by D. L. Roan
A bright pink hue flooded Breezy’s cheeks. Oh sweet hell, light a match and watch him burn. Did she blush like that everywhere?
“I’ll stay in town another night,” she offered, avoiding his gaze. “I’ll bring my things with me when I come back tomorrow.”
“Breezy, baby,” Connor said, re-lacing his fingers with hers.
Baby? Exactly how cozy had they gotten on their picnic?
“You don’t understand,” Connor continued. “The second you drive out of here, those assholes will be all over you. They’ll follow you everywhere, take a million pictures and run a hundred different searches on you until they figure out who you are, where you live, all the way down to what kind of dental floss you use. They won’t stop until they know exactly why you’re here and how you’re involved with us. And when they do find something, it only gets worse from there. Believe me. You don’t want them to know you exist until it’s absolutely unavoidable.”
“I can’t hide here.”
“I’ll take her to get her stuff,” Carson offered. It would be the perfect opportunity to try one last time to convince her to leave. Hopefully she hadn’t told Connor about his less than charming behavior earlier that day. He was already on thin ice with him as it was. “I’ll take the farm road and come out south of them.”
Connor turned to glare at him. “What part of ‘stay the fuck here’ do you not understand?”
“Language!” Hazel scolded.
“Sorry, Gran,” Connor said, his eyes still locked onto Carson, who bit his tongue, his hands curling into fists at his side. He’d fucked up. He got it. Connor didn’t have to remind him every damn second, and in front of Breezy to boot.
Connor finally broke the standoff and turned back to Breezy. “I’ll go out there and give them enough to hopefully satisfy them for a while, but it would be best if you could stay here tonight and get your things tomorrow.”
“I guess,” Breezy shrugged. “As long as your grandparents are okay with it.”
“Don’t be silly, girl,” Nate piped up. “Haze has already set a place at the table for you.”
Carson looked over and confirmed it. There was an extra plate set right between his and Connor’s.
“I can ask our mom to drive you into town in the morning,” Connor offered. “She’s been asking about you since yesterday and would love to spend some time with you.”
Breezy let out a hesitant breath, but eventually nodded her agreement.
A few hours later, Carson awoke to the sound of his cellphone ringing. He pushed up and peered through squinted eyes at the dark room around him. Where the hell am I?
He blinked away the sleep and recognized his parents’ basement where he’d crashed after leaving his grandparents’. When Connor hadn’t returned from his visit with the reporters to join them for dinner, he’d asked Breezy to take a walk with him, but she’d promptly declined, retreating to her room with Gran. Upon his return home, he’d found Connor’s room empty, so he’d slunk down to the basement to lick his wounds and try to figure out what the hell to do next.
His phone rang again. He fished through the tangled mass of quilts someone had laid over him until he found the source of the offending noise, silencing it with a curse as he noted the midnight hour.
The light from the television in the corner blipped an annoying rhythm that made his head throb against his skull. What the hell was wrong with him? He counted the beer bottles on the floor beside the couch. He hadn’t had so much as a buzz from less than a twelve-pack since he was a teenager.
He stood and stumbled to the bathroom. His cellphone rang again. “Fuck.” He staggered back to the couch and grabbed it up before returning to the bathroom. He had to piss like one of their dads’ stud horses.
“What?” he barked into the phone cradled against his shoulder as he freed his dick. The relief that followed was nothing short of heaven. “Oh yeah,” he moaned as the pressure in his bladder slowly faded.
“Dammit, Carson! Could you put that thing away for ten seconds and answer your damn phone the first time I call?”
He clutched the phone with one hand, shoving the sound of Rod’s screeching voice as far away from his ringing ear as he could, as he stuffed his junk back into his sweat pants and flushed the toilet with the other. He managed to make it back to the couch before their manager finished his rant and he pulled the phone back to his ear.
“Did you hear what I said?” Rod demanded.
