“Because I do.”
Fuck. Was it possible to hide under his steering wheel? “I really wish you didn’t.”
“Too bad. And talking to someone who also happens to care about you—”
Brady made a face. “Gross, man.”
“—isn’t a bad thing.”
He sighed. “I know.” Nick was right, it was time to stop hiding who he was, but man his buddy was annoying.
“And it was Jack’s birthday the other day.”
“Oh, shit.” He’d completely forgotten. It was the kind of detail Sam always kept track of.
“It’s cool. Lilly said they were keeping it small. No fancy parties like Patrick had last year.”
Patrick. Brady hadn’t talked to him since the football incident. Turning the ignition, he banged a uey straight across Babcock, earning him a loud honk. Whatever. “Thanks. I think I’ll still stop over there.”
“Hey, good idea,” Nick said. “I wonder who came up with that?”
Sarcastic fuck. “Some pain-in-the-ass friend of mine did.”
“Smart guy. Talk to you later.”
Brady doubled back through Allston and up across the river. Rolling along Mass Ave, he drove through the pristine streets of the Harvard campus until he turned onto Jack’s street. It was a long shot if his brother would even be home, but Jack’s car was sitting in the driveway. The huge Victorian with a massive porch wasn’t something their parents had to buy for Jack. He’d paid for it with his own money. Probably paid the mortgage off by now, too.
Brady cut the engine and walked up the steps. He had no idea what he was going to say but rang the doorbell anyway.
Jack opened the door with a surprised smile. “Hey. Since when do you wear a suit to work?”
“Oh. Yeah. Big meeting today,” Brady said. “Can I come in?”
Lines appeared in Jack’s forehead. Brady’s brother possessed many skills but keeping a poker face wasn’t one of them. “Of course. Come in.”
Inside, he plopped onto a stool at the island in Jack’s tremendous kitchen. Shiny copper pots hung from the ceiling. Brady wondered if Jack made Lilly scrub the place on her hands and knees.
“You want something to drink?” Jack asked from the fridge.
“You got whiskey?”
“You’re asking me for hard liquor at three in the afternoon?”
Yeah, wrong question to ask. It wasn’t long ago that Brady had been the one worried about Jack, who’d spent most of his nights lost to alcohol after Eve passed away.
“I was joking.” Mostly. “Water is fine.”
Jack brought him a glass. Brady drank a few sips, then looked at his brother.
“So, Sam left.”
“Left, as in…left?”
“She’s been at her parents’ place all week. It’s kind of a disaster.”
“I didn’t know things were that bad.” Jack sat on the stool next to him. “What happened?”
Ugh. He didn’t want to go here. But he had to.
“For a while it was normal fights. I thought it was ’cause she was cooped up in the house all the time, but it was partly my fault. I wasn’t there, mentally. I was working constantly, and trying to do too many things at once makes my brain crash.” He looked at the countertop. “I think I have some of the same issues Allegra does.”
“Can you do anything about that?”
There was no shame from his brother. No judgment. Just legitimate concern.
Brady shrugged. “Probably. I’ve avoided it though. And I got used to Sam doing everything because it was easier that way.”
Just like it was easier not to talk. Easier to bury himself in work.
“That happens in relationships,” Jack said. “Sometimes you need to change something to make it work.”
“We tried to change things. It didn’t work.”
“What things?”
Brady twisted his ring under the island. How did people do this? How had Nick?
“I was always jealous of you,” Brady said, not bothering to explain the subject change. “I was always in your shadow, always felt inferior.”
“Inferior?” Jack asked. “You are aware that you design databases while Lilly still has to explain Google Docs to me.”
Brady would’ve laughed, but for the first time, he didn’t want to joke around.
“Doesn’t matter. I wanted to be like you, still do. But when you told me about you and Lilly, I realized I’m nothing like you at all. I’m your opposite.”
Jack frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“You and Lilly. Me and Sam. You told me what you are. I’m your opposite.”
