“It wasn’t small-time to your neighbor,” Ava argued, slipping in next to him to give him a playful nudge. “Marissa said some of those candlesticks were family heirlooms.”
“I don’t even know that the guy would’ve had the smarts to steal them. It all turned out fine,” he said, nudging her back before sliding his fingers through hers. While he’d always shied away from the retelling of that story—all he’d really done was grab the guy and hold tight for seven minutes until the cops got there—it definitely wasn’t the worst thing his sisters could’ve pulled out of the archive. Plus, sharing stories with Ava was different from airing them out with the entire universe. She didn’t just listen, although the genuine interest with which she heard him out always put him more at ease.
Ava saw him. She fit into his life, even the crazy and difficult parts, and she got him.
To the point that he thought maybe, finally, he might be able to forget the rest of his past and move forward with her.
“You’re pretty incredible, you know that?” Ava nestled in next to him to place their entwined hands over her outstretched leg, and Brennan chuffed out a laugh.
“Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you.”
“Come on. You nab candlestick thieves and save kittens from trees. You’re a regular hero.”
His muscles stiffened without permission from his brain, but Brennan tugged in a deep inhale to offset the squeeze. “That’s kind of a stretch. And the kitten thing was just part of my job.”
“I know,” she said, her tone marking the words as the truth. “But that job is part of who you are. You’ve got to have a certain brand of dedication to be a good firefighter. You even said that yourself.”
“I’m not a firefighter anymore, Ava.” And in the end, his actions had erased any hint of good from his résumé.
“Yes, Nick. You are.” Her palm slid over the front of his sweatshirt, coming to a stop over his slamming heart. “Right here, where it matters, you are. And I know that having been hurt makes this hard for you. But you’re a good person, with a good story. It’s not so bad to let that be a part of you.”
She slipped her arms around him, fitting herself against him hip to hip, head to shoulder, and the simplicity of how right she felt canceled out the blowback of her words. Their breath melted together with the far-off sounds of his family in the rest of the house, the soft light and brisk scent of the Christmas tree, the familiar comfort of a home he’d truly missed. But rather than mash back all the emotion bubbling beneath the steely surface he’d created to keep it in, Brennan inhaled, true and deep for the first time in two and a half years.
Ava saw him. She got him. And even if he didn’t know it on his own, when she told him he was worthy, he believed it was true.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ava propped her elbow against the elegant stretch of the brass and mahogany bar at her side with a smile she felt all the way to her four-inch heels. She’d been on her own for the last couple of hours, with Brennan and his immediate family all involved in wedding party duties leading up to the ceremony, then picking up right where they left off after Josh and Ellie’s I do’s. But being in the church with his family, sharing all their joy and helping out with small tasks whenever needed, had sent an unexpected shot of warmth all the way through her chest.
While her old friend Nadine’s family had invited Ava to spend Christmases with them in Pine Mountain, she’d always felt just one step outside the family circle when it came to the festivities. But from the minute he’d scooped up her hand in his parents’ front hallway yesterday, Brennan’s family had naturally folded Ava in, as if there was not only room for her, but the day wouldn’t be quite the same without her there. When Ellie had snuck an excited grin-and-wave combo at Ava from the back of the church, then when Josh broke protocol to meet Ellie partway down the aisle because he just couldn’t wait any longer, their pure, radiant excitement slipped past Ava’s cynical safety net to nestle directly into her heart.
But it wasn’t until Brennan locked eyes with her at regular intervals during the ceremony, twining their gazes over a smile that read are you okay out there? that the comfort in her heart became the foundation for something far, far deeper.
She hadn’t just felt invited. She’d felt necessary. Treasured.
Loved.
“Bride or groom?” A smooth, masculine voice delivered Ava right back to the luxurious reception room on Planet Country Club, and holy GQ model on a stick, the guy in front of her was blond-haired, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered gorgeous.
Even if his demeanor shouted loud and freaking clear that he knew it.
“Oh! Um, bride.” Ava slid her fingers around her glass of club soda, grip going slightly tighter on the hand-cut crystal as GQ ordered a Jameson on the rocks. “You?”
Was it her imagination, or did those Caribbean blue eyes just go a shade colder at the innocuous question? “Groom. I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Alex Donovan.”
“Ava Mancuso,” she said, offering her hand for a perfunctory shake. “It’s nice to meet you, Alex.”
His smile amped up like a toothpaste ad on steroids, although it seemed more cocky-guy playful than cheesy or menacing. “Pleasure’s mine, I assure you. Sorry if I snuck up on you a bit. It didn’t seem polite to let you stand here by yourself when everyone else is mingling, but if you’d rather not have company . . .”
Ava sent a furtive glance through the crowd, zeroing in on the wide hallway leading out to the grand foyer. The occasional silvery flash filtering in over the paneled wood walls told Ava that Brennan was still knee deep in family photos. Holding her own with a little small talk wasn’t the worst thing in the universe, and cocksure demeanor aside, Alex seemed nice enough.
“Not at all. This place is so beautiful, I guess you just caught me daydreaming a little.”
