“You are the worst,” I told him, letting go of Sarah and moving out of the doorway to let him in. As I was locking up, he leaned down unexpectedly and kissed my cheek, and my scowl disappeared, replaced with an expression of shock.
“Thanks for having us,” he said in a stilted way that made me think it was something Sarah had coached him to say.
I looked at her. She looked back at me. And then we laughed, and Reid stalked into the kitchen to sit with Ash while Sarah and I followed.
“So, how has all your time alone with Reid been, he finding ways to keep you busy?” I asked her. I cackled at the furious blush that spread over her cheeks, reddening even the tips of her ears. “That good, huh?”
“Better than good,” she whispered, and I didn’t blame her—no reason to stroke Reid’s ego, when he was so full of himself already.
“I’m glad, Sarah,” I told her, turning off the timer on the oven as it blared. “Really, I am. If you’re happy, I’m happy. You have to know that.”
Sarah smiled at me. She opened the oven door so I could get in and pull the pan out. “I do. And I… I’m happy you’re happy, too.”
I was so wrapped up in our conversation that I missed all but the tail end of the commentary Ash sent my way. “…you know how it goes. These girls are used to the wild. They need to return to their roots every now and again to de-stress.”
“You make it sound like we’re Amazons, or something,” I said, shaking my head at him. “Maybe it’s just that we know you boys act like asses when you’re around each other, so we want to get you alone to figure out who the real you is beneath all that machismo.”
Reid looked at Sarah and raised a brow. “Is that it, darlin’? You girls just wanna get us men civilized?”
Sarah grinned and shrugged at him. “Sounds about right,” she said.
“It’s a damn conspiracy,” Reid complained. But I could tell by the look the brothers shared that neither one of them minded a bit.
We sat down to eat, and Reid broke the news of Sarah’s decision. She wasn’t going back to the village—she was here to stay, in the English world, for good. I couldn’t have been more relieved. I knew I’d still have to come clean with her someday, but knowing I had time to get to that was so… freeing.
I looked at Ash across the table and he smiled, reaching over to take my hand. Everything about being with him had turned out to be so damn liberating. I’d never expected that from him—in fact, I hadn’t expected anything at all—but somehow the player who trailed a thousand broken hearts in his wake had managed to heal mine. And then he’d become mine. I was still having a hard time believing it all.
Because I hadn’t let myself believe in happy endings. Not since I was a little girl, too young to realize that the world was so much more complicated than all that. Maybe I hadn’t grown up with fairy tales, but I’d believed, once upon a time, in the general goodness of people. Believed, more than anything, that if something was meant to be, then it would all work out just fine.
Somewhere along the way, I’d abandoned that kind of hope. Buried it deep inside me under a mountain of betrayal and pain. Ash had dug it back up, breathed life into it once again, and then handed it to me along with his heart. I was so very grateful for that. And I had a feeling I’d be expressing that gratitude for a long time to come.
I still wished that Beth was here with us, and Wyatt too. But maybe Ash had a point. Maybe she needed some distance to process everything that had happened. I couldn’t begrudge her that—she was my sister. Whatever made her happy made me happy.
And at the time… I really did believe she was happy.
Sitting here with Ash, Sarah, and even Reid—like this—over brunch—exchanging stupid stories, with both sets of couples grinning like idiots and holdings hands—I certainly was.
WRATH - The Brody Bunch Book 3
The Brody Bunch finale wraps up all the loose ends while telling the story of Wyatt and Beth.
1
Beth
“Shh! Quiet. Someone will hear us. And for goodness’ sake, Sister—hurry up!”
Sarah scowled at me from the tall trees in the narrow forest that served as the border between our little village and the English world. She was crouched in the dirt, rubbing her ankle, hissing at me from between clenched teeth.
“Give me a minute, please. I think I twisted it.”