“No.” The word came out as a choking cough. He rubbed his chest as the burn in his throat worsened. Had he swallowed a branding iron in his sleep?
“Your brother cancelled New York! On live television!”
What the... He fumbled for the remote and flipped through the channels until he found a local one that showed a rerun of Connor talking with a reporter. The headline banner at the bottom of the screen read ‘McLendon Twins cancel tour for ailing grandfather’.
“Shit!” Adrenaline rushed through Carson’s veins, numbing some of the pain in his aching body.
“What the hell does he think he’s doing? I can’t walk that back, Carson. Live television is not editable! How the hell am I—”
Rod’s rant ended with a loud thud when Carson’s phone bounced off the basement wall. Any residual grogginess was long gone by the time he cleared the stairs and made his way up to his twin’s bedroom. The door was unlocked and Carson barged in, the empty bed under the window fueling his fury.
He flew down the steps two at a time, sliding to a stop when he saw the barn light through the kitchen window. Seconds later he was trudging barefoot through the dewy grass, cursing when he burst into the aisle that ran between two long rows of stalls to find Connor sitting on a bale of hay, strumming away on his guitar.
“Hey,” Connor said, removing the earbuds from his ears. “I like this tune, but I think it would sound better on your guitar.”
“Why?” Carson asked as he stomped over to his brother. “Why the hell even bother writing a new song after what you just did?”
“What I did?” Connor laid his guitar down on the haystack and slid to the ground. “What I did was save our fucking asses, again!”
Connor stomped to the other side of the barn and grabbed his blazer from a hook beside one of the stalls. He reached into the pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, shoving it into his Carson’s chest. “We’re being sued. Consider yourself served.”
Carson unfolded the document and read the first few lines, his eyes crossing at the jumble of legal terms. “What does this have to do with cancelling New York? And why the hell did you tell them about Papa Joe? I thought we agreed not to bring him into this!”
“I cancelled New York because it’s the right thing to do!” Connor railed. “Neither one of us is in any shape to be on that stage. Our fans deserve better!”
“Us?” Carson asked, shoving the papers back at his twin. “What the hell is wrong with you all of a sudden? You looked pretty damn happy a few hours ago, when you came back from screwing around with Breezy.”
“Don’t bring her into this,” Connor cautioned. “And I’ve seen the way you look at her. You want her too.”
Hell yes, he wanted her! That was the problem! “But, Con, she’s—”
“This is about me and you, not Breezy.”
“What about us?” Carson coughed, feeling the burn return to his throat.
“Why don’t you tell me? You’re the one who’s spent the last nine years pushing me away!”
Carson swallowed against the fire in his throat, but nothing burned hotter than the guilt in his gut as it flared back to life, stoked by the truth in his brother’s accusing stare. He looked away, unable to face him. “I fucked up. I lost control for one damn second and I feel like shit for it, but that didn’t give you any right to—ca—” His argument was cut off by a choking tingle in the back of his throat. “You can’t cancel the tour,” he finally managed.
“I just did,” Connor said. “And I think Papa
Joe was right. They would have discovered his stroke eventually. While I will not, and did not, exploit his condition to cover your ass, you can’t deny that we need a little sympathy from the press right now. It bought us some time to work out whatever the hell is going on between us, and I suggest you use it wisely.”
“What is there to work out?” Carson coughed again. “Seems like you have everything under control, as usual.”
His head began to throb again. His throat was on fire. He swiped at his brow and a sheen of sweat coated his palm.
“You know what? Forget it,” Connor said. He snagged his guitar and marched toward the door. “Stay away from Breezy,” he turned back and said with a disappointed sigh. “You’ve caused her enough pain. And get your shit together, or I’ll pull the plug on more than New York.”
“Grrrraaahh!” He growled a curse after his brother was gone, punching his fist through the bale of hay beneath him. He cradled his head between his palms, clutching his hair in his fists. What the hell? His life was spinning like a rank bull with a grudge and he was helpless to make it stop.
