Just not brave enough to admit that you're in lo— She cut off the thought immediately.
Entirely unlike a storybook damsel, she was working herself into a sticky, sweaty mess, loading boxes into the back of her car to drive to her rented storage unit. There were only a few boxes, since most of her clothes were going with her to Mansfield; anything that was replaceable was staying in the house, but things that weren't—books and cookbooks, photographs and jewellery, what precious possessions she wasn't taking with her—were being put away for safekeeping as she packed up what remained of her life in Shepherd's Creek.
All but one of her projects at work were finalised, her possessions were mostly packed, and Simon was confident she'd have a tenant within the length of time she'd hoped for in Plan A of letting her house. She had a week to go before she hopped in her car and drove the six hours to Mansfield, and she should have been, at the very least, mildly excited about the beginning of her adventure—the first step to being the brave girl her mother had known her to be. But as she loaded boxes into her car, it was all she could do to breathe around the constant sense of loss.
Everything reminded her of Rex.
Even now, she could see the place on the front lawn where they'd kissed as though Mrs. Mooney wouldn't see and gossip to the whole town. The front door reminded her of the first evening she'd found him there, desperate to escape his parents' house. If she looked toward Andrew and Gina's place, she could just see the kitchen window through which they'd waved to each other each morning, drinking coffee over their respective sinks. She'd enlisted the Castlereaghs to look after her vegetable patch while she was gone, but looking at it now just reminded her of finding Rex finishing garden work that she'd been meaning to get to for weeks.
For a moment, the sense that she was abandoning her little vegetable patch—her mother's vegetable patch—was almost enough to bring her to tears.
She hadn't spoken to Rex since their fight. That night, they'd slept in separate bedrooms. Well, maybe he'd slept; she'd spent the whole night awake, alternating between convincing herself she was doing the right thing and that she was ruining not only both their lives but also her only chance at this kind of heart-wrenching, soul-blossoming love.
Then morning had come. She'd heard nothing from him before she reluctantly left the house; not that she necessarily expected to, since he was often gone before she woke, but this time the silence seemed deafening. When she came home that afternoon, it was to find his things cleared from where they'd been scattered between her room and the spare bedroom he'd hardly used. Both beds had been stripped and remade, as though he couldn't bear to have her sleeping on the sheets they'd messed up together. On the kitchen bench, he'd left her key and the kind of succinct, initial-signed note she'd almost become accustomed to leaving for him: Thank you. R. She'd pressed her fingers to the deep-cut letters, feeling his conflict over whether to leave the note in the hard-pressed lines of his handwriting.
She'd sat staring at the notepad for a long of time, wishing despite herself that he'd written more. Thank you for… what? Thank you for letting him stay in her house? For the huge number of baked goods? For the orgasms? She wanted to pin him to the ground and make him tell her all the thoughts that he was no longer sharing. That she'd chased him away from sharing with her.
Then she'd remember the look on his face when he talked about coming home, the wonder in his voice that the place could be so similar but so different. The guilt he felt about being away from his family for so long, and the joy that he'd been able to begin strengthening his relationships with his brothers, the fierce, teasing love among them. And each time she reminded herself that she wouldn't be part of his homecoming anymore, it cut like a knife.
The pain had her hardly sleeping. She had changed the sheets on her bed—their bed, her traitorous mind supplied—twice, but still the room smelled of him. Of them. Maybe that was why she had dreams full of fierce touches and hot skin and the pleasure only he had ever given her and woke each morning aching for him. She had taken to sleeping on the couch in her living room, the TV on in the background so that each time she roused, she at least had something to distract her. Unless it was a cop drama, which just reminded her of him all over again, and who had known there were so damn many of them?
It was a strange combination, heartbreak and throbbing arousal, but she could hardly separate the two. The interactions—not to mention the feelings—between the two of them had been so tied up in their attraction that just thinking of him was enough to send a shot of heat between her legs at the same time she took a shot to the heart.
