by Amy Olle
A wide smile split Aiden’s face. He had a nice face, Shea supposed. Girls probably appreciated it, anyway. If Shea had to guess, he’d say Aiden was probably close in age to Jack and Leo.
“So, what brings ya to our little island?”
Aiden rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “Oh, well, that’s a long story.”
“The long stories are the best,” Shea said easily. “Why don’t you catch me up on your work history? How long you been bartending?”
“All my life. I grew up in a pub.”
Aiden took Shea through his work history, stopping off at bars in Montreal, Detroit, Chicago, and Vancouver. In college, he’d studied some mixology and had dabbled a little in brewing since then.
As he talked, Shea considered his unusual accent. It wasn’t like any he’d ever heard before. Not quite the clipped Midwestern cadence of the locals, nor the elongated vowel patterns of a Southerner, and each word came off slightly awkwardly. Almost stilted. He must hail from some peculiar land. Minnesota, maybe?
Aiden seemed to be a perfect fit for the job. Almost too good to be true. Pushing to his feet, Shea told him as much.
“How soon can you start?”
Aiden slipped from the booth and straightened to his full height. “As soon as you need me.”
“In that case, welcome aboard. C’mon over and let me introduce you to everyone.”
Shea introduced Aiden to the staff and showed him the layout behind the bar. When Heather pulled Aiden aside to hammer out a work schedule for him, Shea found his attention drawn through the pub’s large tinted front window and across the street to the bridal store.
He wondered what she was doing right now. Did their kiss dominate her thoughts the way it did his? Had she dropped the ridiculous opinion that they needed a divorce? If not, that kiss and her undeniable reaction to him should’ve dispelled the notion. Despite the anger and the arguments, she still wanted to him. He’d suspected it all along, but now he knew it to be true.
A primal, carnal satisfaction hummed in his veins.
That doesn’t mean she loves you.
Whatever. He needed to touch her more. Touching her would lead to kissing. Kissing to wanting. Wanting to softening. Such a lusty concoction just might be the opportunity he’d been waiting for. The opening he needed to break through the barriers she’d erected between them.
Yes, she’d erected the walls, but his sudden optimism gave him the courage to admit she hadn’t done it alone. He’d handed her the bricks.
She’d constructed her walls over years, all eighteen of them, but mostly the ones he’d spent working at the law firm. The job had been hard–and ugly. It had changed him in ways he never could’ve expected, and though he hadn’t been able to stop the changes from taking place, he could feel them happening to him. He could feel himself withdrawing, drowning. Unable to fight his way back to the surface, he’d sunk deeper every day while his body was riddled with invisible wounds. Unseen traumas that were nonetheless life-altering, as real as a jagged scar or a chronic limp. Submersed by the pain, he’d drifted away from her. Until one day, he’d quit. He just quit, because apparently, he was too broken to care that only losers quit.
There could be no doubt that he’d had a role to play in creating the barriers between them. Which only meant he had all the tools necessary to tear them down again.
By now, Heather and Aiden were deep into a demonstration of the software system used on the cash registers. With things under control, Shea considered the store across the street. In under a minute, he could be near his wife, pulling her into his arms and reminding her how good they could be together.
He started toward the front entrance, but just then, the heavy wooden door swung open and a blinding stream of bright sunlight struck Shea. He blinked against the cruel surge of light as the shadow of a man moved toward him. When the door fell shut, the postman stood before him.
The color rode high on Postman Pete’s cheeks. “Seamus Michael Nolan?”
“What are you doing, Pete? You know it’s me.”
Pete held out a thick envelope with a bright green certified receipt attached to the top fold. “Sign here, please.”
Everything inside Shea went still.
Pete’s wandering gaze didn’t quite manage to meet his eyes.
With painful slowness, Shea’s hand came up to accept the envelope. “What is this?”
“Certified letter.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” When Shea grasped the pen, he struggled to steady the trembling in his hand as he scrawled his name along the black line. Deep down, some part of him understood his life was about to be irrevocably changed.
“Have a good day.” Pete spoke to the floorboards as he scurried to the exit and vanished into another blast of sunshine.
Shea turned over the envelope in his hands and read the sender’s address. His stomach lurched.
Law Offices of Miles Sinclair, P.C.
Pain ripped through him and his knees buckled.
Fuck, it hurt.
She did it.
Denial screamed through him. He couldn’t believe she did it. How could she?
After nearly two decades together, in which they brought three lives into the world and stood side by side as they buried two of their parents, she’d gone and done it.
She’d filed for divorce.
Chapter Five
Beneath his feet, the floor dipped and heaved. Or maybe the unsteadiness was inside him.
With a mental shrug, Shea raised the cool glass bottle to his lips. The liquor burned a trail down his throat and he prayed this would be the swallow that finally numbed the pain.
Instead, the chaos of his emotions distilled into the scalding wound of her betrayal. Her treachery wriggled under his skin and stole the bliss of oblivion from him. Unable to sleep, he’d chosen the next best thing—alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol.
The drunker he got, the clearer things became. They were meant to be together. How could she not see that? Had she forgotten what they were to each other? How could she turn her back on them?