Breezy was right. Maybe he should see a shrink. Dammit! He should have told Connor, gotten it over and done with. His brother would hate him, but at least he wouldn’t be continuing this constant cycle of denial and pain. He didn’t think he could stand seeing the disappointment in Connor’s eyes another day.
And the shit he’d heaped on Breezy! He stared up at the barn rafters, remembering the pain in her eyes when he’d ordered her out of town. Was it possible he’d misjudged her? Her brother? The Grunions were bastards, and her father a known drunk, but he’d had no idea she and Ford had endured the type of abuse Papa Joe had described. If Ford was seeing Charlotte for tutoring, and not because of some psychopathic obsession, did that mean that he hadn’t been on some murder-suicide mission that night? And why hadn’t Charlotte told them as much when they’d asked her about him?
He released another frustrated growl, rolling his head from side to side to dispel the ache in his neck. He didn’t have all the answers. Hell, he didn’t have any of them, but he knew Connor felt the same bizarre attraction to Breezy that he did. He also knew that Connor had always expected them to share a woman. His brother just didn’t know what he was asking!
Carson hadn’t wanted anything to do with sharing someone since he’d screwed things up with Charlotte. He’d tried early on with a few of the women they’d picked up on the road. Even though it was nothing more than casual sex, it always ended the same; a flaccid cock, a rock of guilt in his stomach, and a head full of mangled memories.
He didn’t think it was possible not to keep a hard-on around Breezy, even though she stirred more acute memories of that night than anyone. He still couldn’t do it. He knew what Connor wanted and he was not going down that road again.
Chapter Fifteen
Heeding Connor’s advice, Breezy ducked and turned her face from the window as they approached the small cluster of media vans still parked outside the gated driveway. Until that point, her trip into town with Carson and Connor’s mom, Gabby, had been a refreshing respite from the craziness that was suddenly her life.
She stifled a yawn as they pulled onto the gravel drive. A long, sleepless night and the emotional morning had taken its toll. Her night had been restless to say the least, but replaying her kiss with Connor a bazillion times like the love-sick pre-teen she once was had only been a third of the cause. In addition to her confrontation with Carson, she’d also been apprehensive about seeing their mother. She wasn’t sure why. Mrs. McLendon had been the kindest person she’d ever known.
Gabby laid that particular concern to rest the second she drew Breezy into her welcoming arms when she arrived at their house earlier that morning. A lot of things may have changed since she’d left Grassland, but Mrs. McLendon’s warm brown eyes and disarming smile were exactly as she remembered them.
Breezy absorbed her genuine affection like a sponge, steeling a whiff of her familiar fresh scent that conjured her few precious memories with the McLendon family, taking her back to those years as if it had only been a day ago.
After their emotional reunion, Gabby drove them to a diner in Grassland where they split a stack of strawberry pancakes and a pot of coffee for breakfast. They’d talked for more than an hour, about everything. Somewhere in the middle Breezy took advantage of an uncomfortable opportunity to apologize for the accident; something she’d picked up the phone a dozen times to do, but ultimately lacked the courage to make the call after so many years had passed.
“We were a little bruised and battered for a while but, honey, we’re so sorry about Ford, and we were heartsick for you. No one would tell us what happened to you after everything settled.”
A rush of tears sprang to Breezy’s eyes. There was nothing she could have done to change what had happened that night, but she’d still carried a heavy burden of both guilt and shame. The McLendons had been her light in the darkness and, for a brief moment, that ugly darkness had touched them. It could have destroyed them, and they had been worried about her?
The forgiveness in Gabby’s eyes, the kindness of her words... They’d forever changed Breezy’s life. Pa and the Grunions had been so wrong. How could anyone believe their family to be anything but good and decent?
A tear managed to escape her efforts to hold them back and she reached for a napkin.
