Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask you a favor?”
“Shoot.”
“I know my asking anything of you is the last thing I deserve, but . . . could you keep an eye on her for me? While you’re there. Let me know if she needs anything at all? Or just as important, if she wants anything at all?”
On the one hand, Jake didn’t want Carter to feel burdened by the type of deep-seated guilt that could prompt a request like this. But, on the other, he hoped that was what Carter was dealing with. Because if not, that meant there was more involved here. More at stake.
“Sure thing, man. No problem. Consider me your eyes and ears.” Hearing Carter’s muffled sigh of relief, he added, “All shit aside, you’re a good guy, Carter. You can start forgiving yourself, you know.”
Carter didn’t even hesitate before tossing back, “Said the pot to the kettle.”
Chapter Twelve
Emma saw the sadness clouding Jake’s expression when he returned to the barbecue after finishing his phone call.
His eyes met hers, and the well-masked but not-quite-hidden look of quiet torture on his face stole her breath. He’s been thinking about that night. How many times had she felt the way he looked? Like the nightmares didn’t realize they were off the clock once the sun was up.