“Not necessarily a bad thing.” He paused to give the bartender a thank-you nod at the delivery of his drink, swishing the ice cubes around with a muted clink. “So tell me, Ava. What do you do? Besides daydream, I mean.”
She had to hand it to him. The charm was something else. “I’m a newspaper reporter.”
Well, that took the edge off his smirk. “Not here in Fairview,” Alex said, covering his brows-up surprise with a sip of his drink.
Ava fought back a shudder at the hard-edged scent of the whiskey, her curiosity triple-timing through her veins. “No, but how did you know that? Do you work for the Sentinel?” She’d read dozens of articles in the Fairview Sentinel’s archives. Just because she didn’t recall Alex’s name in a byline didn’t mean he didn’t have one.
But his laughter answered the question even before he backed it up with words. “No, I don’t think I’d make a very good story jockey.”
Right. Come to think of it, she should’ve guessed as much from his callused handshake. “It’s definitely one of those professions you’ve got to be made for.”
“Now you’re singing my tune. What’s your home paper?”
“I write for the Riverside Daily. It’s a smaller publication based out of the Blue Ridge Mountains.”
“You live in the Blue Ridge?” His shoulders jacked up into a hard line beneath his charcoal gray suit jacket, and he took a more substantial sip of his drink before setting it down on the gleaming stretch of the bar.
“Ever since I graduated college,” she said, confusion narrowing her stare. Why would her current home take such a swipe at his expression?
“And how is it that you know Ellie Brennan, living all the way out there in the mountains when she’s lived here in Fairview for her entire life?”
Nope. No way. His smile had done a one-eighty too quickly, and she knew fishing-for-info questions when she heard them. She was a reporter, for Chrissake.
“I’m here with her brother, Nick. How is it that you know Josh?”
Alex tossed back the remainder of the amber liquid in his glass before lifting his chin at the bartender for a replacement. “We
play in the same softball league. Josh plays for his law firm, and I’m on the team where I work.”
“And that is . . . ?”
“Fairview Fire Department. Station Eight.”
Ava’s heart crash-landed somewhere around her kneecaps before springing back up to a defensive position in her chest. “So you know Nick well, then.”
Alex’s laugh came out covered in barbed wire, edgy and sharp, and it matched the whiskey on his breath as he leaned in toward her with a humorless smile. “Better than you do, I’d bet.”
Just like that, Ava’s impulse control left the building, and she smiled back with every one of her teeth. “Don’t put your money down on something you know nothing about.”
To anyone casually chatting around them, they likely looked like just another couple socializing during cocktail hour. But even though Ava would never dare to make a scene at Ellie’s wedding reception, she also wasn’t going to field any attitude from some guy she’d barely met.
“I think that lack of knowledge is a two-way street, sweetheart,” Alex said, although his brows-up expression was back with a vengeance. Before she could pop back with exactly what she thought, another guy arrived at the bar, splitting his olive green gaze between them.
“Hey, Teflon. You’re looking a little serious for your surroundings. You okay?”
Alex’s laugh was more of an ironic snap as he took a step back to gesture formally in her direction. “Oh, I’m great. Just chatting it up here with Brennan’s girlfriend, Ava.”
The new guy’s exhale translated to a nonverbal well, that explains a lot. Still, he extended a hand in polite greeting. “Cole Everett.”
She took it, although warily. “Let me guess. Station Eight?”
He nodded, one economical rise and fall of his light brown crew cut. “For the last eight years. Alex and I came up in the class before Brennan. It’s . . . been a while since we’ve seen him.”
“I get the feeling that’s on purpose.” Ava’s cheeks prickled with heat at the thought.
“It’s complicated,” Cole countered, cutting off whatever Alex looked eager to add by tacking on, “And not the right place or the right time to air this out.”
Alex mumbled something about it being far past time, but then he softened his scowl at Ava. “Look, you seem like a smart woman. All I’m saying is, you might want to look long and hard at the company you keep.”
Seriously? All this posturing over an injury? What the hell?
She was putting an end to this, right now. “I am a smart woman, and I like keeping company with Brennan just fine.” Ava planted her black patent leather heels into the floorboards and stood up as tall as her spine would allow. “What I don’t like are arrogant, life-sized Ken dolls whose special of the day is to kick a good man when he’s down.”
“A good man,” Alex said, low and bitter. “Is that what he told you?”
“It’s what I know,” she countered, making sure both Alex and Cole saw it in her stare.
“In my book, a good man looks out for his own. So maybe you should get the whole story on your man, directly from the source.” Alex’s bright blue eyes met hers and held for just a breath before he shifted to look over her shoulder.
“What do you say, Brennan? You up for telling your girlfriend the truth?”
Brennan’s back muscles seized in conjunction with his lungs, making both movement and breath impossible as Alex stared him down through the soft lighting in the cocktail lounge. Ava swung around on a gasp, her wide eyes still full of the conviction he’d overheard her leveling at Alex.
Conviction he was about to turn into a pile of ash. Christ, how could he have let her think he was in any way decent? What’s more, how could he have thought he’d escape a return to Fairview without an in-your-face reality check?
