Build it Strong (The Ballard Brothers of Darling Bay Book 2)

by Rachael Herron

  “I think I just heard my biological clock.” God, it sounded even worse when he said it out loud.

  And sure enough, she laughed. “Men have those? Can you hear it ticking?”

  “Maybe. Do you hear yours?”

  She shook her head. “We’re not talking about me. This is about you. I’ve never heard a man say that. What does it sound like?”

  Aidan took a breath and swallowed his mild embarrassment. “It’s more like a tickle than a ticking. I look at kids in the grocery store and I imagine them with my ears. Or with their mother’s mouth.” He couldn’t help looking at Tuesday’s lips. “Just think of it—two people love each other so much—”

  “You sound like a commercial for a sex education book.”

  He wouldn’t rise to her teasing, though. He was completely serious. “Two people in love making another person in their likeness?”

  “How godlike.” Her tone was gently mocking.

  “How fucking incredible.”

  Tuesday stared at him. “You’re totally serious.”

  “Dead serious. I don’t think there’s anything more important a person can do than bear children and raise them to be good human beings, loved and safe.”

  “Oh.”

  Was her tone disappointed? Worried? He took another deep breath and then asked the question that was suddenly so important it hurt the back of his lungs to hold it in any longer. “Do you want kids?”

  Chapter 25

  H

  is eyes were so bright, so hopeful, that Tuesday couldn’t bear to see the light in them dimmed. She wanted him to stay like this. She didn’t mean to lie. It just came out. “Of course. I love kids.”

  The funny thing was that it didn’t even feel like a lie. It was what she’d said for most of her life, after all. She had wanted kids. Desperately.

  But now? It was just that—a lie. And he’d just talked about telling the truth… She should take it back—correct herself, right now.

  The grin on his face stopped her. God, he looked so happy. “Of course you do. You’re a teacher.” He tangled his feet with hers, and suddenly their lower limbs were pressing against each other.

  If that kept happening, only one thing would follow.

  So she sat up. “Yep. Hey, do you think we should pack up and find the camera crew?”

  “Probably.” He nodded lazily, and a stray shaft of sunlight landed on his face. His stubble was lighter than his hair, almost blond against his tanned face. He’d put on his jeans when she’d tugged on her clothes, but he was still shirtless. Cords of muscle knotted at his bicep, at his shoulder.

  “Roll over?”

  Without asking why, he did.

  She touched the falcon that soared across his shoulder blades, tracing the blue ink down along his spine.

  “Why a falcon?”

  “It’s a replica of a falcon painted on the face of a clock Bill had.”

  He was so strong.

  And beautiful.

  Tuesday was neither.

  God, he’d seen her scar—had touched it, every red ripple and disgusting ridge. She hunched as she tugged her shirt lower.

  “Wait.” He reached forward, the very tips of his fingers dipping under the hem of her shirt and brushing the scar where it disappeared into her jeans. “Tell me.”

  “Nah, that’s okay.” As if he’d offered her more water.

  “Tuesday?” He sat up, too, his cut abs tightening as he did. Was there not an inch of fat anywhere on the man’s body? “You can talk to me.”

  She could. That was the problem. She really did feel like she could talk to him, but that wasn’t what she needed.

  She needed a home.

  She needed quiet.

  She needed time.

  To heal. To think. To mourn the loss she’d just lied to him about.

  She’d made him think she could have children.

  What a joke. “Let’s just pack it up for the day.”

  He caught her hand and twisted his fingers lightly with hers. “I just admitted I had a crush on a whole family. I wanted to steal them as a whole. I want your house because of it. That’s kind of messed up. Won’t you tell me your secret?”

  A blast of energy, sharp and prickly, ran from the top of her head right down to her toes. She wanted to tell him. “Put on your shirt, at least.”

  He grinned. “I’m distracting you?”

  She wouldn’t admit it. Don’t say it. “Yes.” Crap. But at least she was capable of telling him the truth still. About some things.