I glanced over the rise of her bonnet at the sleepy houses behind us, still visible through the trees. All the lights were still off—I couldn’t see even a single candle lit in any of the windows. It was exactly what I wanted to see, a familiar sight that let me know no one had realized Sarah and I were gone yet. We were safe here, in the dark. For now.
But how long would that last? We were taking such an immense risk, and I didn’t know if it was just the knowledge of what might happen if we were caught that made me so nervous, or if there was an actual, credible threat. I treated our exodus like the latter was true—as though at any moment, we might be spotted dashing through the woods and heading into the city our father referred to as “a den of sin.”
Bright Falls.
We’d been there before, of course. Short trips to superstores when we needed supplies, that kind of thing. But always with an adult, male escort. Always with family members who might be equipped to protect our virtue. Amish girls, and even Amish women, were not permitted to enter the city alone under any circumstances I knew about except one, and that practice had been outlawed in our house for years now. Which meant that tonight, we were breaking a vital rule.
It wasn’t just because we were women, either—it was also because my sister and I were embarking upon a journey that our father had forbidden us from ever since our eldest sister, Hannah, left almost two years ago. Rumspringa was supposed to be a time of exploration and meditation, a time where young Amish men and women could either thwart temptation and return home to dedicate themselves to the church, or choose to stay in the English world for good, abandoning their faith, their families, and their homes forevermore.
It was a normal part of our culture, once upon a time. But since Hannah had left, Father had outlawed the practice in our family. Amish youth were to stay Amish, he said—it was for their own good. It was a blessing, truly, to never know temptation at all.
We didn’t see eye-to-eye on that. And so here I was, just a few hundred feet from the road, giddy with excitement and nerves as I envisioned seeing Hannah again for the first time in two years.
What would I say first? What stories would I tell? Life was, all things considered, fairly simple in the village. Would my tales hold any significance for Hannah anymore, now that she was part of a much more exciting, expansive world? Would she care how the horses were doing, or about the calf I’d helped deliver in the spring? What about how far Sarah had come as a cook, all the things she’d learned, including our grandmother’s most beloved recipes?
I’d never find out unless we kept moving. I looked down at Sarah, still crouching amongst the fallen leaves. She’d stopped rubbing her ankle; her eyes were fixed over her shoulder at the village.
“You’re stalling,” I told her, and narrowed my eyes. “It’s almost like you want us to get caught.”
Sarah turned back to me, but did not meet my gaze. A strawberry-blond lock of hair had wrested free of her bonnet and she tucked it back in before answering me. “It’s not that.”
Keeping my voice low, I asked her, “Then what?”
She was quiet for a time, wringing her hands. I knew what she hoped for. She was anticipating I would see this was a bad idea, that I would come to my senses and we’d return home while we still had the opportunity. It was then I realized that we stood at a proverbial crossroads--we had reached the point of no return. If we crossed this line in the sand, there was no coming back. If we continued out to the road, we would have transgressed beyond the possibility of suffering no consequence. This was our last chance to give up, and Sarah, as always, was looking for safety in
inaction.
Not me. That wasn’t who I was. I was the youngest, the most headstrong—the curious, stubborn one who was constantly reminded of it, whether the admonishment came from our parents, our neighbors, or from Sarah herself. I was always testing limits, pushing boundaries, and learning all the ways in which I could bend the rules. Tonight, my intentions were no different. I wanted an adventure. I wanted a reunion. But I wasn’t going without Sarah.
I sat down in front of her with a sigh. She’d started pulling stray tufts of grass from the cool night soil, disturbing a few earthworms in the process. “Sister,” I said, “you’re afraid. I see that. And I understand. The world out there is one you’ve always been told you should fear. Father and Mother have put it into your mind that there is nothing so dangerous as the English—but think of Hannah. Think of our sister, who has survived in that world for years. Flourished, even! The secret letters she writes to us, they all speak of how amazing life outside our pastures is. Don’t you think we owe it to ourselves, and to her, to see for ourselves?”