His best friend had been buried under three stories’ worth of burning rubble because Brennan had been impulsive. Overconfident.
Wrong.
“We’re not doing this here,” Cole murmured, sending a pointed look around the guest-filled room. It was just like the guy to be a traditionalist and stick to the unspoken rule that firefighters dealt with their laundry in-house, no matter how dirty. Only problem was, Brennan didn’t have a house. And he sure as hell couldn’t go back to Eight. He hadn’t been there since the night of the fire.
No matter how desperately he ached to put his feet on the path leading back to that firehouse, if only to take what he knew he had coming, he couldn’t. Brennan had made the decision to lead Mason out of that stairwell for one final sweep to find that kid. He’d known it was a risk, that the fire was fully involved with the potential to come crashing down around them.
Brennan had forfeited his right for forgiveness when he’d kicked in that door anyway. Now what he needed was to smash that night back into the dirty little hole in his chest and get the fuck out of here.
“There’s nothing to do,” Brennan finally managed, the words scraping his throat raw on their way out. He turned on his heel, heartbeat sledgehammering through every last pulse point in his body, when Donovan’s reply nailed him right between his shoulder blades.
“Go ahead and keep walking away like always, Brennan. Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
Before he could even process the fact that he’d moved, Brennan wheeled back around, his emotions becoming the air in his lungs as he lowered his voice with deadly intention.
“You think I sleep at night? That I don’t replay what happened at that fire on a continuous goddamn loop in my head? I haven’t slept for the last two and a half years, Donovan. I doubt I ever will.”
Cole moved forward, placing himself between Brennan and Alex as he took a few steps toward a more private alcove beside the bar. “Look, we were all rattled by what happened, and there are some things that never got resolved. But—”
“But nothing,” Alex interrupted, irritation rolling off his frame in waves. “You’re really going to boil it down to something that simple? Let’s not sprinkle sugar on this bullshit just so we can call it candy.”
Cole’s brows winged upward, and oh hell. Just what they needed was for the calmest guy in the house to get pissy. “I’m not downplaying any of what happened.” The look on his face dared Alex to argue, which he didn’t. Unfortunately for Brennan, Cole also didn’t back off the subject. “But clearly there’s a lot left unsaid.”
Dread leaked through Brennan’s limbs, his palms going slick as he curled them into fists. “What do you want me to tell you?”
Alex jumped into the answer with both feet first. “How about that you fucked up, and because of that, we lost one of our own? We’re supposed to have each other’s backs, Brennan. All the time.”
Just like that, all the grief and anger and blame that Brennan had clutched inside himself for two and a half years came slashing to the surface.
“Do you think I don’t know that? I was there! I wasn’t just on scene, or in another part of that apartment building. I was there, right goddamn next to him when that floor collapsed. I made that call. I led the way, and I’m the one who got hauled out on a stretcher instead of in a body bag.”
Cole opened his mouth, stepping forward with concern etched hard around his eyes, but the words kept barging past Brennan’s lips without his brain’s consent.
“You want me to tell you what I told the investigators? That I’d never seen a fire that brutal in my life, that I thought there was a kid trapped inside?” Damn it, he heard the terror in that mother’s voice every single night, felt the weight of it every time pain shot through his back.
He barreled on. “Or do you want me to tell you that Captain Westin called the fire only seconds after we finished our sweep, and we were turning around to fall out when the floor caved in?”
Memories hurled themselves through Brennan’s mind, as vivid and real as if they’d happened a minute ago, even though he’d kept them hidden for so long.
“I made a judgment call to go down that hallway to loo
k for that kid. I knew the risk, and I took it. I’d love to tell you that what I did is killing me, but it isn’t. I get to drag myself out of bed every damn day, and instead, what I did killed someone else.”
Grief clawed all the way through Brennan, spilling over everything inside the way it had for the last two and a half years.
“And I’m going to live with that for the rest of my fucking life.”
This time when he turned to walk away from Alex and Cole, he didn’t look back.
It wasn’t until Brennan got all the way through the lobby, past the set of heavy oak doors and onto the frozen sidewalk beyond them, that he realized Ava had been right behind him the whole time.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Brennan, wait.”
Ava’s voice slid past the waves of emotion doing a spin-cycle through his gut, but Brennan was too far gone to turn her words into anything that would stop his one-way trip down the sidewalk and all the way back to Pine Mountain.
Her footsteps quickened, heels sounding against the pavement in a rapid-fire clack-clack-clack, and she planted herself in front of him, gentle but unmoving. “Wait.”
He stopped, bracing himself for the onslaught of her questions. But instead, Ava just reached up to cup his face with both palms, guiding his eyes to the anchor of her clear, green gaze.
“I’m going to tell Ellie you’re not feeling well, and that I’m taking you back to the hotel.”
Shit. Ellie’s wedding reception. Jesus, he was the worst brother in the history of siblings for ditching out on his sister’s celebration.
The sentiment must’ve been plastered all over his face, because Ava pressed up to her toes, keeping her no-nonsense stare level with his. “She’ll understand, and you already did the pictures. I just don’t want her to worry.”
All Wrapped Up (A Pine Mountain Novel) Page 24