It wasn’t that. Thai food was delicious. But Steve had barely eaten our Chinese the night before, and I worried he would have the same reaction to more takeout and simply pretend to eat. He needed something more homemade, something surprising enough to help him forget his hunger strike whether or not he was even aware he had one.
“It’s great,” I said finally, trying to sound excited. “Really.”
“What I really wanted,” Brennon continued, taking my hand, “was to take you to my favorite restaurant across town, but…”
But someone had to stay with Steve. I turned to ask Steve how he felt about Thai—I would make him something else if I had to—but I only caught sight of his elbow as he limped into the hallway and disappeared. So Grumpy Steve was back, was he?
“I’ll be right back,” I said and grabbed one of the food containers, not even caring what it was. With a fork in hand, I hurried over to Steve’s room and knocked on the door, waiting only half a second before pushing my way inside.
“Let yourself in,” he mumbled from where he stood in the middle of the floor.
I glanced around only long enough to take in the mounds of clothes and garbage littered around the room, and then I stepped over a pair of jeans and placed the food in his hands. “Eat this,” I ordered.
“Excuse me?”
“Eat it,” I repeated clearly. “Your friend and roommate was kind enough to bring it home, and you’re going to eat the whole thing.”
He’d pretty much lost his grumpiness and simply looked confused as he stood there, the paper box in one hand and a fork in the other like some king with his orb and scepter. “Or?” he wondered.
“Or I’ll come in here and force feed it to you,” I replied. “And don’t think I won’t.”
He looked down at the box then gently pried it open, staring at its contents from a few different angles before returning his unfocused gaze to me. “This is just a box of rice,” he said, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
Oops. “Fine,” I replied. “I’m going to go back and get you some actual food, and you’re going to eat that.”
By the time I got back with some curry—and felt the heat of embarrassment under Brennon’s inquiring gaze—Steve still hadn’t moved, though his mood seemed to have only improved in the few seconds I was gone. “Here,” I told him. “Now promise me I won’t have to come back in here to make sure you didn’t hide it under the bed instead of eating it.”
He grinned. And for a second, I completely forgot what I’d even said. The man had a smile. “Do you really think I would do that?” he asked quietly.
“Or throw it out the window,” I replied, stumbling over the words a bit. He didn’t even have a window in his room. “I assume you can get creative when you put your mind to it. Are we going to have a problem?”
In answer, Steve stabbed his fork into the box, pulled out an enormous piece of chicken, and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth.
“Good,” I said, closing the door behind me and taking a second to recover from that smile. Maybe all wasn’t lost for Steve Evans.
Brennon was on the couch now, his tie undone and his suit jacket draped over the arm. Though he leaned on his knees, he straightened up when I sat next to him, and he slid his arm around me, pulling me close. “I thought he’d gotten over that,” he said.
It took me a second to figure out what that meant. “You knew about the eating problem?” I asked in alarm. Then why hadn’t he done anything about it?
Shrugging, Brennon suddenly looked exhausted. “That first year after the accident, I was really worried about him. It’s why I asked him to move in here and sell his house. So I could keep an eye on him.”
I couldn’t help but turn to the hallway, trying to imagine what Steve was doing right then. Was he eating, like he agreed to do? Or was he figuring out a way to make it look like he had? “What happened to him?” I asked quietly. “The accident. He won’t tell me.”
Brennon took a deep breath and pulled his arm out from around me so he could run both hands down his face. “Steve was crazy,” he said, only the words brought out a bit of a smile. “We were dorm-mates our freshman year at Stanford, and I knew right off the bat he was not someone who could live a small life. He’s…he’s smarter than he lets people think. It’s not like he’s manipulative, but he can read people and know exactly how to use their weaknesses to his advantage. Like, when he was a kid. He started his own business when he was twelve, delivering groceries to those who had a hard time getting to the store on a regular basis. He hired on a few other kids, and it quickly turned into a citywide thing.
“By eighteen, he had a couple hundred employees and a constant influx of cash without having to lift a finger. He had school paid for, excelled in all his classes, and every other weekend he was off on some adventure. Skydiving, cliff jumping, skiing in the Alps. He had his own racecar for a bit—not kidding—and by the time we graduated, he was being scouted by some of the top businesses around the world. Within a couple of years, he got hired on at one of the best tech companies in San Francisco, really high on the ladder for anyone let alone a twenty-four-year-old kid from Brooklyn who doesn’t even have a background in tech. He even got engaged.”
My stomach flipped—not that I’d been at all calm listening to what Brennon was saying—and I waited silently to hear how everything fell to pieces for the man who was just on the other side of a wall. Even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. The Steve I had been getting to know was so different from the one Brennon was describing, and I knew that change had happened because of the accident, whatever it was. He had clearly lost more than just his eyesight, and my heart ached for him as I listened to Brennon’s narrative.
“Steve was heading for greatness,” he continued. “A couple years into the job he met Amelia—his fiancée—and they bought a house in Pacific Heights. He proposed, and they had their wedding planned in Cabo. He was in negotiations to become VP of the company when he was riding his motorcycle home and a truck ran a red light.”
