A Date with Desire

by Heather McGovern

  And he’d sooner trash his bike than hurt Anna. Not when she was the one who had complete faith in him.

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t like talking about the past and my family because . . . our past, my past, none of it is great.”

  She edged closer, offering her support. “What happened?”

  More like what didn’t happen. A string of happenings, over the course of years. Like bad-shit dominoes, falling down through the Bradley family’s lives. The resort slowly going under, his parents’ marriage falling apart, Dev screwing up left, right, and center, because what better way to deal with your family officially falling apart than to go from troublemaker to full-on self-sabotage?

  Then, almost getting arrested wasn’t enough, so he went for college expulsion and across-the-board disappointment.

  Anna wasn’t messed up like she thought. She was lost, and not handling it well. He had been messed up.

  And even though he was trying to make things right now, had kept his nose clean for years now, and was doing his best to make up for lost time, be the brother he should’ve been for the last decade, nothing changed the fact that he’d screwed up, big-time, for a long time.

  He couldn’t change his past. All he could do was work on himself, and everyone in town and their brother knew why. He didn’t want Anna knowing it too.

  “Did it have to do with breaking into that Tool and Tackle shop and the church?”

  Shit.

  But she already knew some of his past, didn’t she? Whether he wanted to talk about it or not, she was there when he’d had to face Mr. Miller.

  “Had a little something to do with the tackle shop, yeah. I don’t . . .” He clenched his teeth, warring with his desire to share some of himself with her, when for years all he’d done was keep all the broken, ugly parts under lock and key. “I don’t know why some of those store owners were so into me getting the festival off the ground.”

  “Why wouldn’t they be? They like you.”

  “They shouldn’t. They probably like the festival and they’re doing this in spite of me. That’s . . .” He dragged a hand through his hair, scrubbing at the base of his skull. “That’s why I wanted you to come along. Me, by myself, they’d have laughed me out of the shop. But with you, I have more credibility. I’m not just the Bradley family screwup; I’m the guy who’s maybe gotten his act together.”

  “Why would they think you’re the Bradley family screwup?”

  “Breaking into the tackle shop and trashing the place wasn’t the last time I got into trouble. Matter of fact, I think it was the first.”

  “Then . . . the church?”

  “No.” His laugh tasted bitter. He wished it was only two or three instances of trouble he’d gotten into, and not the dozens. “Some trespassing, stealing. Underage drinking. I didn’t break into the church until my senior year. A place to go to get away from the resort, away from my bickering family. Made myself a hangout, invited my friends, and we smoked and drank and painted the walls, burned stuff in trash cans to stay warm.”

  Her mouth went slack at his purge of cold, hard truth.

  Bet he didn’t look so romantic now. And now that he’d started spilling the truth, he couldn’t stop.

  “Roark was horrified. Raised hell about me being a bad influence on Sophie and Trevor, and that only made me madder because he was worried about them, and not me. I spent years being a little shit. Getting in fights, drinking. I was pissed off at the world and I wanted everyone to know. I succeeded too, even got blamed for stuff I didn’t do. The rare times I was good, I was still bad. The coup de grâce, though? Getting kicked out of college.”

  There was no point in editing the facts now. She wanted to know about him; then he might as well let her see.

  “After my brother pulled a million strings to get me in, and the local sheriff agreed not to arrest me and Wright and Jake for vandalizing a church because it might keep us out of school, I go and get kicked out.”

  Her eyes wide, Anna swallowed. Her whole life she’d probably never associated with someone who hadn’t graduated with honors, never mind getting kicked out. He didn’t want to see shock in her eyes.

  “Why were you kicked out of college?”

  Her struggle to line up the man she knew with the man he used to be, hurt all the more. He was a disappointment, or at least had been, for a long time, and he didn’t want her knowing that guy.

  Even if she was leaving someday soon, or maybe especially because their time together was finite, he didn’t want to see that suspicion in Anna’s eyes, the way it lingered in everyone else’s.