Sarah’s eyes flicked up to meet mine, and the moonlight made them flash despite the shadows. “Maybe there’s a reason Father doesn’t want us to go,” she ventured, an argument I’d heard plenty of times before and in varying incarnations. “Maybe his ban on Rumspringa really is for our own good.”
“And maybe,” I argued, as I always did, “there’s a reason Hannah left and never came back. A good one.”
And as always, Sarah had no argument for that.
“I’ll keep you safe, Sister,” I said, standing up and offering her my hand. “Hannah and I both will. But if you don’t see for yourself what’s out there—if you don’t take a risk, knowing you might reap an incredible reward—you will regret it, Sarah Miller. I swear it.”
This seemed to give my sister pause. She looked at my hand for a while, chewing the skin off her lower lip, conflict written in her knitted brows and the creases forming at the corners of her eyes. I knew Sarah was capable of great things. I knew she was capable of being brave. I’d seen her climb trees before—granted, she could never get back down without help, but the fact that she could get up to the top of them told me she had the potential to be more than what this community had in store for her. I just had to make her see that.
“And if I hate it out there,” she said slowly, looking up into my eyes, “we can always come back home. Right?”
“Of course,” I told her without hesitation, and she finally took my hand. I helped lift her to her feet. “Any time you want—as long as you’ve given the English world, and Hannah, a fair chance.”
But the fact remained that I truly believed, as we continued on toward the road, that none of us were ever coming back to the village again. Well, perhaps just once to say goodbye to Mother, but I felt strongly in my heart that once I’d had a taste of the forbidden outside world, I would finally know peace. I was a restless soul, a wanderer, and knowing the world was big enough to accommodate my curiosity and imagination was a thought that kept me up at night, dreaming of the possibilities.
Hannah had made it all sound so simple. So obviously the right choice. And I was sure I’d agree with her, and in time, Sarah would too. Maybe we’d find some nice English boys who could expand our horizons even further. There would be no limit on what we could do.
I was naïve then. And the truth was that no one—not Sarah, not Hannah, and least of all myself—knew the full and complicated scope of what we were about to get into.
I was just a girl in a black dress, white apron, and bonnet, walking down a lonely road with my sister in tow, heading toward the lights of the city like a moth about to flit too close to a flame. And just like the moth, I was about to get burned.
But I couldn’t look away from that beautiful, flickering glow. Especially not once we’d made it inside the city limits and through the door of the bar our eldest sister worked in, a place the neon sign said was called Trick Shots.
I’d never been in a bar before. I barely even had a concept of what one was. And as Sarah fretted behind me, chewing her lower lip raw, my stomach trembled with the anticipation of what was beyond that door. Would there be people? Surely, there would. How many? It seemed a small building, but Hannah had written to us that the city tended to be crowded. What would it be like to stand in a crowd like that, one of so many—and all of them so different from me, from Sarah, from each other? Even when our village got together for community events, there weren’t terribly many of us. Moreover, there wasn’t a lot of variance. Just a sea of black and white, the women in their dresses and bonnets, the men in their trousers and shirts and hats.
Here, there would be all manner of color. I was sure of it. Excitement welled in me the same way I knew apprehension must be welling in Sarah. I felt badly for her, that she couldn’t let herself enjoy this experience. Sarah wasn’t good with new things. She’d gotten ever worse about them ever since Hannah left us. Maybe seeing her again, finding out why she’d done what she’d done, would help Sarah let go of some of her fear. Every time I looked at her wringing her hands like that, I thought of the girl she used to be, the sister I’d looked up to, squinting from the lower branches of a tree she’d climbed all the way to the top of. She’d seemed like such a force of nature, once upon a time. Maybe our adventure in the city would restore her to her former glory, do her some good. I certainly hoped so.
I pulled open the door to Trick Shots. I couldn’t wait another second. It had been so long since I’d seen Hannah, and I was dying to know her world.