  While Aidan pulled on his shirt, she put on her shoes. She tugged her hair back with the rubber band at her wrist, and she found her glasses, still perched carefully on the stump where she’d placed them.

  With her glasses on, she felt stronger. And she could see farther than the two feet separating their bodies—the whole glen came into focus. The water sparkled, a brown bird hopped at the edge of a wide gray rock, and the eucalyptus bent and swayed as if the whole world were moving. The air smelled fresh and damp.

  Hopeful.

  Aidan crossed his legs and leaned forward. Without ceremony, he caught her chin in his hand, and kissed her. It was a satisfied kiss, and a happy one.

  The kiss made her feel stronger.

  “Go,” he said. “Lay it on me.”

  She shrugged. “Just your every day run-of-the-mill car accident.”

  “What happened?”

  “I took a right turn. I had the green light, and—” this was usually as far as she could get without crying, but this time the lump stayed low in her throat. “I didn’t check to the left. A minivan blew the light, and whomped into my car.” Her fault. She had the green, yeah. She’d been awarded the settlement, yes. But forever she’d know it was her fault for not simply turning her head to the left to check for traffic.

  “Were you alone?”

  He would be smart enough to ask that. “No.” Now her voice broke, and she hated herself that much more violently.

  “Who were you with?”

  “Two kids from school. Identical twin girls.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Yeah. Teachers weren’t supposed to drive kids home. It was against every rule in the book, for good reason. For this reason. But Maddee and Maggee were the twin daughters of her best friend. Diana’d had the flu, a bad case with a high fever, and her husband was out of town. Tuesday had texted Diana. I was going to bring you hot and sour soup. Want me to drive the girls home so you don’t have to get out of bed?

  She’d done it before. Maddee and Maggee liked being in her small electric car. They liked how quiet it was, how you could barely hear it when it was running.

  Until the minivan crashed into them.

  It had been the loudest thing Tuesday had ever heard in her life.

  “Were they okay?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Tuesday.”

  She liked the way he said her name. As if he wanted to fix something about the situation. If only he could. “No one died, don’t worry.” Sometimes she wished she had. “But Maddee’s spine was broken. She’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. And Maggee’s face was slashed by a spring in the seat in front of her. Even though the surgeon was good—the best—her face will always be a little different.”

  He got it immediately. “Than her sister’s face.”

  “Yeah.” Diana’s daughters would never be twins again. One would be low to the ground, wheels for legs. They didn’t even have the comfort of having identical faces anymore. “They were the kind of twins who loved their twinship. Every day, they insisted on dressing the same. They loved fooling people.”

  “Did they ever fool you?”

  Tuesday shook her head. “I was so proud of that. I think they loved me for it. I’d known them since they were babies, of course, and I’d always been able to tell them apart. Something in the way they said their words. Maggee’s voice was always just about half a pitch lower, and the way Maddee giggled was
a little bit faster.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. In horror? Was he wishing he were somewhere else? Then he opened them, and in his gaze was something that made Tuesday feel at once thoroughly warmed and at the same time completely terrified. “It was an accident.”

  How many times had she heard from her parents? “I know that.”

  “There’s a saying about accidents. They happen.”

  Did he think he was going to fix this? Because nothing could. “It was an accident, I know. I hadn’t planned on allowing the steering wheel to shred me internally. I didn’t mean to maim my best friend’s kids for life. But it was still my fault. I didn’t look left.”

  “You can’t let yourself think like that.”

  Oh, really? “I wasn’t paying attention. And that’s the thing—I’m the kind of person who always pays attention. To everything. But not that day. If I’d looked left when the light turned green, I wouldn’t have pulled forward.”

  Aidan shook his head. “You might have anyway.”

  “What?” He didn’t get to say that.

  But apparently he thought he could. “We’ll never know what might have happened if things were different. The minivan ran into you, right? That’s like saying it’s your fault that you left the school at the wrong time. If you’d just gone to the bathroom before you left, everything would be different.”