  “I . . . I had alcohol on campus. But mainly it was providing alcohol to my nineteen-year-old girlfriend and her underage friends.”

  He wrinkled his nose, scratched it, the memory like a bad smell. “I didn’t keep an eye on her at the party we threw, and she got obliterated. As in black out, go to the hospital and have your stomach pumped, drunk.”

  “Oh my god.”

  Dev swiped at his brow. Years had passed and that night still brought on a cold sweat.

  “I was twenty-one, so I bought the booze and I should’ve been the responsible one, but I wasn’t.” Talking about that night brought it all back. Panic like he’d never known. He’d been so certain the girl was going to die and it’d be his fault.

  Everything that everyone said and thought about him was true. Dev cleared his throat against the knot threatening to choke him.

  Anna reached for him, her hand on his leg. Why would she comfort him? He was the villain in this story, not the victim.

  “Anyway, I was the older boy with the bad record, and her father was friends with the dean, so forget a probationary period. It was bye-bye college, hello everyone knowing why I’d come back to Honeywilde.”

  Frustration made his skin crawl. “But I deserved the punishment, and eventually it made me get my shit together.”

  “You came home and everything was okay?”

  His coarse laugh made her jump. “Hell no. Of course not. That’d be too reasonable for me. No, I came back to Windamere and the resort was on the brink of failure, and everyone saw me as the guy who got kicked out of college—especially since my brother was the prince of Honeywilde—so I did my best to live up to their expectations.”

  Her shoulders slumped.

  Anna was the kind of person who’d want this story to have a happy ending, but that’s not how real life worked.

  “I partied my ass off and did my best to be destructive.”

  He would never forget the disappointment in Roark’s eyes, or the vein popping out in his temple. It’d been a miracle they didn’t come to blows the day Dev came home. They’d fought before—dozens of times, over petty stuff—not this time though. Somehow they both knew, if they fought over something as serious as Dev ruining his life, there’d be no coming back.

  “What did your parents say? They had to be livid.”

  Dev shook his head and swallowed again, even harder. The need for their outrage, their disgust, their feeling some way about him, was still a fresh, empty hole inside him. He never cried anymore, but his voice trembled as he spoke. “Nothing. They . . . they said nothing.”

  Anna remained quiet a moment, but her hand on his leg tightened. “Oh.”

  One tiny word, laden with an understanding he felt wash over him.

  “Is that why you were so self-destructive?”

  He jerked his chin in a nod and she nodded too.

  “And I was furious.” He spat out the word. “We could’ve had everything. All of us. When I was little, we were fine and . . . I don’t know what happened. No one really knows what happened. My grandfather starts this amazing inn, gives it to my dad, we have a nice home and we were good kids, and then it all went to hell. Money got tight and either Mom wasn’t taking her meds or Dad had withdrawn and was shut up somewhere with a drink. It got to where no one was ever happy, our family slowly fell apart, and no one was doing anything about it.”

>   Anna blinked, her eyes glassy as she studied him.

  “Roark did his best to keep us together, but he was a kid too, and he’s not the kind to stand up and yell bullshit. I am. So one day, I don’t know, I think I was thirteen or fourteen, I start yelling at him for trying to hold us all together. I said, ‘If Mom and Dad are so miserable, why are they still together? If they hate the inn so much, why are they still here?’ Then they separated. Mom left and as soon as Roark finished school, Dad left too, leaving us an inn on the brink of collapse. Thanks, Dad.”

  Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath, and he brushed the pads of his fingers over her nails, the shine as bright as the day she arrived. “When I moved back home, I’d go out all the time, drinking. I’d make a mess of myself at night and sleep all day. Then . . . one night I got pulled.”

  “For?”

  “DUI.” He scratched and shook his head. “Guess I hadn’t screwed up enough yet.”

  She bit at her bottom lip.

