In spite of the fact that he’d made it home to Philly for a grand total of seventy-two hours over the course of those years, his mother still encouraged him. He’d cultivated a passion for something he truly loved, and he felt right at the helm of a restaurant, restoring it to former glory.
Yes, he missed his family, and was in awe even then of how fast Bree seemed to slingshot from a gap-toothed little girl to the cusp of adolescence. But his own father had left when Gavin was five, and Bree’s father died when she was a toddler. Gavin could barely remember a time when it wasn’t just the three of them, and he owed it to his mother and sister to make a good living, to support them the best he could, even if it had to be from afar. He wasn’t crazy about being absent for such long stretches, but there would be plenty of time to make up for that later. Doing whatever he could to bolster his mother’s single-parent salary while gaining the experience to write his own ticket had seemed like a win-win of the first order.
Until his mother got sick, and he realized he’d failed both her and Bree miserably by not being there until it was too late.
Gavin shook off the wad of guilt building in his gut and got out of the Audi, welcoming the snap of cold night air around him as he stalked up the porch steps. No matter how badly he wanted to, he couldn’t change the past. The most important thing now was to take care of Bree, and while their talk earlier in the week seemed like small potatoes on the surface, the relief he felt at finally making progress tasted more like a four-course banquet. He might not be perfect parent material, but he was getting the hang of things, slowly but surely.
The sound of voices floating into the foyer from the living room hit him like a thick web of confusion, and concern immediately pinpricked his senses. Frozen to the threshold between the porch and the cottage, he tried to place the voices. Bree’s light timbre mixed in with Sloane’s deeper cadence, and the concern upgraded a level. He hadn’t told Sloane about Bree’s nightmares, but what if she’d had one? It was after midnight, and a nightmare might explain why she was up. A curl of laughter shot from the kitchen right into Gavin’s chest.
If Bree had woken from a nightmare, no way would they be laughing over it. So what the hell was going on?
Stuck to his spot between outside and in, he listened. The actual words were unintelligible, but the way Bree’s girlish voice layered over Sloane’s throaty laughter took a potshot at his gut. The sounds held strains of something he hadn’t heard in far too long.
They sounded so happy.
Realizing that he was standing in an open doorway with a subarctic chill at his back, Gavin stepped all the way into the cottage with a quick head shake. He pulled the front door shut behind him, and the resulting noise reduced both voices in the kitchen to hushed whispers.
“Hey!” Sloane poked her head in from the doorframe, eyeing him mischievously. “You’re home.”
“Is Bree okay? She’s not normally up this late.” He nodded toward the back of the cottage. Although his fear had downgraded after hearing the sounds of happiness coming from the kitchen, it wouldn’t hurt to be one hundred percent sure everything was fine. And to find out why on earth Bree was awake if nothing was really wrong.
Sloane’s eyes widened, fringed by her sooty lashes. “Oh! I know it’s late, but . . . well, it’s Friday night. And Bree wanted to stay up until you got home.”
Gavin’s pulse stuttered with shock. “She . . . what? Are you sure everything’s okay?”
Sloane released an overdrawn sigh, clucking her tongue. “You are such a pessimist. Of course everything is okay. She just has a surprise for you.”
“What is it?” He swallowed tightly, tamping his feelings into a smooth veneer.
“Please. Didn’t anyone ever tell you how a surprise works? You have to close your eyes.”
The worry he’d felt when he’d walked through the door gave way to a startled laugh. “You’re serious.”
“No, you’re serious. But I’ll try not to hold it against you.” She walked into the living room, and the sway of her hips beneath her dark, low-slung jeans made Gavin’s libido yawn and stretch like a bear coming out of hibernation.
“Gee, thanks.” Damn, Sloane looked pretty with her face all lit up in excitement. And clearly, the surprise was something good. How bad could it be to just play along?
Sloane sidled up to him, wearing that infuriatingly sexy grin he simultaneously loved and wished she’d keep to herself, and said, “Come on, close ’em. I promise I won’t lead you astray.”