The boat pitched and he stumbled out onto the rear deck. Searing sunlight blasted him. Collapsing on his back on the storage bench, he pulled the bill of his baseball cap down to shield his face from the sun’s blaze.
His mind raced. He needed to reply to the summons or risk his custody status. Due to the kids, state law mandated a sixty-day waiting period before they’d grant the divorce, but that didn’t mean the dissolution of his marriage wouldn’t move forward. There’d be negotiations, settlements, court appearances. His lawyer mind set to work laying out his case. Stating his arguments. Building his defense. Anything that could stop the landslide her divorce filing had set off.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Shit, none of that mattered now. Whether he consented to the divorce or not, he couldn’t make her stay married to him. It wasn’t the 1800s.
Sometime later, when the sun had slipped halfway to the horizon, a shadow fell over him. He cracked open one eye to find two men peering down at him.
Noah nudged him with the toe of his sneaker. “We’re too late.”
“I get his boat.” Luke settled behind the wheel.
Noah scowled down at Shea. “Are you drunk?”
Shea grunted. “Go away.”
“I’ hear he’s been an ass ever since Isobel went on that date,” Luke said, his head bent while he fiddled with something on the control panel.
“What date?” Noah’s head swiveled from Luke back to Shea. “You know about this?”
A groan eased from Shea when he sat upright. Shoving unsteadily to his feet, he shuffled over to the cooler and bent to retrieve a beer from the ice.
Noah plucked the beverage from his hand. “Who’s the guy?”
“You remember Cooper Spence?” Luke folded his arms across the steering wheel.
“Not at all.” With a hiss of sound, Noah twisted the cap off his beer bottle.
“He was in the clas
s between you and Shea,” Luke explained as Shea dug around in the cooler for another beer. “Brainy kid. Kind of quiet.”
A frown clouded Noah’s features. “The kid who wore the bow tie?”
Shea wrenched the cap off his beer and took a long glug of the draught.
“That’s him,” Luke said.
Noah lifted his shoulders. “He was a good guy, wasn’t he?”
“And she’s my fucking wife.” The angry words erupted from Shea and echoed across the water.
Noah took the outburst in stride. “You don’t want out then?”
“Christ,” Shea muttered and sank back down onto the bench. “No.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Jesus, no.”
Noah lowered his body onto the bench across from Shea. “We heard Isobel filed.” Leaning back, he propped his feet on top of the cooler. “So what happened between you two?”
Shea crammed the heel of one hand into his eye socket and rubbed. What the hell? Was he confiding in his brothers now? Good God.
But the words were pouring out of him before he could shut off the valve. “I have no fucking idea. Everything just sort of… fell apart, you know?”
“I have no idea,” Noah said cheerfully. “Before Mina, I hadn’t been in a relationship lasting longer than a few months. Tell me what it’s like.”
From beneath the brim of his ball cap, Shea glared at Noah while he searched for the words, but grief and helplessness swamped him.
Noah reached inside the cooler, snagged another beer, and tossed it to Luke.
“I thought we were fine.” The air squeezed from Shea’s lungs. “We were busy with work and the kids. Life was crazy, a little chaotic sometimes, but we were us. I thought we were stronger than all of that.”
But it’d worn on them. Work, chores, school pickups and drop-offs, practice, dance, haircuts, doctor appointments, birthdays, holidays. The long hours he spent commuting to his soul-crushing job at the law firm, which he’d kept at for seven awful years because the money was good—excellent, actually—and because he wanted to be able to give Isobel and Finn the world.
Life had gotten in the way of living. He was too busy to talk, too tired to listen, and at the end of the day, he’d had nothing left in him to give to the ones he loved most. He was empty.
Too empty to feel.
“When we did talk, all we did was fight.”
“What about?”
“Everything. Nothing. Stupid shit.” Some not so stupid shit, too.
Then one day, Shea looked up from the legal brief on his computer at Finn sitting across the dinner table. A shadow of peach fuzz teased his chin and a permanent scowl hardened the increasingly masculine features on his face. When had he grown from an affable little squirt into an angry, withdrawn teen?
Stunned, he’d turned to Isobel, but rather than finding the sweet girl he once knew at his side, he discovered a woman looking more lost and alone than he could ever remember seeing her look. She should be happy, but she wasn’t.
He’d never forget the wounded expression on her face when she thought no one was watching her. He’d put that look there. No one else.
A sudden surge of bile rose in the back of his throat and he swallowed. “So I left.”
Noah straightened on the bench. “Wait, you left her? Why the hell did you do that?”
The ugly memories were all jumbled in his mind and Shea shook his head. “Because she told me to.”
“You’ve never done a damn thing I told you to do,” Luke complained. “Or anyone else, for that matter.”
Shea let his head fall back onto the side of the boat and stared up at the cloudless sky. “I guess I figured it couldn’t get any worse if I left, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to get better if I stayed.”
In the silence, the cry of a seagull rang out. Shea’s gaze followed the bird as it soared overhead and then dove, breaking the surface of the water with a riotous splash.
“I never thought it’d happen to us. Divorce.” The beer tasted foul in Shea’s mouth when he tried out the word.
