My red bra.
My entire body went weak.
Not how I wanted him to find out.
My jaw went slack. I tried to speak but nothing came out. Sanchez eyed me then quickly cleared his throat. “Oh, awesome.” Sanchez stepped forward. “You found Em’s bra, been looking for that one.”
“In Miller’s car.” Jax’s teeth clenched. “And stop the bullshit, Sanchez, I know my sister’s stuff when I see it.”
Sanchez held up his hands and said under his breath, “Hey, I tried.”
Miller hung his head, then licked his lips. “Jax, not here, man. Let’s go into the bedroom and—”
Jax launched himself across the room and punched Miller in the face. Miller let him, just stood there and let my brother clock him in the head like he deserved it!
I ran at them, screaming.
Sanchez was able to get between them but was punched in the stomach by Jax, who was trying to get another good hit on Miller.
“Stop!” I yelled.
Nobody listened.
“Jax, STOP!”
He hesitated enough for Sanchez to slam him against a wall and keep him away from Miller. Blood spewed from Miller’s mouth and nose, and I was pretty confident he was going to be nursing a black eye for at least a week or two.
I was at his side in seconds, Em brought me a warm cloth.
“What the fuck, Miller!” Jax roared. “Who the hell do you think you are? I asked you to date her so Anderson would leave her alone, not so you could get into her pants!”
Sanchez’s eyebrows shot up while Em covered her mouth with her hands in shock.
Harley didn’t seem surprised. Then again, it was Harley.
She’d be more surprised if we weren’t sleeping together.
“How long?” He jerked out of Sanchez’s hands. “Damn it, how long, Miller!” His chest was heaving.
Miller dropped the cloth and winced. “The first time was Vegas.”
“First time?” Jax’s nostrils flared. “Vegas? As in last year Vegas?”
I bit down on my bottom lip and stood in front of Miller. “It was me.”
“Move away, Kins. I’m not going to punch him, and it’s not like I blame you for him seducing you!”
“Stop!” I clenched my hands into tight fists. “Just stop! It was me! Okay! I was on the couch and I couldn’t sleep so I crawled into his bed thinking he was too drunk to notice—”
“You had drunken sex with my sister!” He roared over my head, ready to lunge again.
Oh, this was not going well.
“Jax!” I held up my hands and pressed them against his rock-hard chest. “I made the move, it was me, well, technically it was both of us—”
Jax cut loose with a harsh curse.
I doubled my effort. “But the point is, it happened. Miller helped send me away for my own good and then when you asked us to date again, it was like . . . lighting a match and throwing it on dry wood.”
“Wood,” Sanchez repeated with a low chuckle.
“Really?” Em elbowed him in the side.
“Let me get this straight, you fucked my sister, then helped me encourage her to leave the country? One of my best friends? You didn’t tell me, then proceeded to lie by omission and promised not to touch her again, and just what? Tried not to sleep with her, got naked, and decided ‘What the hell, I’m going to do this again because the first time things ended up so well’?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Miller sneered from behind me. “I liked her, okay? I knew how you felt! How the hell does that make me the bad guy?”
Hearing it put that way made it burn a little less.
“So is that what you do then, Miller? Shit gets hard and you walk away? You listen to people around you? Help me out here, because the other night when she was at her worst, you ran away. You’re a runner, so what now? What happens when our dad dies? What happens”—his voice rasped—“if her lupus flares up again? What are you going to do then? I’m sure you know all about that, right? How to treat it when it gets bad? What happens if it does? You gonna leave her for her own good? Help me figure it out, because I sure as fuck don’t think you deserved her then and I damn well don’t think you deserve her now. Not after what she’s been through.”
My entire world stopped.
Mouth open.
I couldn’t make a sound.
He’d outed me.
In front of everyone.
I don’t remember falling to my knees, just that I did.
“Who the hell are you talking about?” Miller whispered.
“Me,” I answered. “He’s talking about me.”
The room shifted.
Warm arms caught me before my head hit something.
A black tunnel.
And then nothing.
Chapter Thirty
MILLER
Lupus.
Flare-ups.
Sickness.
She’d passed out. I caught her before her body hit the floor. The fight between me and Jax long forgotten now that the most precious thing in my life—and his—was momentarily lifeless.
Flashes of my mom collapsing, crumpling into a lifeless heap in front of my eyes.
And the searing pain that split me in two, threatening to never make me whole again, pounded into my line of vision. Not again. Not again.
“Kins?” I gripped her hand. “Wake up, baby.”
Jax paced in front of the couch, alternating between wiping his face with his hands and swearing in my direction.
Finally, after a few seconds, though it felt like ten minutes, her eyes flickered open, focusing in on my face. A small smile spread across her features and then fell. She slowly moved to a sitting position.
Jax stopped pacing and knelt in front of her, gripping her hands between his.
She jerked away. “What right do you have?”
Jax shook his head then sucked in his bottom lip, biting down so hard I thought the guy was going to draw blood. “I’m your brother. It’s my job. Mine.”
“It’s your job to tell everyone in this room about my past?” she yelled.
He flinched. “No.” His face flashed with anger. “But what the fuck do you think you’re doing, Kins? If this was real, if you really loved this guy—” I hated that they were talking about me. They deserved privacy. My heart felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it with the goal of breaking it against the only muscle weak enough to shatter on contact. “If you loved him, you’d tell him everything. If he loved you, if you weren’t just a hot piece of ass, convenient—”
I growled low in my throat.