  “Anyway, the cop who pulled me over? It was Jake. Jacob Miller. Mr. Miller’s kid. The guy who was right there with me and Wright in that church, drinking and raising hell all over town. He looks me up and down and all I see is pity. That pissed me off. He’d gotten his shit together, so why couldn’t I?”

  That night could’ve been last night, he still saw it so clearly.

  He’d been in shock. Seeing Jake all cleaned up, police uniform, put together and an actual voice of authority and reason.

  Even when Dev had cussed at him, tried his hardest to pick a fight because, deep down, he’d wanted to get his ass kicked, figured he deserved it, Jake had moved out of his way. Nothing but a calm voice and patient understanding.

  “He, um . . .” Dev coughed to clear the knot from his throat. “He told me to get in his car. He’d take me home. We pull up at the inn and, I swear to god, I’ve never seen Roark run so fast. Sophie is right behind him and . . .” He rubbed at his eyes. “She’s crying and Roark yells, ‘Is it Dev? Is he okay?’ and I realize, their first thought isn’t that I’ve gotten my ass arrested or I’m in trouble again. They think I’m dead. Or hurt or . . .”

  The panic on his brother’s face, the tears in Sophie’s eyes, they still hurt. He’d never forget the look on their faces that night.

  He felt as though his heart had stopped, his vision tunneling in on them from the back of that patrol car, even as they couldn’t see him. “I wanted to hurt myself, but I’d gone numb. I wasn’t hurting myself, I was hurting them. My parents might not care, but they cared, and I was breaking their hearts.” He shook off the stinging in his eyes. “Right then I swore I’d stop. I’d never drink again, if that’s what it took, I’d work my ass off, scrub toilets—whatever I had to do so I’d never see that look on their faces again.”

  Anna squeezed his hand, her eyes misting up.

  “They were working so hard on Honeywilde, to get it back up and running. All hours, they worked and cared. They wanted this place to be joyful again and . . . I did too. I really did, even though I was screwing everything up. Roark told me I had to work if I was going to stay, and he was right. Our folks were gone, and the only people who gave a damn about me were struggling to survive. The thing that pulled me out of the spiral was I didn’t want to see my brothers and sister hurt or fail. I’d failed enough for all of us. I wasn’t going to let them go down in flames too, so . . . I started getting my shit together.”

  “How did that work out?”

  “Horrible at first, then really rough.” He laughed darkly. “Then, painfully and slowly, things got better. Roark always had to take care of us growing up, and I should’ve been there for him and Honeywilde from the start. Part of the resort is mine and I knew that was something. I wanted to be responsible for what little was mine and, in bits and pieces, Roark and Sophie could count on me enough to help out.”

  Now, simply helping out wasn’t enough. He was a different person. He had ideas and he knew how to work hard. The only way to make people see him as something other than who he used to be was to prove to them he could do more. Be more.

  “I want to be seen as more than the problem kid for the rest of my life, you know?”

  Then maybe he could stop seeing himself that way too.

  Anna turned, her fingers curled, holding his. “And this festival is the biggest way to do that?”

  Chapter 22

  She already knew the answer.

  Now she knew why this festival was so important to Dev; the same way he knew her fear about going on in life without her father, the well-hidden, insecure side of her, and the wild and wanton side that wanted to break free.

  More than anything, she’d needed the man with the sly smirk and comeback, always on his guard, to confide in her. She’d needed Dev to be defenseless too, and he was.

  He’d let her in and through all his destructive behavior, she saw the man who cared so much he kept hurting himself to prove he didn’t. Until he realized he was hurting the people who loved him.

  Dev laughed, forced and rough. “Hey, they can’t all hate you if you save their favorite event of the year, right?”

  Her chest ached, her eyes burned. “No. And I don’t think anyone hates you. Not nearly as much as you’ve hated yourself.”

  Chin lowered, he lifted his gaze to meet hers. The vulnerability in his blue eyes lanced her heart. “But what about you? Hearing all that, I can’t possibly look like a romantic. You still want to waste what’s left of your vacation on me?”

  Anna kissed him.

