by Layne, Ivy
“Rest up. If you need anything, call me, okay?”
“I will,” she promised.
Unable to resist, I tilted her face up to mine. Her eyes gazed past my ear, refusing to make contact, a faint flush coloring her cheeks. I hadn’t even kissed her and she was already warming to me, her body melting into mine, her tongue sneaking out to lick her lips.
Slow, I reminded myself.
I meant to listen. I did. But the second my mouth touched hers, I forgot all about slow. Her soft lips parted, her tongue shyly brushing mine, that little gasp of pleasure kerosene on the flame of my need. I was hungry for her, greedy, and her mouth met mine, just as greedy, with just as much raw need.
I could be rational, sensible when I didn’t have my hands on her. Now? With her breasts pressed to my chest, her hips rolling into me in a movement so instinctive I doubted she knew what she was doing—rational was out the window.
I was a breath away from throwing her over my shoulder and showing her how much pleasure I could give her when I realized she was shaking. A bolt of fear drowned my arousal. Had I scared her? Had she tried to stop me and I missed it?
No. Her eyes were glazed with lust, her body trembling. Not with fear, but with too much sensation.
She’s a virgin, you fuckhead, I reminded myself. What happened to slow?
She was responsive as hell, and she wanted me, but she had no clue how to handle what her body needed. I rubbed my palm roughly up and down her back with a long sigh. She shook against me, her face buried against my neck, cheeks hot on my skin.
“You okay?”
“A little tired and a lot freaked out,” she said with more honesty than I’d expected.
“You want me to stop kissing you?” I asked, my breath freezing in my lungs as soon as the question was out.
What if she said yes?
Her head shook in a negative. Thank fuck. I might have wept tears of frustrated disappointment if she’d said yes.
“You’ll tell me if it’s too much?”
A nod, and a deep, shuddering breath. “I’m sorry—”
“No,” I interrupted. “No apologies. Not about this. Never about this. I’m trying to take it slow. It’s just harder than I expected.”
A quirk at the side of her mouth as she pushed her body into me, pressing against my rock-hard erection. “Isn’t it supposed to be hard?”
My burst of laughter was as surprising as her saucy tease. “My cock? Yes. Taking it slow so I don’t scare you off? That should be a lot easier.”
“Is it usually?”
“Easier? Hell yes, Buttercup.” The almost-forgotten childhood endearment slid out naturally. “Control is not usually an issue for me. Not like this.”
“Then why is it hard with me?” she giggled.
“Fucked if I know, but it is. So fucking hard.” Another giggle. I rested my chin on the top of her head, absorbing the sound of her laughter. “I forgot I used to call you Buttercup. Do you still pick them and hold them under your chin to see the sunshine?”
“Not in a long time.”
“We’ll have a picnic when it warms up,” I promised, remembering all the times I’d found her in the wild of the woods, curled up against a tree trunk with a book in her lap, a bouquet of buttercups at her side. She’d loved the sunny flowers that grew in abundance in the fields of Heartstone Manor.
“Okay.”
With another squeeze of my arms, I let her go, more reluctant to leave her than I’d expected, especially after that kiss. “Rest. Take a nap, a bath, whatever. Text me if you’re up for dinner later. Otherwise, there’s some cans of soup and frozen pizza in the kitchen.”
Another “Okay,” and she was gone, grabbing her suitcase and disappearing into the first bedroom she came to. I got in the elevator and hit the button for Cooper’s floor, feeling like I’d left some essential part of myself behind with Hope.
Buttercup. How had I forgotten that? And if I’d forgotten calling her Buttercup, what else had I buried? I didn’t have time to figure it out before the elevator was spitting me out into Cooper’s foyer. Time to face the music. I was not ready for this.
I didn’t think I ever would be.
Chapter Eighteen
Griffen
They were all waiting for me. Cooper. Alice. Cooper’s brothers Evers and Knox. All wearing similar expressions of concern. Alice came forward to give me a hug, her arms strong despite her tiny frame. When she let go, she leaned around me, looking back at the closed elevator.
