Ava stuttered out a sigh. “I’m really sorry. I know it’s nearly ten, and you guys get up so early to open the bakery, but . . .”
Pete cut off her apology with a wave, leading her down the hall to his brightly lit kitchen. “Lily sleeps like a prizefighter going down for the count. She barely even budged when my cell phone rang. And I don’t care about the bakery.”
Ava’s lips parted over no sound, and her brother shook his head as he pulled a high-backed farmhouse chair from the table in invitation. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. Running the Sweet Life means a lot to me. It’s the career I always wanted. But it’s a place, Ava. People are more important.”
Hell if that didn’t prompt a fresh round of tears from her mutinous eyes.
“Yeah.” She slapped at her cheeks with the back of one hand, forcing herself to get it together as she tucked her legs beneath the cranberry-colored tablecloth. “I might’ve missed that memo.”
“I’m sorry.” Pete sat across from her, scrubbing a hand over his five o’clock shadow. “But I’m afraid you lost me.”
Ava inhaled a rickety breath, and exhaled the pocket version of her life’s events over the course of the past few weeks. While gabbing freely about her love life with her overprotective and under-restrained brother had never ranked particularly high on her list of sure-let’s-do-that, Ava hadn’t thought twice about calling him tonight. She’d done enough damage in the past by keeping her feelings inside, and she had to admit, Pete was a surprisingly good listener when he wanted to be.
“Jesus,” he murmured, blowing out a slow breath across the table. “What happened after he told you to leave?”
Ava slumped in her chair, but didn’t deny the truth. “Well, since my menu of options had exactly one crappy selection, I left. To be honest, it all happened really fast. I didn’t mean for him to find out the way he did.”
She’d been waiting to tell Brennan about the story—and Gary’s subsequent ultimatum—until after they left the Double Shot for the night. Upsetting him at work wouldn’t have helped matters, plus, she’d thought maybe if she had a little time to really think about it, she’d come up with some way to make things right.
But then she’d been so mired in looking for a Hail Mary in that damned report that Brennan had taken her by surprise, and yeah . . .
Now they all knew the unhappy ending to that story.
Frowning, Pete eyeballed the fresh round of tears clinging to her lashes. “Do you want me to go down there and break his legs?”
Ava coughed out an involuntary laugh. Okay, so maybe Pete wasn’t entirely a calm, cool listener. “Thanks, I think, but no. If anyone deserves blame, it’s me.”
“I’m not sure that’s quite true.” Pete pushed back from the table, moving over to the stove with practiced, comfortable strides.
“Please.” Ava’s heart twisted against her breastbone, but it was past time to face the truth. “For the last two weeks, I’ve been writing a story about the one thing he’s been trying to hide for the last two and a half years. I should’ve told him.”
“Maybe. But you wanted to write the story to show him what he meant to you. Telling him would’ve defeated the purpose.”
Before Ava could open her mouth to argue, her brother gave her a dead-certain look that told her he knew of what he spoke. “Trust me on this one. Sometimes stories need to be shown. And you had no way of knowing everything that happened at that fire. You didn’t intend to hurt him.”
“I still stand by the story I wanted to tell. Brennan is . . .” Amazing. Courageous. Gone. “Worthy of the recognition,” she choked out. “But he went so far as to leave his hometown to try to get away from what happened there. And now everyone will know about his past.”
“Hmm. I’m no expert,” Pete said, pulling a carton of milk from the fridge, “but it seems to me that hiding from your past isn’t usually the best plan for coping with it. Especially if it’s tough.”
And didn’t they both know that firsthand? After all, leaving Philadelphia sure didn’t kill the demons that had been born there, either for her or her brother. Still . . . “Yeah, but he’s not some dirtbag covering up a scam or a scandal. Exposing him like this isn’t right.”
Pete tipped his head in a nonverbal okay, you’ve got me there. “What about your original article? The one you wrote before you knew about Mason? If you stand by it like you said, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing to let Gary run it.”