  She could explain how she felt, use a lot of words to make him understand that nothing he did in his past would change the way she saw him today. She could argue that who he was back then actually made him the man he was now, but Dev wasn’t a man who needed a lot of words.

  After all of that, he’d be sick of words by now. He showed her how he felt with action, not words, and she’d do the same.

  She kissed him long and deep, until his fingers found their way to her hair, his lips to her neck.

  So many pieces fell into place. The reason Dev was so determined to pull off planning the festival, even when faced with little help from anyone else. He wanted to revive the event for the town, but his motivations weren’t about simply helping out the business owners and locals. This was his apology. To the town, to his family, to himself.

  Whether he realized it or not, giving this Blueberry Festival back to the people of Windamere, was Devlin’s way of saying he was sorry for all he’d done. Proving to everyone he was a decent guy now. He’d changed.

  Some of what he’d told her was shocking and maybe he did deserve to get kicked out of college, but he didn’t deserve harsh judgment, at least not anymore.

  She’d seen Sophie and Wright around him, and got no sense that they saw him as anything other than wonderful. The older brother, Roark—she had no idea how he felt, but her opinion was crystal clear.

  Devlin never meant to hurt anyone except himself, and he was doing everything he could to make up for years of destructive behavior. If this festival was to be his redemption, then she’d do everything in her power to make sure the whole thing was the biggest, best festival this town had ever seen.

  She leaned away, catching her breath. “Didn’t you say you needed my help with the festival? For something behind the scenes?”

  “I need you to do an ad for the festival. But we can talk later. No more talking.” He ducked his head for another kiss.

  She leaned away, smiling. “No, I want to do this for you. This is important and I can help. Whatever you need, I’m here.”

  He studied her. Seconds dragged by and he merely looked at her. “Why are you so good to me?”

  Her turn to shrug off the praise, the attention. “I believe in you. And I believe in what you’re doing. I want to make sure this happens.”

  Bafflement that she was so willing crossed his face, still. “We need a slogan. For the festival. Something catchy that we can put in the papers and Madison
can get in the big magazines next month. Something that will make what is basically a three-day craft and food fair so irresistible to day- and weekend-trippers, they come here and spend all their money.”

  Anna smoothed back her hair, trying to think. “Hmm. Irresistible. Mountains. Food, crafts.” The words bounced around her brain like a rock tumbler.

  She needed to spit out a gem for Devlin, and she’d been low on inspiration and sparkly ideas for months.

  But this was important. More important than any deal she’d made at work.

  This was a way to thank Dev for everything he’d done, for taking a rattled, strung-out woman and making her feel human again. Showing her not only how to get away from it all, but how to be brave and deal with the obstacles as they come.

  “Get away. Mountains,” she murmured to herself. They were in the mountains, up high, great-tasting food, arts and crafts. “Great taste in food . . . in art . . . up high . . .” Luckily he didn’t think she was nuts for talking to herself. “Higher elevations . . . I’ve got it!”

  Dev jumped.

  “I’ve got it!” she said again, unsure who was more surprised, her or Dev. “The Windamere Blueberry Festival—Elevate Your Tastes. In the background you have a graphic of the mountains. In the foreground you need a banner, if you don’t already have one. Blue lettering, classy font, maybe blueberries on one side, handmade craft image on the other. Nothing too cutesy, though. You want clean lines, classy. Style. You want the buyers to know it’s a food and crafts fair of quality items. We live in the times of the rebirth of farmers’ markets. People want local and fresh and unique. You need to play into that. Quality, and what’s popular right now, will bring in the urbanites, and they spend a lot of money.”

  Eyes round, Dev stared.

  “The people from nearby counties will already be sold. They’ll be here and be your bread-and-butter sales; you’re going to reach them by word of mouth alone. What you need is something to go beyond that market. Next level. Sell it to the people in Charlotte. Sell it to Greenville, Charleston. Then everyone is selling out of their on-hand supply and taking orders to fill later.”