Come on, brilliant big brother. Figure it out.
It took a few seconds for Jack to reply. “Oh. Wow. Okay.” That line in his forehead deepened. “That’s why Sam left?”
Not exactly. “She left because we tried something and it fucked everything up.”
“And I’m guessing the thing you tried was a BDSM thing.”
“Basically.”
“How did it fuck everything up? Did you guys not communicate or something?”
Of course it had taken Jack all of two minutes to hit Brady’s critical error on the nose. “I wasn’t honest about what I wanted.”
Jack smiled, slightly. “We’re not mind-readers, Brady. As good as Dominants are, we can’t figure out what our submissives need by osmosis.”
Wasn’t that what Sam had said? That she couldn’t read his mind. Brady tried not to let the weirdness of the moment overwhelm him. “I have a hard time telling her things that won’t make her happy. It’s like I have some kind of mental wall against it.”
And that wall acted like a gag, stopping him from saying, or even from figuring out what he felt. He put her happiness first because he dreaded the withdrawal, scared of doing anything that didn’t make Sam smile.
“What did you struggle to tell her, if it’s okay to ask?”
Brady cringed. “I like being submissive with her, but…when we had someone else—”
Jack’s eyebrows shot up.
“—with us, I freaked out.” Jesus. He was actually saying these words. “Does that make sense?”
Jack’s brows stayed raised. “Well, someone can enjoy getting spanked sexually by their partner, but it doesn’t mean they want to get smacked by anyone else, or even by that same person in another situation. That’s why you create limits.”
Brady hadn’t seen his submission as a limit. It wasn’t a toy he didn’t want to use, it was something deep in him. But it clicked now, putting it that way. He didn’t want to submit to anyone but Sam.
Next question.
“Is it normal for a submissive to want to make their Dom so happy it eclipses everything? Even your own doubts and reservations?”
“I think it happens, but that’s when you speak up. Say how you’re feeling.”
“I kind of suck at that.” Brady stared at his hands. At his ring. “I kept a lot hidden from her, being submissive especially. I was worried it made me weak.”
“Weak?”
Brady had to look up. That was how shocked Jack’s voice had been.
“Do you have any idea how strong you have to be, to do what you do?” Jack asked. “Submissives put their faith, their bodies, their lives in the hands of their Dominant. Do you know how difficult that is? To give in and allow someone else to control you? I couldn’t do that.”
He’d never thought of it that way—that it took strength to hand over his own power like that. And it was a bit of a boost, to know he was a natural at something his brother wasn’t.
“Was this ever…hard for you?”
“You’re joking, right?” Jack asked. Brady shook his head. “I hid this for years from Eve before finally opening up. I was terrified she’d reject me or divorce me.”
“Seriously?”
Jack nodded. “Lilly and I fell into it quickly, but that was because we knew who we were going in. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s easy for u
s. Half the time I’m scared shitless that I’m going to hurt her.”
“Wow.” Man, it was scary as hell, to accept who you were.
“I think everyone grapples with some part of this when they realize it’s who they are,” Jack continued. “But there’s no stronger or weaker half. The submissive might be the bottom, but the bottom is the bedrock. You’re the one who holds the Dominant up, who lets them be in that top space they need to be in. The submissive is also the mirror—you help the Dominant see who they are when they can’t see themselves. But you both have to be present, when you’re in role and when you’re not. You have to talk. Trust, openness and honesty, that’s what this is all about. Not sex.”
Things snapped into place and fell apart at the same time.
“I should’ve told Sam. I should’ve said something sooner instead of worrying she wouldn’t accept me.” Even worrying about her not loving him was partially his fault. After all, he’d stopped saying it also. “I should’ve told her a lot of things.”
“Can you talk to her now?” Jack asked.
“I think it’s too late. We might be too broken now.”
“Broken things can be mended. I don’t think you’re broken beyond repair.”
“Why not?”