She pushed another box into the boot of the car as the phone rang. She fished it out. "Hi, Kayla."
"Hi, honey. How are you doing?"
Kayla had been her rock since she'd driven Rex away. Al had cried over a tub of ice cream more than once, both at her place and the house Kayla and Sam shared, and the two of them had been careful not to be as lovey-dovey as usual in front of her. She appreciated the gesture but hated that it needed to be done. Even at her worst moments after she'd split from Harry, she hadn't required that kind of kid-glove handling.
This was worse.
"Same old," Alannah said, putting a hand behind her back to crack her spine back into alignment. "Packing boxes. I'll take them to the storage unit tonight or tomorrow morning."
"How's finishing up at work going?"
"It's okay. I've mostly finished the handovers, just waiting on the plumbing to be finished in the Verne house before I sign it over. This week, I'll take the new architects around to meet the contractors, make sure they know where we're up to and what I have lined up for the next few weeks. Then it's just summary reports, and I'm closing out, packing up my office, and giving presents to all the interns who bought me coffee this year. There are a surprising number of them, you know."
"Are you feeling okay about it?"
"Mostly. This is crunch time, isn't it?" Al joked half-heartedly.
"Are you really feeling okay about it?" Kayla persisted.
"Work? Yes. I'm going to a new job that's going to be bigger than I've ever managed, incredibly well-paid, and a fantastic new opportunity that will open lots of doors for me in the future."
"And the not-work stuff?"
"Also lots of new opportunities." To her horror, she felt tears rising in her throat. "Hey, maybe I'll meet someone while I'm trav—okay, no, that hurts. Still too soon for that."
"Give it time, Al. You're going to be just fine. And I'm here whenever you need me."
"I know," Al sniffed.
"We're going to barbecue tonight. Sam's having another go at cooking sausages, and then I'll cook our real dinner. Do you want to come and have a glass of wine?"
Al thought of her own barren fridge and the cookies she'd just finished eating. Her entire kitchen was in pack-down mode, her baking utensils all boxed up for the storage unit, since she'd inherited most of them from her mother. They were too precious to risk losing while she was gone.
Like her heart.
She gulped in another breath. "Sure. What time?"
"Seven?"
"Great."
Now she just had to hold it together for… oh, the rest of her life?
Rex was not holding it together. He knew that. He'd known it from the first night he lay awake in Jared and Ivy's spare room, knowing he wouldn't be able to sleep at all if he had to stay in his parents' house, so close to the bed he and Alannah had shared. He had known it from the first time Jamie Cameron had to check if he was ill because he looked so haggard. The bruise from Harry Mitchell's fist had only just faded, but it had been replaced by throbbing in every joint in Rex's body and a deeper one in his chest. He hurt. He hurt. Knowing that Al was somewhere in town, going about her life, finishing up at her job, doing her own washing up after baking and packing up the house they'd shared all-too-briefly… if he thought about it for too long, it started to feel like his sanity was going to whirl out of his grasp. So, he worked, suc
h long hours that even Jamie queried it. Long enough hours that his body was exhausted, and still, his sleep was fitful at best. Everything he did seemed to be an aching homage to the woman who was leaving him.
It was almost worse that she was still a week from leaving, because she was gone from him but not quite gone entirely. And Shepherd's Creek being the size it was, he could hardly leave the house without being worried about running into her.
If he saw her looking happy and unaffected, Rex thought his head might explode.
He suddenly had a whole new sympathy for Harry Mitchell, imagining the pain of losing Alannah, compounded by the horror of seeing her with someone else… He wasn't entirely sure he wouldn't get sloshed on a Monday night and deck her new boyfriend. So, he hid out, filling his time with cleaning Jared and Ivy's place as a thank you for putting him up and making use of what cooking skills Al had managed to teach him. He fixed every creaky door in their house and the hole in their fence and went with Simon, the realtor, to inspect several properties. None of them felt quite right, but then, he wasn't sure anything would if it didn't have a head of blonde curls bent over an enormous baker's oven.