  She’d had to pee before she left the school, actually, but she’d been so intent on getting to the Chinese restaurant for soup and getting the girls home that she’d been planning to go at Diana’s. Yeah, that made it her fault twice over.

  Instead of stopping at the bathroom at school, she’d woken up in the hospital, tubes in her arms, to find EMTs cutting off her pants soaked with blood and urine.

  “Enough.” She stood.

  “I’m sorry.” Aidan jumped to his feet, too. “How are you and your best friend now?”

  Tuesday laughed, but it sounded like paper crinkling in her throat. “We aren’t.”

  “She won’t talk to you?”

  “Worse. She said she would.” It had been a bottomless pit of pain. Diana’s pinched white face, saying It’s okay. It was an accident. Of course I forgive you. “I can’t stop thinking that what she really wanted to say was that she couldn’t forgive me, that I couldn’t see her or the kids again. But it’s Minnesota. You don’t say that. We were practically family.” God, it felt dumb to say out loud. It was the PTSD talking, that’s what her therapist had said. Her therapist had said she needed to accept Diana’s words for what they were, to not overanalyze them. Not martyr herself to what she thought Diana had been feeling.

  Instead, Tuesday just kept writing the email that she would probably never send.

  Aidan said, “So the only way out was out of town.”

  “Her kids would have been in my class in a year.”

  “Oh.” Aidan winced.

  “You know, I’ve been writing her an email for months? The longest email in the world, in which I say everything I would have told her if we were still talking. Sometimes I can’t stop typing it. I stay up too late writing, and writing more is the first thing I do when I wake up. It’s in my Drafts folder.” I told her about you. I told her everything.

  “I bet that hurts.”

  It felt good to to hear that. “Yeah. But less than not talking to her at all.”

  “What if…never mind.”

  “What?”

  “What if she really did forgive you? What if she wants to talk to you, too?”

  Tuesday shook her head. “No.”

  “I’m sure you’ve had all these thoughts. You don’t need my input.”

  “Anyway,” she said brightly, “that’s where the blood money came from. The other driver’s insurance paid for everything, a couple of million for each kid, and I got almost a million. Enough to buy this old house and start over.”

  He looked jarred, his jaw tightening. Was he disgusted by where her money came from? But he only said, “At its base level, though, it was just an accident.”

  An accident she’d caused. Nausea rose in her windpipe. “I know. In my heart I know that. It’s just—how could she explain this to him? “I’ve spent my life watching out for things. Paying attention. But then I missed that car coming. I was driving the car in which the kids I loved got hurt. I’ve been trying to work through it—to get to a place of forgiveness, I guess—but then every time I do, I hear something loud that trips my brain right back into the feeling. Or I smell the burning plastic scent that blew into the car when the firefighters cut the door off.”

  “PTSD.”

  Tuesday shook her head, frustrated with herself. “Yeah. I’ve got a shrink and everything. Or I had one, anyway. I’ve got workbooks and journaling prompts. I’ve got support. But instead of getting better, I cut off my best friend and ran away.”

  “What if you just call her? Or text her?”

  That was the thing, everyone had good, easy solutions. But no one else lived in her body. No one else felt the panic creep up her throat, they couldn’t see the blackness that slipped in front of her eyes. “I know. I want to fix it, to fix us, but first I have to fix myself.”

  “How?”

  Tuesday felt tears spring up behind her eyes, and she couldn’t—she just couldn’t do this. She would figure it out. Somehow. She had to. “I—oh, God. Do you mind if…? I’m going up to the house.” The sounds of hammering had been filtering down the hill the whole time they’d been in the spring area. There would surely be someone on the crew, either construction or camera, who could take her back to the Cat’s Claw. Later. When she’d finished shaking.

  She was fast on her feet, and she left his voice calling behind her.