“Simple. Because my little brother happens to be a rock star at problem solving.” He smiled. “And because you still love each other.”
It was simple. It was the simplest answer of all.
“Thanks. That helps. And sorry I flaked on your birthday, by the way.”
Jack clapped him on the shoulder. “We’ll celebrate again when Sam comes home.”
Brady headed out, starting toward home, then got off the Pike and went to Sam’s parents’ place. He’d done her wrong by not being honest. By letting her take on too much. He’d been hiding at work, making it the place he felt like a superhero, when it was his excuse. He was avoiding things, sleepwalking through his marriage, hiding pieces of himself and thinking that was the right way to keep Sam, terrified to lose her for real.
He reached the apartment, found a spot and got out, but no one answered when he buzzed in. Brady stepped back and looked up to the second-floor window. The lights were off—she must’ve been out with the girls, but he stared anyway. It was where she’d been all week, where she’d slept and maybe cried and felt terrible about what had happened because she thought it was all her fault.
It wasn’t. He was as much to blame for things falling apart as she was.
He didn’t know if he could keep up with her—she might want more experimentation than he could handle—but then it was his job to speak up. He couldn’t fix the past, but he could change things going forward. It was time to take ownership over his struggles with communication, to stop hiding and step up to the plate.
It began to rain. He got back in the car, headed in a different direction. He wasn’t going to let this be their ending. Their love was special—a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and that kind of connection didn’t crash and burn in a week after seventeen years. He could be her bedrock. Her mirror. Her lucky charm and her hero.
She was his Sammy. And he was going to figure out a way to get her back.
31
“I still don’t get why we can’t go inside.”
Sam sat in the driver’s seat, too shell-shocked to answer Allegra’s question.
She’d taken the girls to get ice cream after school, and after she’d allowed Allegra to play a game on her phone and started Hope on her homework, she’d logged into the Choate trust bank account on her iPad. It had been painstaking work, going back transaction by transaction, but she’d separated the legitimate expenses from what she was pretty certain were bogus ones.
“Mom?”
“Because it’s raining and I don’t have an umbrella. So let’s wait for Dad.”
Allegra huffed out a dramatic sigh and mashed her head against the seat. Oh, the teenager she was about to become.
It was a dumb excuse, though. They wouldn’t have come back to the house at all except Sam had been so distracted she’d forgotten to have the girls pack their bags for the weekend. She should put on her big-girl panties and go inside with them, but she’d seen a moving van parked down the street and it had freaked her out, like it was some kind of omen. Plus, it was pouring—the kind of rain that fell in sheets and forced green out of the brown grass, drenching the pavement until it ran in rivers. But the truth was, she was stalling.
She needed more time to think.
Back at the ice cream shop, she’d zoomed in on the images of the cashed checks. There was no discernible difference in the signatures, except that the ones made out to cash had a slightly different tilt to the G in Reginald. It wasn’t enough of a smoking gun, but the Saks and corset shop purchases were. She’d been sure Pierce had been the one stealing, but it was Hanna, to the tune of eight grand.
She couldn’t prove it, though. Not without those receipts. So what was she going to do?
She could tell Hanna to come clean, but Pierce had told Sam not to say anything. Would doing so put her job in jeopardy? She could go straight to Pierce, but Hanna was her friend. At least, Sam thought she was.
She stared out the windshield and watched the rain run rivulets along the glass.
Hanna had talked about discovery, about not keeping secrets, but she’d been lying. And Sam had been so caught up in everything, so blinded by the excitement and flattery of Hanna’s attention, that she hadn’t examined the situation. She’d wondered how Hanna afforded her lavish life, but pushed it to the side. And now she’d been intimate with, allowed her children to be around and possibly ruined her marriage over, someone who’d committed a crime.
It stole her breath, the idea of losing Brady for good. How had she been so horribly, completely wrong?
“Daddy’s here,” Hope said from the backseat.