Ava’s mind clicked back to the piece she’d spent the last two weeks fitting together, bit by meticulous bit. “I do stand by it. Or I did. I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter anyway. Gary wants more sensationalism. He wants the dirty details of that fire front and center on page one, and he won’t settle for anything less.”
“Now there’s someone whose legs deserve to be broken. Asshole,” Pete muttered, sliding a deep-bellied coffee mug from the cupboard at his shoulder.
“Asshole or not, he’s got me by the hair. Either I write this article with all the gory particulars right there for the world to see, or he will.” The trembling she’d been able to keep at bay worked its way back into her chest, rising up to claim her voice as she continued.
“At least if I write it, there’s a chance I can help Brennan save a little face. Anything Gary churns out will be astronomically worse. Even if he has to work his ass off to get it done.”
At least she had a tiny bit of leverage there. It would take all of Gary’s questionable brainpower to get a story like this done in twenty-four hours from scratch. His code of ethics might be anorexic, but he still had to research and fact-check just like everyone else.
“What about Brennan?” Pete asked, coming back to the table with a mug in each hand.
Ava’s eyes filled with tears, and seriously, she was never going to get anything fixed with her idiot face leaking like this. “What about him?”
“Any chance he’ll hear you out once he’s calmed down?”
“No.” Her heart ached at the admission, but hating reality didn’t make it any less true. Or any less deserved. “I never meant to hurt him. But I still did. I only wanted to stay close to you and Lily, and to tell Nick’s story with integrity. He’s . . .” Her throat clenched, but she willed the words to life. “He deserves nothing less. I just didn’t know that telling it would do more harm than good.”
Her brother placed the mug full of milk and graham crackers in front of her at the table, fixing her with a bittersweet smile. “You’re always going to be close to me and Lily, Ava. We don’t need to be in the same place for that.”
Ava nodded. Despite the two years Brennan had spent in Pine Mountain, he and his sisters had slid right back into place as if the distance didn’t matter. And when family truly cared about each other, and loved each other no matter what, the distance really didn’t matter.
She and Pete were too close to let anything come between them.
“I know,” she whispered. “People are more important, right?”
“Now you’re catching on.”
Ava dropped her chin, and not even the spicy-sweet scent of warm cinnamon and rich milk could comfort the ragged hole in her heart. “I just wish I’d slowed down long enough to realize that before it was too late.”
Pete leaned in to kiss the crown of her head. “You’ll find an answer with this article. You always respect the story in front of you.”
The words trickled into her brain, and God, that phrase was so familiar.... “Say that again?”
“What? You’ll find an answer with this article?”
Ava cranked her eyes shut, grasping at voices, memories. “No. The other part.”
“Oh. You always respect the story,” her brother said. “I mean, I know your choices for this one kind of suck, but . . .”
You respect the story. No matter what.
Ava’s memory kicked to life in a single, beautiful instant, and she stood up from the table in a rush of impulse and absolute certainty.
“My ch
oices might be difficult, but Brennan’s right. I do have them. And it’s far past time that I made the right call on this one, once and for all.”
Brennan had never wished for a crush of pre-New Year’s Eve revelers—or better yet, a raucous bachelor party for a double wedding—so hard in his life.
Of course, it was closing time, and the Double Shot was painfully empty. Just like every ounce of space in Brennan’s chest. Two days from now, everyone in Pine Mountain would know exactly who he was. His job. His secrets. His past.
And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
“Here.” Adrian’s voice delivered Brennan back to the Double Shot, the familiar clink of glass on wood snagging him back behind the bar.
“What’s this?” Brennan slid a skeptical stare at the two shot glasses full of whiskey lined up neatly across the wood, the half-full bottle of Crown Royal sitting next to them like a bookend with really bad intentions.
“For a bar manager, you kind of suck at this. But we can work on your skills later. Right now, you look like you could use a stiff drink.”
The words I’m fine spun up from the defenses long programmed into Brennan’s repertoire, but he bit them in half as he picked up one of the shot glasses. “You’re the boss.”