Every single one of the just-business defenses he’d built over the course of the week disintegrated into dust. He jammed his eyes shut, more of an act of self-preservation than obedience. “Okay. They’re closed.”
Sloane’s obvious buzz of happiness was catching, and despite the reluctance he’d felt just minutes ago, Gavin found himself giving in to the bolt of eager curiosity running through his veins. If the conversation he and Bree had shared earlier in the week was a glimmer of hope, her staying up late to surprise him with something was an out-and-out bonfire of possibility.
“Okay, Bree. Are you ready?” Sloane’s voice lilted past his ear, and his anticipation amped even higher when Bree chimed in.
“I guess. Okay, yeah.” Traces of something soft folded over Bree’s voice, and Gavin scrambled through his mental Rolodex to try to place it.
But before he could put a finger on the hushed emotion cradled in her words, Sloane said, “Okay. Open your eyes.”
Gavin raised his lids, but the image in front of him made no sense. Blinking didn’t offer any help in the clarity department, and finally, after ten seconds of full-on staring, recognition flattened him like a steamroller moving downhill.
No way.
“Bree?” The word thudded past his lips, laden with shock.
“Ta-da.” She gave an awkward twirl, not meeting his eyes when she returned to stillness. The Bree standing in the doorframe was an altered version of a beloved familiar image, and he went back to blinking in an attempt to reconcile the two in his brain. But the more he did it, the less it worked.
He barely recognized her.
“What did you do to your hair?” Gone was the light brown ponytail he’d watched her pull into place just this morning, replaced by a sleek new haircut that barely grazed her shoulders. And wait, how did it look so much lighter than it had just hours ago? She looked just like the older girls she’d been hanging out with in Philadelphia, and the realization made his unease return with a nasty vengeance.
Bree’s cheeks flushed. “I . . . I got it cut.”
“It’s a different color.” Anger welled up, demanding release, but it was circumvented by a fresh wave of shock as Gavin registered the trendy new jeans and V-neck sweater she was wearing. And was that lipstick shaping her mouth into a sheer pink frown? “How did you do all of this?”
Bree’s eyes darted over his shoulder, her frown flattening into a thin line. “We just went to the mall.”
His anger ratcheted higher, and he swung around to face Sloane. “You did this?” God damn it, Sloane being impulsive with herself was one thing—she was an adult, even if she didn’t always act like one. But letting Bree go from zero to grown-up in an afternoon was totally over the line.
Sloane took a step back, eyes as wide as dinner plates. “She needed a couple of new outfits for school, so we went to the outlet mall in Riverside.”
“Funny, last time I checked, hair color wasn’t on the school supply list.” His tone could’ve inspired an ice age, but he was well past giving a shit.
“There’s a training school for stylists around the corner from the mall. The highlights are only temporary—they wash out in a couple of shampoos, and they offered to do them free with her haircut. They’re not that much different from her natural color, so I didn’t think it was such a big deal. In fact, I thought you’d be happy.”
“Happy?” The word reeked of sarcasm, but Gavin made no effort to rein it in. “You thought I’d be happy ab
out the fact that she looks like she’s eighteen? You’ve got to be joking!” Temporary or not, thirteen was way too young for hair color. Those shampoos needed to start happening, pronto.
Before he could draw enough breath to tell her to get scrubbing, Bree threw her hands up with a shout, startling the hell out of him.
“Are you ever going to stop treating me like a baby? It’s my head, and I’m standing right here!”
He slashed a hand through his hair in frustration, but refused to budge on the argument. “I know you’re not a baby, Bree, but you’re not an adult, either. You can’t just run around getting makeovers like you’re grown up.”
A niggling thought trickled into his consciousness, and the entirety of what Sloane had said hit Gavin like a delayed reaction.
He turned to narrow his eyes at her. “Wait. You said the highlights were free. Where exactly did you get the money for the rest of this little excursion?”
