by Avery Flynn
“Wow, this looks amazing,” Hadley said. “The reception is going to be almost as gorgeous as you.”
Adalyn gave her a short, tight smile. “It took a while to talk Gabe and Mom into it, but then Weston, Knox, and I finally convinced them that rich people from the city who wanted something unique would pay big bucks for intimate destination weddings out here.” She waved toward the open barn doors. “The plan is to use the cabins as guest cottages once Knox finishes those up. Pretty soon the bunkhouse will be outfitted with twenty junior suites, and we have a crew coming out to build a lodge house and additional cabins. Then we’ll have everything to host weddings and corporate retreats during the off-season. With the way things are going, diversification is the name of the game.”
“That’s an ambitious plan.” And one she could totally see her siblings carrying off.
Adalyn whirled around, turning away from Hadley and Will. “You aren’t the only one with dreams, you know.”
Hadley flinched. “I never said I was.”
“Just because I stayed doesn’t mean I resigned myself to dodging cow patties for the rest of my life or that I don’t have plans for the future,” she said, her voice trembling.
“Adalyn.” She hurried over to her little sister’s side, worry jabbing at her like splinters under her skin, and put an arm around her sister’s shoulders. “What’s wrong?”
“You have to ask that?” Adalyn shrugged off Hadley’s touch and started pacing the wood dance floor. “I’m getting married in forty-eight hours; Derek still isn’t here.” Her voice got louder and more high-pitched with each word. “And I’ve spent more than I budgeted just to make this event fancy enough to impress my sister who thinks so badly of where she’s from that she left and never comes home.”
It only took a second for the shock of the declaration to transform into heavy, hot shame that clogged her throat. “That’s not true.”
“Really?” Adalyn started pacing again, her angry steps booming in the barn. “Then why do you only come home when you have to?”
Money? Her totally nonexistent free time? The fact that it’s easier to maintain the fake-it-because-she-still-hasn’t-made-it illusion by text than in person? “My life in Harbor City—”
Her sister threw her hands in the air. “Is perfect. We know. Your life is always perfect.”
All the phone calls where she glossed over the hard parts of her life, the feeling of being lost in a sea of people, and the constant grind that never seemed to take a break all came back. She hadn’t been honest. She’d been a photo filter in human form, smoothing out the cracks and adding a fake layer of soft light that turned everything rosy.
“Adalyn, that’s not—”
“What you meant?” she interrupted. “I don’t care. Not all of us are perfect all the time. Some of us work hard for things, pouring our hearts and souls into it, and never get the results we want.” Adalyn’s cheeks were mottled with emotion, and a frustrated anger burned in her eyes. “So yeah, maybe I went a little overboard to make everything extra to impress the woman who everything always does go right for. And what has it gotten me? A fucking clusterfuck of a wedding and a groom who can’t seem to get here. I—” Adalyn’s voice broke as the tears started rolling down her cheeks.
“Adalyn,” Hadley said, her heart aching for her sister as she reached out to wrap her in a hug.
She avoided it with ease. “I gotta go.” Then she rushed out of the barn, waving off Hadley’s attempt to stop her.
Sinking down onto the cowhide-covered booth seat in a stall near the door and fighting to keep her own tears at bay, Hadley clenched her jaw tight enough to make her teeth ache. It was like all the lies she’d told her family about her life in Harbor City were piling up, one on top of the other, until they’d started tumbling down, landing not just on her but on those she loved, too. She hadn’t meant for it to be this way.
Will sat down across from her and she braced herself for the sneer, the cut down, the call out. It was coming. It always did. If anyone saw straight through the bullshit she’d been slinging, it was him.
Nothing in her life had gone right since she’d kissed the wrong man in a coat closet. The very same wrong man sitting across from her right now. That was it—she was leaving. She got up and started out of the stall, but the feel of his finger curling around her pinkie for a second before slipping away stopped her.
“Speaking from siblings-being-pissed-at-you experience, it’ll be okay,” he said. “She just needs a minute.”
Too shocked by his uncharacteristic kindness, she flopped back down into the seat, the words rushing out before she could stop them. “I never meant for things to turn out like this. I have fucked up everything.”
He got up and crossed over to her side of the wraparound booth seat and sat next to her before relaxing back against the seat as if he had nowhere to be anytime soon. “Vent away.”
She shouldn’t—especially not to him—and yet the words she’d never shared with anyone were bubbling up inside her, and she knew there was no stopping them.
“Adalyn was only five when our dad—” The rest of the words clogged her throat, fighting to stay silent, even now.
She bit the inside of her cheek and looked up at the ceiling, blinking fast. God, it wasn’t supposed to still hurt this much. But she didn’t even have to try to see the car in the closed garage, smell the fumes, feel the panic when she spotted her dad slumped over the steering wheel. Her mom had shoved her back into the kitchen, then rushed toward the car, yanking the door open as she cried.