The whiskey burned a straight path from belly to balls, lighting up all five of his senses like the Fourth of July before settling in a hard tingle at the back of his neck.
Brennan shuddered in an effort to recalibrate. “Shit.”
“Yup.” Adrian placed his now-empty shot glass on the bar without missing a beat. “Teagan locked the front door on her way out, and Jesse just took off for the night. So are we talking about this?”
“No.” Bitterness that had nothing to do with the whiskey flooded his mouth, and hell—some defenses never died.
“Okay.” Adrian poured another round, but Brennan’s hand fell just short of the glass. As tempting as it was to literally drown his sorrows, he’d learned a long time ago that going numb didn’t take care of his problems.
Brennan paused. “There’s a lot of stuff you don’t know about me. It’s all going to hit the fan in a couple of days, and I’m not sure how it’ll play out.”
“Does it have anything to do with this?” Adrian held out a crumpled printout, the title blazing, RESCUE SQUAD HERO STARTS OVER IN PINE MOUNTAIN, and sweat dotted Brennan’s brow.
“Where did you get that?”
“I found it on the floor under Ava’s table after she left. Two minutes after you inventoried the walk-in. For the third time tonight.”
Ah, fuck. There was no sense in trying to get out of this now. Adrian was the most freakishly intuitive guy he knew. Except maybe for Captain Westin.
Brennan ran a finger around the shot glass, but opted for pouring himself a Coke instead. “I used to be a firefighter.”
“Something tells me that’s not quite past tense, considering how you pulled Matthew Wilson out of Joe’s Grocery a few weeks ago.”
“I was injured on the job,” Brennan said, although it was a hell of a sugarcoat. “And I left under bad circumstances. So, yeah. There’s no going back.”
“You know I respect you, right?” Adrian tossed back Brennan’s shot of whiskey without breaking eye contact, and Brennan nodded without thought.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Because you’re full of shit.”
“Excuse me?” Okay, so it wasn’t smart to pick a fight with a guy who had just done two rapid-fire shots of whiskey and was the size equivalent of a Sherman tank, but come on. Brennan couldn’t just leave that alone.
But rather than rise to the throw down in Brennan’s voice, Adrian softened both his stance and his tone. “Don’t get your shorts in a knot. I’m trying to help you.”
“It’s not working,” Brennan snapped, feeling like an instant dick. He amended, “I don’t think anything can help this now.”
“Christ, you are a pain in the ass.” Adrian shook his head, adjusting his black and silver Harley-Davidson baseball hat with one hand. “Did you even read this?”
“I don’t need to read it.” So much for not being a dick. “I lived through it once already.”
As loaded with emotion as Brennan’s words were, his buddy didn’t even blink. “Well, it looks like your story’s coming back for another round, like it or not. So the question isn’t whether you want people to know it.”
Adrian took the page off the bar, placing it between Brennan’s fingers.
“It’s how you’re going to change things so you can live with them the second time around.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Brennan’s eyes burned as if they’d been hand polished with lighter fluid and set out to dry in the midday sun. He parked himself at the last booth in Scarlett’s All-Night Diner and ordered a Coke, relearning the place with a couple of furtive glances. The restaurant had been standing at the corner of Fairview and Church since Brennan could remember. Between the laid-back atmosphere that felt like an old pair of jeans, its location two blocks from Station Eight, and the owner-slash-cook’s easy affinity for slinging together some of the most killer food on the eastern seaboard, Scarlett’s was a local favorite among firefighters.
“Well, well. You are a sight, son. I’ll give you that.” A familiar, raspy voice surfaced from two and a half years in Brennan’s memory banks, and hell if it wasn’t more comforting than anything else.
Damn. He’d missed this place.
Brennan stood, running a hand over his hair to no avail. Nothing short of a shower, a shave, and a hot date with a hairbrush could hide the three hours of sleep he’d put on top of the five-hour, middle of the night drive into town. “You don’t have to pretty it up, Captain.”