I found it smelled quite a lot like stale beer.
And the floors were… kind of sticky.
And the sounds….
I never knew there could be so many sounds all at once, all competing for pride of place among the patrons. There were television sets mounted high up on the walls, displaying varying pictures—a well-dressed older man speaking directly at the screen as images above his shoulder flickered and changed; another of a man standing, rose in hand, across from a line of beautiful, anxious looking women; a brutal fight—at varying volumes. The people gathered here, all in different styles of dress—none of them particularly modest—chattered at a low din mostly, though a few who seemed particularly inebriated spoke much louder and more boisterously. Everything about them was so… exotic. So new. The colors on the women’s lips. The tight clothes they wore. The men in all manner of wardrobe, no two completely alike, either by small degrees or large. It was all so surreal, so fascinating. I wanted to ingest all of it at once….
But already, Sarah looked like she’d bitten off more than she could chew. Her eyes were distant, hazy. She flinched every time she heard glasses clink, and if I didn’t get her settled soon, she was going to strike blood in that lip of hers. She was almost chewing it off.
“Sister,” I said, curbing my enthusiasm and slipping my arm through her own, “we’re safe here. Everything is all right. We just have to find Hannah.” I squinted into the sea of people surrounding us. “She said she’d be tending bar…”
It took me several moments to locate her—not because of the throng, but because Hannah looked so different from last I’d seen her that, although my gaze had settled on her several times before, I hadn’t recognized her.
I felt my jaw sag. “Hannah?” I squeaked, looking her up and down.
Our sister turned to us at the sound of her name, green eyes widening as she took us in just as we were examining her. Her long, dark hair was exposed and straightened, gleaming in the dim overhead lights; a shiny, velvet curtain that would have been considered vain for her to show off back in our village. She was wearing makeup—not much, but any amount was more than I’d ever seen her in. Her already pretty skin was smoother now and a little paler. She must not have been spending quite so much time out in the sun.
And her outfit… it wasn’t exactly scandalous, but she was baring far more flesh than was considered “proper” by Amish standards. The neckline of her top alone would have made our
grandmother turn over in her grave. My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. Though we were sisters, I’d had no idea Hannah had… well, cleavage! Not like that, anyway.
My face flushed. And when I looked at Sarah, I could see she wasn’t much better off. Her eyes were so wide I was sure she was going to pull a muscle.
“Beth,” Hannah breathed, standing stock still for a moment, her lips curling into a disbelieving smile. “And Sarah!” Then she rushed over to us, vaulting over the small door along the side of the bar and wrapping us both up in her arms. She smelled like alcohol and something… else. I wasn’t sure what it was at the time. Something kind of like sweat, but different. Muskier. “You made it. I was so worried. You should have let me come and get you!”
“You would have given us away,” I told her for what felt like the umpteenth time. In our plans for this night, I’d had to write Hannah over and over to assure her that Sarah and I would be able to make it to Trick Shots on our own. I was afraid if she got too close to the village someone might find us out, and besides, it wasn’t a long walk—by Amish standards. It had given Sarah time to compose herself anyway, and many others from our village had made the journey to Bright Falls on foot during their own Rumspringas.
“I could have parked at the halfway point,” Hannah huffed, drawing back now to take us in again. She shook her head. “Jesus, you two got big. Tall, I mean. You look so much older than you did when I last saw you.”
“It’s been two years,” Sarah reminded her, as if Hannah needed any reminding of that. As if any of us did. I thought I detected a bit of an edge to her voice, but then she said, “We’re bound to have changed in that time. As you have.”
If Hannah thought Sarah was being cold, she showed no signs of it. She just took our hands in her own. “You’ll always be little girls in my head. It’s a big sister thing, I guess.” She shook her head in wonder, as if still coming to terms with how we’d grown. “So there weren’t any problems with you getting here?”
The Brody Bunch Collection: Bad Boy Romance Page 39