“Where is she?”
Of course, Alice was looking for Hope. “Taking a nap. She needs it after the last twenty-four hours.”
“You got married?”
“Yep.”
“You going to tell us why?”
“Because we’re in love, why else?”
“She didn’t know?” Cooper asked, handing me a cold beer and leading us to the big couches in his living room. Cooper was sharp. He might not know the details, but he knew I hadn’t married Hope of my own free will.
“She had no clue.” There was a lot I didn’t understand, but I was sure about that. Despite the shitty things I’d said earlier, I knew Hope was innocent in all of this.
“And your brother’s in jail? Did he do it?” Evers asked, bracing his foot on the table, curiosity in his ice-blue eyes. He was the youngest of the Sinclair brothers, the most like me in temperament. Easy going, charming, hard to ruffle.
Okay, I had to admit, Evers was more like me before I was shot. Post career-ending shoulder injury, I was a cranky bastard.
“No,” I answered. “No way Ford did it.”
“Huh. Isn’t he the asshole who got you kicked out of town and stole your fiancée?” Cooper asked. Alice’s head pinged between us, taking it all in. Cooper alone knew the whole story thanks to a bottle of tequila years ago on the anniversary of my would-be wedding.
“He is,” I admitted. Might as well get it all out there. “It was a long time ago. A lifetime.”
“It was her too, though, wasn’t it? Hope had something to do with it?” Alice only knew bits and pieces of the story, but she was good at putting things together. They all were.
I set my beer on the table and went for the bar at the side of the room. “I need something stronger than a beer. Anyone want anything?”
“Bring the bottle,” Knox said. Always a man of few words, Knox got right to the point. I grabbed the decanter and five glasses.
Knocking back a generous slug of Cooper’s excellent whiskey, I started at the beginning of the end. “We were going to elope. My father didn’t like Vanessa. We’d dated off and on all through college. Prentice always hated her. When I started talking about marriage, he said it wasn’t going to happen. I ignored him. Right around then there was a business he wanted to buy, thought it would fill a hole in our portfolio. The owner didn’t want to sell. Prentice was playing hardball. My brother Ford and I were trying to stop him, to find a way to fill the hole without stealing a man’s livelihood.”
“Did you two get along back then? You and Ford?” Alice asked, sipping delicately at her whiskey.
“Back then we did, yeah. Or I thought we did.” Bitterness crept in, leaving a sour taste in my mouth. I took another slug of whiskey to wash it away. It was a lifetime ago, I reminded myself.
“What did Hope have to do with anything?” Evers asked. “Was she an ex? Wasn’t she a little young for you?”
“Not an ex,” I corrected, remembering Hope back then. Gangly and coltish, she’d grown into her adult height but the rest of her hadn’t yet caught up. “She was sixteen. Just a kid.”
“That’s my point.” Evers’ eyebrow raised. “She was sixteen. You were twenty-two. Little young for you.”
“It wasn’t like that. She was always around because of her uncle Edgar, Prentice’s business partner
. We grew up together. She was a kid, but she was smart as hell and funny. She was kind. Hope had a way of seeing through the bullshit. She was… I don’t know, it sounds weird, but she was wise.” I shrugged a shoulder. “I liked talking to her.”
“It didn’t hurt that she had a crush on you,” Alice pointed out, reading between the lines.
“It wasn’t like that,” I protested. It hadn’t been. At least not for me. I knew she had a crush on me, and I was careful not to encourage it. I knew she felt like she was all grown up, but in my eyes, she was still very much a kid. “I never touched her. I swear. We were friends. She was the only one I told about the elopement, and she told her uncle, who told my father.”
“That’s it?” Alice asked. “She was a teenager who told a secret?”
I couldn’t keep the bitterness under wraps. It hadn’t been that simple. “Hope knew exactly what would happen. She was young, but she was smart. She knew my father almost as well as she knew her uncle. She knew he’d stop us.”