“Is there any chance you can still fix it?”
“For the life of me, I don’t know how.” The center of his chest ached with hollowness. He hadn’t felt so empty since the days following their mom’s death, when they all walked around in a daze. Soulless and beyond hope. A ragged breath shuddered through him. “What the fuck am I going to do?”
“Say you’re sorry and have a shit-ton of makeup sex,” Luke said. “Have you tried that?”
Noah’s head bobbed. “That’s a solid plan.”
“I’ve apologized for things I haven’t even done yet.” While Shea refused to discuss sex with his wife with his brothers, in truth, there wasn’t all that much to discuss. Since he’d moved out, Isobel barely tolerated speaking to him and the chance that an intimate moment might arise between them seemed more remote than their tiny island. “I’ve tried everything I can think of, but nothing ever works.”
“That only means you need to try something different.”
Shea’s gaze shifted to Noah, intrigued.
“Have you tried talking to her?” Noah asked. “Told her how you’re feeling?”
Shea’s lip curled. “Some.”
A frown puckered Luke’s brow. “Define some.”
“Look, I’m not a touchy-feely kind of guy.”
Two expressionless faces stared him down.
Rolling his shoulders, Shea shifted on the bench. “Sometimes I don’t tell her everything.”
Noah scratched his cheek. “You mean like that time you quit your job and didn’t tell her?”
A vivid memory pierced the drunken haze of his mind.
Grief and fury rolled off her in pulsating waves. “Stop lying to me. For once, just tell me the truth.”
The fear nearly overcame him. “I don’t work at the firm anymore.”
“Were you fired?”
“I quit.”
The shadow of betrayal in her eyes gutted him.
“Look,” he said, “we’re going to be okay.”
“I’m pregnant.”
Fear solidified into something rigid and fierce and fiery inside him. Something that whooshed past his eardrums and thrummed in his chest.
Then, as now, Shea’s heart tried to punch out of his chest. Those days after he quit his job at the law firm existed in his memory as an ugly lump of agony. A fuzzy black pit filled with anger and misery over what had happened—what he’d done—which he’d tried to drown with alcohol and self-deception. More alcohol than anything else, really.
Back then, he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth, so he said nothing and set about formulating a new plan for their lives. He’d made a plan for them without her input.
A low whistle leaked out of Luke. “Dang, she gave me an earful about that. Like it was my fault or something. Though it wasn’t as bad as the time you bought the pub without telling her.”
Noah’s features twisted with derision. “Seriously?”
“I was going to tell her, but she found out before I got the chance.” Shea held up his hand. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“Really? ’Cause it sounds pretty fucking bad,” Luke said.
She’d been through so much and the thought of adding to her stress made Shea’s stomach turn. “She worries.”
“She’s a big girl.” Noah’s voice contained no give.
“She wanted to know what was going on with you.” Luke shrugged his wide shoulders. “Doesn’t seem like too much to ask.”
“Whose side are you on?” Shea asked.
“We’re on your side,” Noah said. “And if you want your wife back, you’re going to have to face some hard truths.”
“You should text her.”
Noah dragged his gaze to Luke. “Are you serious right now? You’re not helping.”
“Hear me out,” Luke said easily. “Emily tells me she can’t get a fair fight unless we slow things down.” Affection thickened his voice when he
talked about his wife, Emily.
A stutterer, she sometimes struggled to get words out and Shea could only imagine how she might fare in a rapid-fire argument with his silver-tongued brother.
“At first, I flat-out refused,” Luke continued. “But now… I don’t know. I kinda like it.” A shadow of a smile touched his lips. “Writing it out gives me time to think about what I want to say. About what really matters. I take better care with my words.”
Shea dropped his head. He stared down at the boat decking and recalled all the careless words said between him and Isobel over the years. So many stupid, thoughtless words.
When he glanced up, Noah chewed the side of his thumb while his features crowded with an intense scowl. Then he straightened and leveled Shea with a black look, like a doctor delivering a fatal diagnosis.
“The way I see it, you’ve got two choices.” He ticked off the first option with his index finger. “One, you can let her go on that date.”
“She already went on the date,” Luke said helpfully. “Good ol’ Coop. Cooper Eugene Spence.” He overenunciated each word.
A growl built in Shea’s throat.
“Then let her go out with the next guy, and the next one after that,” Noah said. “Let her go on as many dates as she wants.”
Shea took a long, desperate pull from his beer to hide the gnashing of his teeth.
“If Isobel’s got it in her head that she wants to move on, then let her see what’s out there waiting for her.” A calculating gleam winked in Noah’s chocolate chip-colored eyes. “Wouldn’t you rather it be with a guy like Cooper Spence than, say, someone like you?”
Incredulous, Shea’s gaze swung to Luke.
Luke lifted one shoulder. “He makes a fair point.”
Shea’s heart convulsed painfully in his chest. “I don’t think I can do that.”
Noah’s tone turned conspiratorial. “Any chance Cooper wore the bow tie?”
That tugged a reluctant smile from Shea. “Aye, that he did.”
Noah took a self-congratulatory nip from his beer bottle. “You know, you might want to educate Isobel on a few other realities as well.”