  The gate slammed behind her. It sounded like something falling out of the sky, and she only barely kept her whole body from flying apart.

  Chapter 26

  F

  elicia was standing on the back deck as Tuesday walked up through the overgrown garden.

  “There you are. Oh, my God.” Felicia rushed down the steps. “Are you okay?”

  At least Aidan hadn’t asked her that, hadn’t said what she’d been sure he was going to say, What about you? What about your scar? Were you hurt inside anywhere?

  People didn’t usually ask this. They didn’t want to know. Not when faced with the red rigidity of her scar. She’d learned that over the summer, the one time she’d gone to the beach with her parents. There on the shore of Lake Superior, she’d watched people first wince, then gird themselves, then smile up into her eyes cheerfully. As if it were nothing but a tattoo, not worthy of mention.

  It had been awful.

  She hadn’t wanted them to mention anything. Yet she had. When people said nothing at all, it felt like a lie. A huge one.

  Like the lie she’d kind of told Aidan when she said she wanted kids. She was an idiot. There probably wasn’t therapy in the whole world that could help with that.

  Felicia was still staring at her expectantly.

  “We’re fine. We landed and then went for a swim.”

  “Anna, I’ve got them back at the house.” Felicia spoke into a walkie-talkie.

  “Copy.”

  “And you’re okay?” Felicia was still looking her up and down. She craned her neck to look behind her. Aidan was just coming up the hill, taking long strides, the backpack over his shoulder and the blanket draped around his neck. “You guys had a date? Off camera?”

  “The revolution will not be televised.”

  Felicia threw her arms up in the air. “That’s the whole point. It has to be televised. I thought you’d both crashed and died!”

  Aidan was close enough now to interrupt. “You did not. We had the cams on when we landed.”

  Felicia put her hands on her hips. “Okay. But. You owe me.”

  Anna came running around the side of the house, camera in hand. The sound guy was right behind her.

  Aidan said, “Okay, to make it up for you, what do you wa
nt?”

  “No, Aidan.” Tuesday shook her head. “It’s fine.”

  Felicia, though, nodded emphatically. “A kiss. A good one.”

  Tuesday winced. As if there was any other kind of kiss with this man. “Seriously?”

  “I just made her run away from me. I guess kissing me isn’t the best idea.”

  No, she’d run away from herself. “It’s not the worst idea.”

  “Oh! Well, okay!” There was a sweet, funny lilt in his last word, and his eyes darkened as he set the backpack down on the ground and stood in front of her.

  He smiled into her eyes. Tuesday forgot the camera, forgot Felicia was practically rubbing her hands together in glee.

  With one strong hand, Aidan tilted her chin.

  He leaned down.

  Before he could kiss her, Tuesday sprang upward, on tiptoe. She planted a very swift kiss on his lips, before dropping back down to her heels again. “There,” she started to say, turning—

  Aidan caught her, first by one hand, then the other. He pulled her against him, threading her arms around his waist, and his mouth was on hers. She lost her breath and she was pretty sure that all the oxygen had left the atmosphere because she sure as hell couldn’t find any. His mouth was hot, and it was life, and the way he tasted made her feel as if she’d never get enough of him—he was exactly what she needed, and the more she took of the kiss, the more she wanted. The world fell away like it had when they’d lifted off, hours before, and there was nothing but this kiss, this man, this moment.

  He drew away, and she sighed, wobbling forward. She had to balance herself on his chest, and he smiled down into her eyes.

  Oh, God.

  She had it bad.

  In the far distance, she heard a happy laugh, and when she turned her head, Felicia was clapping in delight. “Yes, yes, yes. You got that, Anna?”

  Anna’s own cheeks were pink. “I did. I think the camera lens fogged up, though, so we might have to do it again.”

  Tuesday’s cell rang in her pocket. She pulled it out. “Crap. It’s my mother.” Tuesday moved away to answer. “I’m here.”

  “Where’s here, darling?”