More than anything, he missed her. He missed her slightly crooked smile and the way her eyes crinkled up at him in the mornings before he went to work and she went back to sleep. He missed the way she loved her work, and her snarky sense of humour, and the little vegetable patch to which she was devoted, the smell of sugar in her hair that never quite faded, and the feel of her smooth skin against him as he made her cry out his name. There was an Alannah-shaped hole in his life, and he couldn't imagine not feeling the loss.
At the end of the workday, Jamie Cameron had ordered Rex to leave. "I can't be here supervising you at all hours, you know. Go home." He had, remembering belatedly that he'd agreed to help Ivy prep for the meal they were hosting for his parents and Eric tonight. Rex would have thought it just another of the family dinners his mother so loved, except that Ivy had been cagey every time he mentioned it. He washed the day's dirt from himself, wishing he was in an altogether different bathroom, before heading to the kitchen where Ivy was already elbow-deep in a sink full of potatoes.
"Thank you for helping," Ivy said, flicking a smile over her shoulder that only looked slightly forced. "I never know how much to cook when we have your whole family. Even if Nate can't make it tonight, I feel like nothing I make can be as good as your mum's cooking. My only saving grace is that Jared would eat anything I put on the table. And I suppose you, since the two of you eat so much."
"Ivy, I'm hurt that you'd say something like that," Rex said. "I have an appetite like a bird."
"A bird of prey, maybe. Grab a peeler and have a go at some of these, would you?"
Rex nabbed a few potatoes out of the sink and got to work. If he could have chosen a woman for Jared, the most personable and charming of his brothers, it would almost definitely have been someone like Ivy. She was small and sweet, but her core of steel was more than a match for Jared's wild side. Despite being a native of Shepherd's Creek, Ivy had no time for the gossip of living in a small town, and she made no secret of that fact. She ran a successful shop on Main Street that sold clothes and what Jared had repeatedly insisted was correctly called "household décor", in the tone that meant his wife had made him repeat it so many times that it became truth. Rex had never heard more excitement in his brother's voice than when he'd passed on the news that he'd proposed and Ivy had said yes; he'd never seen the man more excited than on the morning of his wedding. Rex had flown in for just a few days to be there when they got married. Instead of choosing one of his brothers to act as best man, Jared had selected all three, and they'd stood up with him as he pledged himself to the woman who now cast her sympathetic smile on Rex.
"So Alannah Green really did a number on you, didn't she?"
The poorly concealed pity in her voice made him want to retch. "Do you mind if we talk about something else?"
"How can we, Rex? I've known you since you were fourteen. You know I consider you my brother. Jared tries to cover up how worried he is by putting month-old footy matches on the TV every night and forcing you to socialise with him silently, but I can't do that. I'm concerned for you, little brother."
"Yeah," Rex said, slowly decreasing the speed of his potato peeling until he was just holding a spud in one hand and the peeler in the other. "Yeah, she did a number on me. She… she doesn't want me."
Ivy nudged him with an elbow. "What does that mean?"
"I'm in love with her, Ives. And all she wanted from me was an adventure. I was just… a rebound for her."
"A rebound? Does that mean she's planning on going back to Harry?"
Rex groaned around the stab of pain in his chest. "How did everyone in this town know about Al and Harry, and I didn't?"
"We were here," Ivy said, deadpan. "We witnessed it. But that's beside the point."
"Is it? He's what she wanted. He was going to give her a home, he said to me. A life. I can't give her that."
"Wanted," Ivy reminded him. "Past tense. She broke up with him. If what Al wanted was stability, she had it." She huffed out a breath. "What you're telling me doesn't make sense—she wants adventure, but to come back to stability, but she broke up with the person who wanted to give her the most stable, most Shepherd's Creek existence you could think of?"
"I don't understand it either, Ivy." Rex felt potato starch smear as he lifted a hand to run it through his hair. "I just know I want to be with her, more than anything, and she is leaving. She is leaving me."