“Jealous,” Alice murmured to herself.
I raised my glass in a salute. “Exactly. One minute I think I’m getting married, and the next my father’s kicking me out—of the house, of the company—Vanessa is married to Ford, and I’ve got nothing but the clothes on my back. The whole fucking family just stood there. Ford played it off like I’d been trying to undermine that business deal on my own. He handed my father what he needed to force the owner to sell, making me look like I’d betrayed our father and Ford was the savior. Prentice bought it.”
“And no one said a thing?” Alice pressed. “They just let him throw you out?”
“No one,” I confirmed. Whiskey and memories clouded my mind, the truth slowly rising to the surface. “Except for Hope. Prentice made it into a production, introducing Ford and his bride to the family at the same time as he disinherited me. Fuckers didn’t even look guilty. Ford just kept smiling. But Hope started yelling at Prentice. I can’t remember what she said. He had her removed from the room, didn’t want her spoiling his big scene.”
There wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to erase the memory of my father and Ford’s twin smiles. Smug. Triumphant.
“Your father was a royal asshole,” Knox commented. Understated, as usual. I gave another bitter laugh.
“Yeah, and then some.”
“Sounds like Hope did you a favor,” he said.
I went still inside, instinctively recoiling at the idea any favors had been done in that clusterfuck. My entire life had been stolen from me. My future. My legacy.
“Kind of, yeah,” Alice agreed. “She got rid of the fiancée—because why would you want to marry a woman who ditched you for your brother? And Hope got you free of your father. Do you really wish you’d spent the last decade-and-a-half like that? With a woman who—let’s face it—didn’t love you. A brother who stabbed you in the back. A father who tossed you out just because he didn’t get his way. You were better off in the army and then here with us.”
“Alice has a point,” Cooper said. “You’re one of the best men I know, and you wouldn’t be that man if you’d stayed there. Would you?”
The change in perspective was bending my brain so far I thought it would break. I’d spent so long seeing myself as the victim, all this time focused on what they’d stolen from me. What Hope had stolen when she’d shared my secret.
Sure, I hated the rest of them, too. I was all about equal opportunity hate when it came to my family.
Hope was the only one who’d protested. She started it when she told my secret, but she’d tried to stop it. She’d stood up for me.
Had she stolen my future, or had she set me free?
What if I had married Vanessa? I tossed back the rest of my whiskey. That didn’t bear thinking about. I’d been a smart kid when it came to business, not so clever about women.
Vanessa was a viper. I hadn’t kept up with my family in the past decade and a half. I did know Ford had divorced her but not without her soaking him for a fortune in alimony.
“What makes you think it was Hope who spilled the beans?” Alice asked.
“She admitted it.” I’d never forget the guilt on her face. Guilt and apology. “I asked my father how he knew, and he pointed at Hope.”
“But surely, he must have known before she told her uncle,” Evers added. “The whole thing with the business deal, Vanessa marrying your brother. That didn’t all come from a sixteen-year-old’s gossip. It’s too orchestrated.”
“I looked into your father,” Cooper said. “He was not a man who’d miss someone fucking with his business. You were what? Twenty-two? Ford was twenty? You’re sharp, but I doubt you were clever enough to hide what you were up to. Especially if your brother was undermining you the whole time.”
Fuck. My brain was definitely going to break. They were right. Hope had been so easy to blame. So much guilt on her face as she’d wept, begging Prentice to reconsider.
I’d been so angry. So fucking angry. And terrified. All I’d known was my family.
I’d lived a life of luxury, walked right into my job with Sawyer Enterprises. I had no idea how to survive on my own, how to make my way in the world as myself, separate from the Sawyers.
I’d walked down the endless drive from Heartstone Manor to the main road shaking with fear and rage. Acting on instinct and desperation, I’d bummed a ride to the nearest army recruitment center and signed up.
It had been sheer luck that I’d taken to the army, had found Cooper and then Sinclair Security. By the time I was settled enough to think about what happened, looking back felt like a waste of time.