She’d been faking it for so long that it didn’t still hurt that she couldn’t get any words out. It’s where she’d first learned. Denial. Push it away. Don’t talk about it. Make it look easy, better, perfect so her younger siblings wouldn’t be scared, they wouldn’t ask why Mom was crying all the time, and they’d stop asking when Daddy was coming home. Never didn’t seem fathomable to them. It seemed kinder to just pretend everything was fine, and so she did.
And she’d never stopped.
Not since that day.
Not since that moment.
She was so lost in that memory that she could still feel the wool thread of Weston’s sweater bunched in her fist when she held him back before he could run after their mom. It was the soft cotton of Will’s T-shirt against her cheek that pulled her back. How he’d made it around the semicircular booth and ended up with her in his arms, she had no clue. All she knew was that feeling the solid thump-thump of his heart against her cheek was exactly what she needed.
“Adalyn was too young to really remember what it had been like before our dad killed himself or what it was like after it happened and before our mom married Gabe,” she said, remembering how small her sister had been, with her always lopsided ponytails and her gap-toothed smile.
Will tightened his hold on her and brushed his lips across the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” The stock answer, the one that came out without her even thinking about it, following her motto to minimize, deflect, and move on before the pain became too real again.
“But it never goes away,” he said, his voice as scratchy as Weston’s wool sweater had been.
That’s when it hit her. Here she was, talking to him as if he didn’t know what it was like, but he was a double member of the dead parent club. The newspapers in Harbor City loved to bring up references to his parents’ tragic car accident when the twins had still been in grade school.
She sat up so she could pivot enough to look him in the face as he sat next to her and confirm what she suspected. It only took a glance to spot it, that understanding look of having been there, too. He knew, and even though they’d still be enemies in an hour, right now they were both in the same shitty club that almost no one ever wanted to be a member of.
“No, it doesn’t,” she said, taking hi
s hand in hers, entwining her fingers with his. “I used to pretend he was just out there, somewhere, and that he’d find his way back to us. Like he was lost or wandering the Black Hills or something.” She shook her head and sighed as some of the pain eased in the telling, like a load made lighter because she wasn’t carrying it by herself. “Even now, I’ll catch myself going an extra block or two when I’m behind someone who has the same walk as he had or wears the same cologne. It never really goes away, that loss, the sense of betrayal, the wondering why when there really is no answer, and the guilt for still being mad and sad and everything in between. It just sits there, waiting, patient as a spider to trap me in its web whenever I least expect it. So I picture that image of me I want people to have and fake it until I make it true.”
Will didn’t say anything, didn’t burst in with questions, didn’t shush her like she had to herself. Growing up like he had, being under the tabloid microscope, must have given him more understanding of how invasive that could be. Instead, he squeezed her hand, turning enough so they were face-to-face, alone but together.
“My job was to keep Adalyn happy so she wouldn’t ask questions,” Hadley went on, telling the man she’d always thought of as Evil Twin again what she’d never told anyone else. “No one gave me that job; I just assigned it to myself to make everything seem perfect so she wouldn’t be sad—and it worked. So I guess I kept doing it, sharing only the shiny, happy parts and never the jagged, ugly parts.” And the fact that everything in her life in Harbor City was starting to feel like a comb with most of its teeth broken into sharp spikes meant she really wasn’t sharing anything. Instead she was a ghost with her own family, dodging their calls and texts, leaving her more isolated than she already was in the big city. “I guess I never stopped.”
She let out the breath that she’d been holding since they’d found her dad and gathered herself up again, her gaze falling to her fingers intertwined with Will’s. His hands were big, steady, as if he never worried about anything.
“We all have our coping mechanisms,” he said, his voice soft. “The things that help us through a tough time. It’s just that sometimes they stick with us past when we actually need them.”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
For a minute, she didn’t think he’d say anything. Tilting her head up so she could watch his face, she could practically see the war going on in his head by the way his jaw was clenched and the vein at his temple pulsed.
“Our parents died in a freak car accident,” he said finally, after letting out a long sigh. “No other drivers, no dangerous conditions, no explanation really. All the reports state is that there were brake marks, but it obviously was too late. They slammed into a tree hard enough that we had to have a closed-caskets double funeral.” He paused, looking past Hadley’s shoulder as if he could see his parents behind her if he just stared hard enough. “Web and I woke up one morning, went down to eat breakfast, gave our parents hugs before they left for the day, and never saw them again. It was like they just disappeared—well, except for the news coverage. Even at nine, we couldn’t avoid seeing all that.”
She squeezed his hand. “That must have been awful.”
“It was.” He shrugged. “But you figure out ways of making things work.”
His admission was like a light bulb going on in a dark room, it explained so much. “All the assumptions…”
“I like to think of it as thinking ahead. You can’t be surprised if you’re already prepped.”
“Does it always have to be thinking that people’s motives are bad?”
“It’s not always like that—only when it involves someone or something that really matters,” he said, his voice rough around the edges.
“Like Web,” she said, glancing back down at her hand in his because she didn’t want him to see the yearning in her eyes.