Sloane’s wince was so slight, he would’ve missed it if he hadn’t been staring her down. “From the cabinet in the kitchen.”
“The money I left for emergencies?” It was all he could do to drag in a deep breath and let her answer.
“Yes.”
He turned toward Bree, reaching for as much calm as he could muster under the circumstances. “Go to bed. I need a word with Sloane in private.”
“But—”
“I’m not arguing with you about this.” His tone sounded as frostbitten as he felt, but his cool was bound to be short-lived if he kept looking at this transformed version of her. “We’ll discuss it in the morning.”
“What’s the point?” Her knuckles flashed in a thin string of bright white as she tightened her fists at her sides, and every ounce of progress they’d made over the course of the week evaporated into thin air.
“You never let me do anything, anyway! Don’t even bother grounding me. I’m not coming out of my room ever!”
Before Gavin could tell her to stop overreacting, she ran down the hall toward her room, punctuating her departure with a bone-jarring slam of her door.
Which left him alone in the living room with Sloane.
“Gavin, I’m sorry. I just thought—”
He stopped her apology midbreath, unable to hold back. “You didn’t think at all! Hair color? Makeup? There’s nothing about this that’s okay.”
Sloane bit her lower lip hard enough to leave two crescent-shaped indentations in the curve of pink skin. “It’s only a little lip gloss and temporary hair color. They’re both easily undone.”
“But your bad judgment isn’t,” he pressed, taking an angry step closer. “You’re supposed to be taking care of her, not stirring up trouble. Just because you go through life like there aren’t any freaking rules doesn’t mean it’s how her life should be.”
“I said I was sorry.” Although Sloane’s words were nothing more than a whisper, they assaulted his senses as if she’d bellowed them like a drill sergeant.
He snapped, “Sorry isn’t good enough!”
Sloane flinched visibly, and the rest of his anger jammed to a halt in his throat. But rather than apologize again or back down, she met his gaze head-on.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe the way I do things makes me a crappy candidate for a babysitter, and maybe I did use poor judgment when I took Bree to the mall without asking you first. But that kid opened herself up to you tonight. I might not know squat about how to raise a thirteen-year-old, but let me tell you what I do know. If you push her away for the sake of what you think she should be doing, she’s going to shut you out completely.”
Gavin stood, stunned into silence by Sloane’s words as she picked up her things in a swift grab and walked toward the door.
“And you can trust me one hundred percent on that.”
Gavin knew he should make his feet move, that in spite of how much she probably hated him right now, he should go check on Bree, or do something. But he couldn’t remove himself from his spot in the living room.
No way had he pushed Bree away. If anything, it had been the other way around. And anyway, it was his job as her guardian to consider her well-being. She couldn’t just throw on makeup and get her hair colored on a whim, no matter how subtle and natural-looking the result might be. She was thirteen, for Chrissake!
She’s going to shut you out completely.
Despair welled up inside him like a cut in need of attention, stinging mercilessly as it rushed to the surface. With the singular exception of asking Sloane to continue as her sitter, every time he tried to do his best for Bree, they ended up further and further apart. No, she didn’t make things particularly easy all the time, but she wasn’t a bad kid, either. Was he honestly that terrible a parent, just because he worried about what would happen if she grew up too fast?
Was he keeping her from growing up at all?
“Okay, Mom, help me out here.” Gavin’s whisper rasped through the postmidnight silence in the cottage, tugging its way from his lungs. “I want to do what’s right for Bree, but I don’t know what that is.”
God, this was crazy. After a few minutes of forcing his breath to shift from shaky to smooth, he scrubbed a hand over his face and ushered his thoughts into rational order. The odd recollection of old memories that he’d shuffled through in the driveway, the bittersweet pang of coming home to happy, feminine voices—he cataloged each of these things in his brain, turning them over and over like waves on a shoreline.
The note in Bree’s voice just before he’d opened his eyes flickered back to his memory, winding through the corners of his brain until the emotion behind her familiar cadence plowed the breath from his chest.