I grabbed Brennon’s hand, though I wasn’t sure which of us I was hoping to comfort. I could picture the accident too well, and suddenly it hurt to breathe as I imagined what that must have been like for Steve.
Brennon took another deep breath. “Thank God he was wearing a helmet,” he said, “or he would have been dead. The impact broke his arm and collarbone, nearly shattered one of his ankles when he landed, but he hit his head. Hard. He was in a coma for four days, and none of us knew if he would ever wake up. When he did…”
“He couldn’t see,” I whispered. I thought getting passed over for promotions was bad, but that was nothing compared to this. This was waking up and realizing your whole life as you knew it was gone.
Nodding, Brennon wrapped his other hand around our entwined fingers. “Amelia stayed with him for a while, trying to help. But he wouldn’t let her, and she left him about three months after the accident. He pushed everyone else away, and sometimes he wouldn’t even let me in when I’d come to visit. Losing his sight… That took his whole life away from him. Everything he loved to do. Eventually, his company had to let him go because he didn’t show up for work, and he pretty much had no reason to leave the house anymore.
“He basically disappeared after that, locked himself in his house and told me he was fine. Just recovering. But I went to visit him once after not hearing from him for a couple of days, and when he didn’t answer the door, one of his neighbors said they hadn’t seen him at the windows for a while or even any lights. I forced my way inside and found him…” He swallowed, and I wrapped my arm around his shoulders.
“I don’t even know how long he’d been lying there,” Brennan whispered. “Could have been a couple of days. He was literally starving. Unresponsive. The doctors told me he wouldn’t have lasted much longer if I hadn’t… My best friend nearly died because he couldn’t even find the will to eat. He was in the hospital for a week, and then I brought him here. Took him to a
therapist every week. He still stayed at home and rarely left the apartment, but for the last year, everything seemed good. Better. But if he’s—”
“Hey,” I said, both to stop him from talking about such horrible things and to protect him from falling into his own dark chasm. None of this was Brennon’s fault. “He’s fine. I promise. Practically devoured an entire smoked salmon today. You’ve been an incredible friend to him, and he knows that. Even if he doesn’t say it.”
Brennon’s eyes held so much emotion that I almost couldn’t keep eye contact with him. Gratitude and pain collided with an intensity that pulled at my chest and made me wonder if I could ever find anyone else who looked at me the way he was looking at me right then. When he leaned forward and kissed me, it felt like he was putting everything he couldn’t say into his lips and his hands at my neck, and in that moment, I wondered if maybe I was wrong about never finding someone to love me.
“I am so glad I met you at that wedding, Lissa Montgomery,” he whispered against my mouth, though I was almost too lost in his kiss to understand what he said.
And to think I’d almost left Seth’s wedding early.
“Let’s play a game,” I said suddenly, sitting up straight as a wave of energy rushed over me. It had come out of nowhere, but I latched onto it. With Brennon gone all day at work, I didn’t get many moments alone with him, and I was going to use this time to my advantage. “And before you try the excuse that you don’t have any games,” I added, “I know you do.”
Grinning, Brennon pushed a curl behind my ear. He clearly appreciated the lighter mood, as sudden as it might have been. “Have you been rummaging through my stuff?” he asked.
“Without shame,” I replied. “I had to know what sort of man you were before I stuck around for too long.”
He teased another kiss against my lips, determined to throw me off. But this was a battle I would win. Likely realizing this, he sighed and sat up as well. “And what sort of man am I?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On how you play Monopoly.”
He frowned. “Monopoly,” he repeated. “You don’t think I deal with enough money problems at work?” But his eyes lit up, which meant he was probably intrigued by the idea.
My mom and I had had plenty of crazy games when I was growing up, and I almost always managed to beat her. Soundly. It drove me to pursue a career in finance, and in the last decade, I had yet to be beaten by anyone. “I should warn you,” I said, “I’m really good at Monopoly.”
Narrowing his eyes, he slowly got to his feet and headed for the closet where he kept his games. “I thought you were supposed to be convincing me to play,” he said. “Not cautioning me.”
“You don’t have a choice, so it doesn’t matter.”
“I had no idea you had such a competitive streak in you, Lissa.”
I brought over the rest of the food and quickly helped Brennon set up the board and distribute the pieces on the coffee table. “This is why we have to play,” I told him and chose the dog playing piece as I settled on the floor. “There’s so much we don’t know about each other, and Monopoly will bring all the dirty little secret personality quirks to the surface.”
Brennon placed the top hat piece next to mine. A smile played at his lips, and he shook his head a little before he said, “If you end up forcing me to mortgage all of my properties, will you be a merciful lienholder?”
I gave him my very best wicked grin and replied, “That’s for you to find out, my good sir. Roll the dice.”
* * *
Brennon was not a yeller. He wasn’t even a beggar. Though he barely had any money and had only a couple of useful properties left to his name, he sat on the floor opposite me and kept his eye contact firm and stoic. I had a full board of hotels and complete monopoly of the utilities, but I still hadn’t broken him. I was impressed, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had played against someone with quite this level of dignity.