“And others.”
He didn’t say her name, and maybe it was some wayward hope on her part that he meant her, but when she looked back up at him, something shifted. Her sadness that was always just under the surface gave way to a need to reconfirm that life wasn’t just about hiding the broken parts or anticipating the worst of people. That there could be—was—more. That she could be happy just as she was without having to pretend at all.
It was almost guaranteed that she’d regret this later, but for right now, it was the only thing that mattered. She needed to blast away everything else and let that part take over. There was only one way she knew how to do that without faking it and only one person she wanted to do it with.
Without letting herself double- or triple-think it, she leaned in and kissed him, knowing she was only asking for trouble and she was more than okay with that.
Chapter Fourteen
Will froze. It wasn’t because he wasn’t burning for more—because he fucking was—but because Hadley needed to get away from the memories; the pain of the past wasn’t for show. No one was that good of an actress, hundreds of millions on the line or not. She’d pull back in a second, the regret he’d seen in the coat closet clear on her face, and that would be it. And he’d still be here wanting the woman who meant to take his brother for everything she could. But as she moved her soft lips against his, the tip of her tongue teasing him, begging for more, it got harder and harder to hold on to that. Because knowing it was wrong didn’t change the wanting.
He cupped the back of her head, threading his fingers through her brown hair and breaking the kiss. The move cut into him like an icy wind. “Hadley.”
“We shouldn’t,” she said, her voice soft with an edge of need beneath it.
“No.” Still he didn’t move, the tension holding him in place, his fingers tangled in her hair, her body so close, he could feel the heat of her skin against him.
“But we want to.” She looked up at him through her eyelashes. “At least I want to.”
His cock thickened against his thigh as he white-knuckled his control even as it slipped through his grasp. “You are not alone in that.”
“But we can’t.” Her hands on his chest, fingertips gliding their way over him and leaving nothing but unquenched fire in their wake.
He didn’t mean to bring her closer, to glide his hands down to her hips and slide her over so she was on his lap. Her hands were on his shoulders, straddling him. Somehow, even though he knew exactly how perfectly her softness fit against his hardness, he managed to keep his hands light on her hips instead of pulling her down and grinding her against him.
This would kill him.
She would kill him.
God, he’d die happy.
“It’ll complicate things,” he managed to get out through clenched teeth as he fought against the lust burning him from the inside out.
Her cheeks flushed, desire swirling in her eyes, as she clutched his shirt as if she were as much on the edge as he was. “It already has.”
Fuck. How did he argue with that? He couldn’t. Not here, not now, with Hadley in his arms, her body pressed up against his in the tiny booth. The whole world collapsed in on this one place, the air heavy with promise and possibilities, as if they weren’t just battling each other but that they were fighting the inevitable.
“One last time,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure he’d ever get enough of her.
“Then we’ll have each other out of our systems,” she said, tugging at his shirt and pulling it free.
She worked it upward so slowly, it was more like torture than anything else, until the only thing against his chest was the cool of the fresh air and the heat of her gaze.
“Do you really think we can?” Because he didn’t just doubt, he wanted to believe.
“Only one way to find out,” she said, pushing his shirt up and off him in a fast, fluid motion that still took too damn long. “Please, Will.”
She rocked against him in a slow rhythm th
at short-circuited his brain, but it was the sound of his name on her lips as she rubbed herself against his hard cock that snapped his last bit of self-control. There were better men out there who’d say, not wrongly, that this was the woman gold digging his brother—or more charitably, the woman fighting to forget old hurts—and, therefore, he should peel her off him, set her down, and walk away.
He wasn’t that man.
Dropping his hands so they were flat on the smooth cowhide seat on either side of his thighs, his entire body hard and aching for her, he forced himself to hold on long enough to get out one last question. “Are you sure?”
She grabbed the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it off, dropping it so it landed on top of his on the seat. “Absolutely.”
Thank. Fucking. God.
Her perfect tits were encased in paper-thin purple lace, the pointed tips of her nipples jutting out, right at eye level. Later, he’d look his fill. Now, he needed more. He tugged down the lace cups and sucked her freed nipple into his mouth. Licked it. Teased it with his teeth. Swirled his tongue around its hard, sensitive peak as she moaned her pleasure, begging for more. The sounds she made, the way she let her head fall back as she rocked her hips, it ruined him.
“You’re gonna be the end of me,” he said.
Her hands tightened in his hair, a teasing tug as she let out a shaky breath. “That wasn’t how I planned on taking you out, but a woman can dream.”
“Such a smart mouth.” So damn kissable. It was the kind of mouth that launched a thousand hard-ons since he’d first spotted her along the sidelines smiling at his damn brother.
“You wanna know a secret?” Hadley looked down at him from her perch on his lap, her tits brushing against him. “I think you like my smart mouth.”
“For starters.” Damn him, he liked so much about her, from the don’t-even-try-your-usual-bullshit attitude to the way she cried out when she came.