Hope. Oh, God, Sloane was right. It had been hope, and even though he’d never hurt Bree on purpose, he’d pulled that hope out from under her all the same.
Gavin’s purposeful stride had him halfway down the hall before his brain registered the movement, but it didn’t matter. All the forethought in the world wasn’t going to make what he had to say any easier, and even the most eloquent speech could be shot down by a righteously indignant thirteen-year-old.
He really was a terrible parent. How could he have missed this?
“Bree?” He knocked in an awkward thump. “Hey, are you awake? It’s important.”
After an excruciating minute that felt ten times as long, she mumbled, “It’s open, but I’m not coming out.”
Undaunted, Gavin turned the knob. Bree had scrubbed her face and put on her pajamas, and she kept the book on her propped-up knees open, as if to highlight the idea that she felt intruded upon. The sparse light cast down from the bedside lamp kept her expression in the shadows, and he noticed with a sharp pang that Bree had tried to pull her hair back into a ponytail, only now it was too short to cooperate. Tawny wisps framed the angles of her cheekbones, and she swiped at them in vain.
“Hey. I was hoping maybe we could, um, talk a little.” He shuddered inwardly. Eloquent he was not.
“You’re mad, I’m grounded. What is there to talk about?”
“You’re not grounded. And while I’m not thrilled, I might’ve . . . jumped the gun on the mad thing.”
Bree’s head snapped up, and another chunk of hair feathered from her sad excuse for a ponytail. “What?”
“Got your attention with that one, huh?” He shoved his hands in his pockets. Damn, he hadn’t felt this inundated with guilt since he’d missed her solo in the fourth grade choral concert because he’d had to cover a busy holiday shift at the last minute.
“No.” She turned toward him, so slightly that it was barely perceptible. “Okay, maybe.”
It was as much of an invitation to start talking as Gavin was going to get, so he took it. “Look, before I say anything else, you need to know that first and foremost it’s my job to make sure you’re taken care of. Sometimes that means I need to make decisions that aren’t popular with you. I’m not going to apologize for wanting to make sure you’re safe and okay.”
Bree grimace
d and wrapped her arms around herself, but he held up a hand. “But I am going to apologize for yelling at you. I shouldn’t have done it, and I’m sorry.”
She examined him with a wary flick of her eyes. “It’s no big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” Gavin argued, earning a startled glance that held his rather than dropping like the first. “Yes, I was mad, but yelling at each other doesn’t solve anything. And even though I didn’t intend to, I hurt your feelings, which isn’t okay. It’s just . . .” His throat tightened, but he forced his words to persevere. “There’s kind of a steep learning curve to this parenting thing, and I’m not always very good at it.”
After an interminable silence that scraped at his ears, she said, “You’re okay.”
He fought off the urge to heave an obvious sigh of relief. “So do you think maybe the next time you need something, you could try asking your okay brother? If I’d known you needed school clothes, I’d have taken you to get them. It’s part of taking care of you, Bree.”
“Yeah, but some stuff is embarrassing. Like . . .” She dropped her eyes and mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like buying bras, and his knees became momentarily undependable.
“Um, well, yeah.” Christ, he was wholly unequipped for this. But it was more headway than he’d made in the ten months since their mom had died, and he refused to abandon the conversation, even in the face of unmentionables on his sister. “Maybe we can let the saleslady at the store help you with that. But at least I could take you to the mall. And take care of the other things.”
“You never would’ve let me get my hair cut off.” Bree made a face, and her arms migrated from around her rib cage to cradle her hips as she shifted against her pillows to look at him fully. A quick slice of worry cut through him at the streak of pain on her freshly scrubbed features, but then it was gone.
“I wouldn’t have let you get it colored, no. But we could’ve talked about the haircut.” A wave of fresh guilt splashed through him, prompting him to boldly sit next to her on the edge of her bed. “I was a little busy being thickheaded before, so I didn’t say this, but you really do look pretty.”
Stirring Up Trouble Page 16