“What’s your move, Ashworth?” I asked, my voice low.
Brennon’s mouth twitched as he sat there with the dice in his hands, just a few squares away from a rather large pool of money in the free parking. The odds of him rolling low enough were slim, but he had a chance to redeem himself if he rolled well. “You seem to think you can predict the future, Montgomery,” he replied. “This isn’t over yet.”
“It will be as soon as you toss those dice.”
Rolling the cubes between his hands, he examined the board as if searching for some way to bring himself back from the brink of extinction. It may have been two in the morning, but that hadn’t stopped him from trying his very best to keep himself in the game. He was determined, and I very much liked that aspect of him.
“Here’s the thing,” he said.
“Just roll the dice!” I snapped.
Brennon smiled as if he’d just figured out some secret, and a bit of fear sparked into my chest. At this point I should have had the game in the bag, but he seemed to think it wasn’t quite over. Though how he thought he could win, I had no idea. He didn’t have any hotels. He barely had any houses on his properties. Without a way to shift the wealth from me to him, there was no way he could win, and yet his grin just kept growing.
“What?” I asked.
He chuckled a little. “You like to win, don’t you?”
Obviously. “No one likes to lose, Brennon.”
“But you like to win. Like, you like it a lot.”
“So?”
He tossed the dice across the table, rolling an eleven and putting himself way past free parking. “It’s just a fun little insight. A dirty little secret personality trait, as you said.”
Cocking my head, I tried to figure out exactly what his smile meant. “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?”
As he moved his piece along the tiles on the board, Brennon kept smiling, and he hummed a little to himself, some punk rock song I had known in junior high. He landed on one of my hotels and clearly didn’t have enough money to pay the rent, but he just grinned there like an idiot as he looked over his resources. “Looks like I need to give up,” he said, tipping his hat over as if conceding defeat in chess.
“Then why are you smiling?”
He shrugged. “Because I like getting to know you.”
That was adorable, but, “You’re telling me you’re perfectly okay with losing?” I asked. It would mean he was even better than I’d already discovered, but it was hard to believe he didn’t care even a little that I beat him so completely. It was almost suspicious.
Brennon laughed, shaking his head as he rose to his feet. He offered me his hand, and then he pulled me straight into his arms as soon as I was up. “I mean, I would have liked to win,” he said, and he spoke almost directly into my ear, sending shivers through me. “I’m not a robot. But that doesn’t mean I won’t spend every second I can with you just on the off chance you might get a reason to gloat for a while.”
I rested my head against his shoulder, perfectly content to just stand there even though I knew I should make him go to bed so he wasn’t dead in the morning. But knowing what I should do didn’t change what I wanted to do, and the ball of warmth in my chest dictated my actions. “You sure know how to make a girl feel special,” I said and lifted my head to kiss him.
He responded easily, pulling me closer. “Only the special ones,” he murmured against my mouth.
It was probably the best goodnight kiss I’d ever had.
Chapter Ten
I woke to a gentle touch on my forehead and opened my eyes to find Brennon just a few inches away, a half-smile on his lips as he looked down at me in the dim light coming from the hallway.
“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist.”
Goodness, he was handsome. It didn’t matter what time of day it was; he always looked so put together and clean-cut and all around pretty. How did he manage to look so good after getting so little sleep, and on a couch no less? “You should ap
ologize,” I said, and then I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him down for a real kiss. “If you’re going to kiss me, you might as well do it properly.”
Grinning, he kissed me again then moved over to the closet to finish getting ready. At the moment, he was only in his boxers and his button-up shirt, and I watched him with a smile and wondered where I would have been right now if he hadn’t approached me at Seth’s wedding. Probably serving up pie at the old-fashioned diner down the street from my apartment because I badly needed a job and finding a new career wasn’t going to be easy.
“Do you really have to go into the office so early?” I asked as I slowly sat up and leaned against the headboard. Seeing him for a few minutes in the mornings and an hour or two at night definitely wasn’t enough for me. Especially after last night. “Just take a sick day.”
He glanced back at me as he tucked his shirt into his pants, and I could see his resolve waver for a moment. I probably looked a mess, since I’d only just woken up, but he didn’t seem to mind. “I haven’t taken a sick day in nine years,” he said, and then he began searching through his expansive collection of ties, humming softly as he did.
There were a lot of things I really liked about Brennon Ashworth. He was sweet, and thoughtful, and deliciously good-looking, and every new thing I learned about him seemed to add to his list of excellent qualities. But being a workaholic was not one of them, and I was starting to realize why Seth didn’t like how much I worked. Was I as bad as Brennon?
I would have to try a little harder to persuade him. Slipping off his bed, I came up behind him and slid my arms around his waist. He stopped his tie search immediately, and I twisted around to his other side and slid my hands up to his neck. “You do feel a little feverish,” I said sweetly.
He grinned and touched his forehead to mine, closing his eyes as he breathed me in. “I wish I could stay,” he said and brushed his mouth against my lips. But apparently he didn’t wish it hard enough, because in the next moment he reached behind me and grabbed a light blue tie.
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