Her stomach leapt as she watched Brady’s car pull into the driveway. She hadn’t seen him in almost a week—the longest they’d ever been separated. He unfolded himself from the front seat, stood up to his full height, and landing her eyes on him was like getting in a deep breath after holding it, like a good spring rain after a long, cold winter. He was wearing a suit, too. Not the one he’d worn to the wedding, but a softer one—a gray blazer with a baby-blue shirt beneath it that picked up the color of his eyes.
She wanted to run to him—to throw herself into his arms in the rain like a scene from a cheesy movie or one of her books, but she stayed where she was. Brady squinted in the rain, curls getting doused, then held up a finger and went into the house. He emerged a minute later with a giant umbrella they’d bought after Hope was born. It was impractical and bumped into everything, but Brady had thought it was funny and named it Godzillumbra.
He neared the driver’s side, and Sam lowered her window.
“Somebody call for an umbrella?” he asked. He was smiling, too. Not a big, goofy Brady smile—his eyes weren’t sparkling—but that silliness was there.
“Yeah,” she said. “Thank you.”
But then he was looking at her and frowning. “What’s wrong?”
Months ago, she would’ve had to yell for him to even realize it was raining. Now, not only had he brought out an umbrella, but he knew something was up without having to ask.
“Um…” She nodded at the kids, then shook her head. Brady’s brows pushed together, his frown deepening beneath his beard. God, she wanted to bury her face in that beard, to go back in time and tell herself to realize what she had with him.
“You wanna come in?” he asked.
Such a small offer, and yet she was flooded with relief. Sam nodded, and he opened the back door. “Come on. Everyone under Godzilla.”
“Godzillumbra,” Allegra corrected happily.
They got out of the car and squished together as the rain suddenly came down harder, and booked it toward the house.
When they were safely inside and a little breathless, Brady waited on the doorstep and shook out the u
mbrella. He’d changed the storm door for the screen, something she’d always had to remind him about before, and Sam could smell his cologne mixed with spring rain through the mesh panel.
“Mom, do we have to pack now?” Allegra asked.
Sam and Brady exchanged glances. “Not yet,” she said without breaking eye contact. “You can go play for a bit.”
The girls scampered off in different directions. Brady smiled through the screen.
“Hold on a sec, okay?” he asked. “I’ll be right back.”
“Okay.”
Sam treaded slowly into the kitchen. Her mouth fell open as she looked around. It wasn’t the off-kilter placement of everything that had her putting a hand to her chest. It was the Post-it Notes dotting dozens of different places. Cups over one cabinet. Bowls over another. A list of the girls’ favorite snacks on the pantry door.
On the counter, Allegra’s prescription, and on a note in all caps: MORNING DOSAGE.
She walked into the living room. Another Post-it with Allegra and Hope’s favorite TV shows written on it was stuck to the remote. One was slapped on the coat closet door that said yellow jacket—Allegra’s fave. Another beneath it said Bring down scarves and hats. Bring up bicycle helmets.
Tears sparked in Sam’s eyes, hot and painful. This was what he’d done in her absence—tried to keep track on his own with the system she’d shown him years ago. How cruel she’d been, not helping him get things right the way she’d promised.
Sam was still standing like that when Brady came inside, his arms full of grocery bags.
“You went shopping?” she asked.
He dropped the bags on the table. “Yeah.” His hair was sopping wet. Even his lashes had drops of rain on them. “Tried my best to remember everything.”
She wanted to take a towel and dry off his hair.
“I see your notes.”
He gave her a small, sheepish grin. “Not the most technical system, but it works.”
He took off his rain-spattered suit jacket. The dress shirt beneath it barely contained his arms and shoulders, arms that were once hewn for football, not hugs or housework or holding or their children. When they met, she’d wanted to protect him. Shelter him. To tuck him away from anyone who’d dare hurt him and keep him safe. She’d never thought about what it must’ve been like for him to need protecting.
Their Discovery (Legally Bound Book 3) Page 29