I poured more whiskey into my glass and drank, knowing I was getting drunk and not caring. Of all the places in the world, this one was safe. These people were the only family I’d known since I’d been cast from home, and they were better than anyone I’d left behind.
Except for Hope.
Fuck. Hope. All these years she’d carried so much guilt. And I had let her. I’d let her carry it alone. I’d left, hefting my anger and bitterness like luggage I carried through the years and never thought about what I’d left behind. Never thought about Hope, alone, with only Edgar to look out for her.
I stared into the dregs of my whiskey, trying to figure out what to do next. Apologize? Ask her to forgive me? And what about the rest of them?
I glanced up to see Cooper giving me an assessing look, seeming to understand that I’d had enough for now.
“Just what I love the most,” he said. “A drunk client who needs our help. Don’t think you’re getting a break just because you’re family.” He rubbed his hands together and snagged a folder I hadn’t noticed from the coffee table.
“Don’t get too excited about hosing me,” I said, tipsy but not yet drunk. “I’m taking Hawk. I need a groundskeeper and on-site security coordinator.”
“Fuck. He’ll be all over that. Thousands of acres of mountains to get lost in, plus formal gardens. You probably have a fucking greenhouse, too,” Evers grumbled.
“Yes, we do,” I said with a smug grin. Fucking house should be good for something.
“It’ll be good for him,” Knox added in a low voice.
It would, which was why the Sinclairs might bitch, but they wouldn’t mind if Hawk came back to Sawyers Bend with me. Hawk had been a Ranger with Evers and me, then gone black ops when we’d gotten out. No one knew what had happened, but he’d come to us five years before, a changed man.
Where he’d always been quiet, now he rarely spoke. Quick to anger, he had trouble sleeping, spending hours with his hands in the dirt to soothe whatever ate at him.
He knew more about plants than anyone I’d ever met. What he didn’t know, he’d learn. He might not be the most qualified for the groundskeeper position, but when I added in his other skills, he was the only man for the job.
We dug into the securi
ty plans, me adding to the layout of the property Cooper and his brothers had pulled together since my phone call, tweaking here and there. If Harvey didn’t approve the initial budget I’d add to it out of my own funds. I wasn’t installing Hope in Heartstone Manor unless I could assure her safety.
Someone called for pizza. Alice refilled my whiskey glass, winking and cracking a joke about padding the invoice. For the first time in years, I felt ever-so-slightly on the outside. The Sinclair brothers were almost identical. Cooper and Knox were more heavily muscled than Evers. Evers shared their other brother Axel’s ice-blue eyes while Cooper and Knox’s were so dark-brown they were almost black. Those minor differences aside, they almost could have been triplets, and they worked together with the ease of years as partners as well as a lifetime as siblings.
Nothing like my family. Ford and I had once been two peas in a pod, almost identical in looks except for his dark hair to my blond. With so many different mothers, even Prentice’s dominant genetics couldn’t overcome the variation among the assorted Sawyer children. We didn’t look alike. We didn’t act alike. And for fifteen years, we’d had absolutely nothing in common. A part of me wanted to grab Hope and run from the whole fucking mess.
Grab Hope? Shouldn’t I be leaving her behind?
No. I wasn’t leaving Hope behind, and I was done lying to myself. Hope was the only good thing that had come of my father dying and saddling me with his will.
I was more than tipsy, not quite drunk, when I made my way downstairs to find Hope fast asleep in the only bed in Alice’s former apartment. A better man might have taken the couch. Without the whiskey, I might have been that man, but I doubted it.
If it had been any other woman sprawled between those soft white sheets I could have talked myself into the couch. In the dim light from the bathroom, her hair spilled across the pillow, her skin warm cream against the cool white sheets, tiny spots of freckles across the back of her shoulders barely visible.
For a heart-stopping moment, I saw all that skin and thought she was naked. Ever unruly in the presence of a grown-up Hope, my cock came to life, not dissuaded when I spotted the narrow straps holding up her nightgown.