Captain Westin smiled, his light brown eyes crinkling into age lines at the corners. “Well, then. You look like shit, Brennan. But it’s still great to see you.”
He extended his hand, clapping Brennan on the shoulder as they shook, and shock rippled outward from Brennan’s gut. “Thanks. How are things?”
“Ah. Let’s see. My daughter, Zoe, is back in town, heading up a new program with the city. I love the girl, but she’s giving me more fits than any one man should have.”
The radio clipped to the thick strap on the shoulder of the captain’s uniform let out a crackle and squawk, and he reached up nonchalantly to listen first, then lower the volume. “And Chief Williams is passing a kidney stone over a sudden vacancy at the academy. One of his best instructors just up and ran off with a Vegas showgirl, which of course is now the problem of every captain in the city.”
“A showgirl, huh? That’s interesting,” Brennan ventured, but he knew both Chief Williams and the way things worked in the FFD well enough to know the score. Shit always rolled downhill in Fairview, and it picked up speed and velocity as it went.
“It’s a train wreck,” Captain Westin corrected, pausing to ask a passing server to fill the double-sized coffee cup he’d flipped over. “We’re rotating men from all three shifts over there as best we can, but you know how it is. Qualified instructors are hard to come by.”
Although Brennan had had a handful of great instructors at the academy, most guys who knew their shit and were jacked up about being firefighters were . . . well, firefighters. “Well, I know you’re on shift right now. Thanks for coming to see me.”
Captain Westin nodded, a quick dip of his gray blond head. “I heard your trip into town was a quick one. I’m sorry I missed you at Ellie’s wedding.”
Well, looked like they were going to get right to it, then. “Yeah. I’m sure Alex and Cole mentioned that we, ah, spoke.”
Firefighters might keep their opinions in-house, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have them. And from Alex’s no-bones-about-it confrontation, he’d looked to have enough for everyone at the station combined.
Westin said, “Two sides to every story. But I’ve told you that before.”
“Yes, sir.” Brennan took a deep breath, and—scr
ew it; Adrian was right. He’d come too far and hurt for too long to do this the wrong way twice. “Thing is, I’m thinking maybe my statute of limitations has run out on second chances.”
Captain Westin sat back, swirling his spoon through his cup of coffee even though he hadn’t added milk or sugar. “I pulled a copy of the official investigation report and showed it to Donovan and Everett the day after your sister’s wedding.”
Brennan’s glass hit the Formica tabletop with a clunk. “You . . . what?”
“First off, let me assure you that I still run a tight house with even tighter rules. As captain, it’s up to my discretion to share certain details with my men. I only do so when I deem it necessary, and this situation fit the circumstances.”
“But why would you do that now? It’s been two and a half years.”
“It has,” Captain Westin agreed. “And it’s been a long time since Cole or Alex has brought up what happened that night. But seeing you again changed that, and as captain of Station Eight, it’s my job to do whatever I need to in order to get my firefighters right. Losing a brother is a hard thing for all of us, Brennan.” He leaned in, his serious-as-hell stare paving the way for the words that followed. “But they didn’t lose one that night. They lost two, and it was far past time for them to know why.”
Brennan tried to swallow, but nothing got past the grief still lodged in his throat. “I didn’t think it would hurt anybody but me if I took the blame and disappeared.”
“I’ll tell you now what I told you then. Mason’s death was a tragedy, and there is no way around that. He was a good man, and he is sorely missed. But the golden rule is a tricky one when you only take it at face value. You’re a bit overdue to look past the surface, Brennan.”
All the breath vanished from the room as the sentiment that had pinned Brennan’s self-blame into place for two and a half years suddenly took on new meaning in his mind.
Above all, have each other’s backs.
Brennan had left Fairview to take the blame for Mason’s death, but he’d never stopped to think that Cole and Alex wouldn’t want him to. That they’d have his back if he told them what had happened.
All Wrapped Up (A Pine Mountain Novel) Page 28