“It was an accident, Breezy,” Gabby said, giving her hand a reassuring pat. “A senseless tragedy. You have nothing to apologize for.”
If only Carson believed that. “I know, but I...I wanted you to know how sorry I am.”
Gabby gave her an understanding smile and clasped her hand tighter. “I lost my brother, too. I know you miss him.”
“You did?”
“Mmhmm.” Gabby nodded. “You and I have very similar pasts, you know.”
Breezy listened with rapt attention as Gabby told her the most captivating story of how she’d come to live in Grassland, and how she’d met her husbands. She would never have guessed that someone as kind and gentle and refined as Gabby McLendon was the daughter of a cruel crime lord who had once tried to sell her to his henchman.
Her brother, Stephan, had died trying to stop him, and the man Breezy knew as Daniel—the man she thought was Gabby’s father, the man who had held her in the hospital the night Ford died—was actually a retired U.S. Marshal who had been assigned to protect her.
“That’s...I’m speechless.” She clasped Gabby’s hand again and there seemed to be a kindred spirit between them she’d never felt before. No, that was wrong. It had always been there, only now she understood it. “Thank you,” she said with a shaky nod, clearing the tears from her throat.
“I’m always here if you ever need to talk,” Gabby offered. “You have my number, but you can also come to visit. No invitation needed. Dani and I can use the extra hormonal support.”
After giving her a few minutes to gain control of her emotions, Gabby peppered her with distracting questions about her foster parents, her career as a therapist and her plans for the future, all with genuine interest and delight in Breezy’s success. She never once alluded to any foreknowledge that might confirm her suspicions that the McLendons were her secret benefactors.
After picking up her things and closing out her account at the B&B, they’d stopped by the drugstore to pick up some cold medicine for Carson, who’d apparently come down with the flu. Breezy didn’t know if she believed that, but Gabby did, so she kept her suspicions to herself. At least she’d gotten the low-down on the circus that was the McLendon Twin Museum And Drugstore.
As it turned out, Ralph, from Ralph’s Drugs, had bought the trademark rights to the McLendon Twins label before they won The Big Break, cashing in on their fame when the newly formed McLendon Brothers hit the charts. The McLendons had tried to buy the rights back from him, if for nothing else than to put a stop to the spectacle he’d made of their sons, but Ralph wouldn’t sell.
“Let me hel
p,” Breezy said when Gabby parked the Jeep at the base of their front steps. She grabbed two of the six gallons of milk Gabby had bought at Ralph’s.
“Thanks,” Gabby huffed as she fisted two of her own and shut the rear car door. “With nine of us it goes pretty fast. Cory drinks it like water.”
Breezy laughed. “I would have guessed you’d have your own dairy cows.”
“We’d need an entire herd,” Gabby giggled.
She followed Gabby up the steps and into their house. She’d only been as far as the front porch when she arrived that morning. Something about going inside felt sacred, like stepping inside a church. She’d only imagined what it was like to live inside these walls, to live within the protective cocoon of love and acceptance she’d only witnessed from afar.
Her head swiveled from side to side, taking in every room. Hues of bright yellow and warm whites reminded her of Henry and Olivia, making her heart ache a little. She missed them.
“Hey, baby.”
Breezy stumbled to a stop when Grey McLendon met them at the end of the hall. Handsome as ever, he was tall and broad-shouldered, overfilling the narrow hallway as he leaned down and kissed Gabby, taking the milk from her hands.
“Mmm, thank you,” Gabby replied. “There’s two more in the car, if you don’t mind?”
“You bet. Hey, Breezy.” He reached out for the two gallons she carried and Breezy handed them over. “It’s great to see you again. I can’t thank you enough for everything you’re doing for Papa Joe.”
“It’s my pleasure,” she replied.
“I hope he’s not giving you a hard time.” Two gallons of milk in each hand, Grey ambled into the kitchen ahead of them as he spoke.