Ivy's small arms wrapped around Rex's torso, heedless of the dirty potato water now soaking his shirt. "You can cry if you want to."
"I'm not going to cry," said Rex, who was fighting tears.
"Even so," Ivy said. "We're here for you. You're always our family, even when you're away from home."
Alannah knew she was dragging down the mood of dinner at Kayla and Sam's place by the way they kept exchanging glances when they thought she wasn't looking. The conversation never halted; the two of them could run a stand-up show with their dialogue. Or maybe a podcast. Did people do stand-up anymore if they weren't on a Netflix special?
Al threw her hands up. "Stop talking with your eyes over my head. I can feel you doing it whenever I'm eating. These sausages are delicious, by the way," she added to Sam, who preened at her praise. He had been attempting to conquer the barbeque for some months now and had such limited success that Kayla had limited his attempts to supermarket brand sausages to avoid ruining her good-quality farmer's market purchases.
"Didn't I say you'd get it eventually?" Kayla asked him. To Al, she said, "We're not talking over your head. We're just worried."
"Why would you be worried? I have a week until I leave. I'm excited." Her tone belied her words—she wished she could sound as enthusiastic for her upcoming job as she had before Rex. Now, all she could think about was what she was leaving behind.
"Are you, though?" Kayla asked, at least an octave above her normal speaking range.
"Yes. Very excited."
"You don't sound it," said Sam, who had obviously missed the sarcasm memo.
"I can't not go," Al said. "Don't you get it? I've been hiding here for five years, hiding in my safe home with my safe boyfriend—the most adventurous thing I've done since my mum died is renovate my house. I've been living this boring, beige little life because it was safe, and I am sick of it. I started clinging to Harry when she died because I needed anything to hold on to, and at first, that was fine, but it's not me. It made me into something small and scared, made me into someone who settled."
"There's nothing wrong with living a quiet life in a small town," Kayla said quietly. "Once you've seen the city lights, you might see that."
"I don't mean anything is wrong with it," Al said. "I'm saying this all wrong. I might come back here someday. My home will always be here. But I've been scared and hiding since the day I no longer had my mum to pick me up if I fell. She al
ways told me I was brave, but since I lost her, I've just been safe. I've been hiding from that kind of hurt by staying with a man I didn't fully love, and now that I've found one that I do—" Her voice broke. "I can't have him. I can't have him and be the kind of person my mum wanted me to be—the kind of person I want to be. Staying with him would be the easy out. Leaving him, leaving here, is hurting me, but I need to do it. I need to know I can do it."
Sam's hand briefly covered Alannah's. "I get it. You're doing what you need to do to feel like you are yourself again."
"I was okay with being background noise for too long," Al said brokenly. "I need to remember who I am when I'm not being sensible, careful Alannah Green."
"Just promise me you'll be safe," Kayla said after a beat. "Just promise me that someday, even if it's just for a visit, you'll come home to us."
"I promise," Al said, and she meant it with all her heart.
The Castlereaghs—minus Nate, who had begged off due to his caseload—had their mouths full of their first bite of Ivy's legendary potato bake when Jared dropped a bombshell.
"Ivy and I have some news," he said, and before anyone had time to swallow and ask, he opened the floor to his wife. "Ives?"
"I'm pregnant," Ivy said in a rush, and there was a beat of stillness in the room. Then suddenly, everyone was trying to swallow, to stand up, to hug Ivy and press their hands to her still-flat belly. Eric had turned in his seat next to Jared, and perhaps because Rex knew Eric wasn't much of one for displays of affection, the hug the two men shared had even more significance. "Knew it would happen," Eric said, over and over. "Knew it would finally happen," and Rex realised that this was something his brothers had discussed—Jared, who was never serious, and Eric, who avoided conversation wherever possible. His chest hurt with the discordance between his happiness for Jared and Ivy and the sadness that he hadn't been included in the conversation about his niece or nephew. He left the two of them to their moment and went to Ivy.
He Comes Home Page 17