“He’d demand to know everything about you . . . You got so sick when you were with Anderson, so sick, and I wasn’t there to stop it, you wouldn’t let me help you, and now you’ve put yourself in another hopeless situation.”
“That I never asked you to bail me out of,” she pointed out, her voice laced with anger and hurt.
Bail? What the hell? Why would she bail? From me? Why would there be any bailing at all?
I dropped her hand.
I had to.
Mine was shaking too hard to be any good.
Jax scowled. “It’s my job.”
“Who made it your job?” she fired back.
“I did!” he roared, jumping to his feet. “Who was there when your parents left you alone on the dirty floor? Who helped wash the cuts on your feet?” Tears welled in his eyes. “Who held your hand at the hospital when the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with you and thought you had cancer? Me! I was there!” Jax pounded his chest. “I’ve earned the fucking right to protect you—to make sure nothing happens to you, to—”
“Leave,” she whispered. “Now.”
“Kins . . .” Hurt flashed across his features. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said—”
“Go.”
“What about him?” Jax nodded to me. Yeah, apparently I was the lucky son of a bitch he was throwing under th
e bus. Nice.
If he thought I was leaving her. He had another think coming.
She sighed and looked out of the corner of her eyes. “You should go too.”
I sucked in a shuddered breath.
“No.”
Jax’s face went from apologetic to full-on rage.
Kinsey looked down as her shoulders sagged.
“I stay.”
“Miller . . .” A tear slid down her cheek. “Just go.”
“No.”
Jax moved toward me. I braced myself for another hit, but surprisingly he didn’t do that, he put his hand on my shoulder and walked off. Harley followed.
The door shut behind them.
Sanchez and Em quietly walked down the hall hand in hand and closed a bedroom door.
The chicken was forgotten.
The waffles.
Funny, that our relationship started with those stupid nicknames, and now, it felt like it was breaking, ending, the very same way.
“You were sick,” I whispered hoarsely.
“Am,” she corrected. “I am sick. I’m in remission, I haven’t had a flare-up in years. But I could get sick at any point in my life, hospitalized.” Her head tilted to the side, maybe gauging my reaction.
I reached for her hand, she slipped it away.
“Kins?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you.”
It stung.
More than it should.
Because while I’d convinced myself I was all in, that I was falling in love with her, trusted her, was willing to jeopardize my friendship with Jax and relationship with the team . . .
She’d been, what? Lying to me?
I had to know.
Had to ask.
“You weren’t ever going to tell me?”
She was quiet.
Too quiet.
When one second turned into five minutes, I knew I had my answer.
I stood, unable to face her. “So all those moments when I walked away and then came back fighting for you, the moments I held you in my arms, and kissed away your tears. I was falling in love and you were . . . what? Just having sex? Just trying to piss off your brother? What the hell was I? A distraction from your dad’s condition?”
Her head jerked up. “No! You know that’s not true!”
“Do I?” I spread my arms wide. “Because I don’t hear you denying it! If you won’t even tell me about your past, how the hell are we supposed to have a future?”
Her lower lip trembled.
“Great.” I cursed under my breath. “More silence from the girl I’m in love with, the same one who didn’t even trust me enough to tell me she was sick! How was I supposed to take care of you if something—”
“Shut up, just shut up!” Kinsey jumped to her feet, and slammed a fist against my chest. “Did you ever think that maybe, for once in my life, I didn’t want to be protected?”
I stumbled back.
“You’re not Jax! I don’t need another Jax! Or a father who calls the doctor every time I get a headache or feel sleepy! I didn’t want that with you! Don’t you understand! I don’t want you to look at me and think I’m weak! That I’m sick!”
“Oh, Kins . . .” I shook my head. “Weak is the last thing I think when I look in your eyes.”
A tear slid off her chin.
“You’re one of the strongest people I know. A fighter. Menacing. Aggravatingly stunning . . .” I reached for her. “I never stood a chance against you.”
“This changes everything though.” She wiped her cheeks.
“Only if you let it.” I shrugged. “And that’s your choice, Kinsey, not mine, not Jax’s. Yours.” I dropped her hand. “But I need you to know something.”
She stared down at the ground.
“I’ve made mine.”
Her head jerked up.
“And it’s you.” I took a step forward. “I hate that you’re sick, but what I hate more is that you think for one fucking second that I would cut and run or worse, turn into the type of controlling prick who makes you feel trapped. Yes, I want to protect you. Because that’s what you do when you love someone. And someone like you, someone as special as you, deserves all the good she can get. So while I’m pissed as hell at Jax, I get him, I get why he’s upset, I get why he did what he did. And I deserve his anger, because I went behind his back and took something precious, I took you away from what he saw was his job, his protection. In Jax’s eyes, I threw you out into the wild and asked you to survive . . . and while nothing bad happened, it could have. And the could-have-been is what scares Jax shitless.” I sighed. “I choose you, I just need you to choose me back.”
More silence.
Great.
Kinsey reached for my hand. “You really love me?”
I exhaled in relief. “More than I should if I don’t want Jax to kill me. Then again, maybe it’s the only way to stay alive . . . love you so much he has no choice but to admit defeat.”
She smiled for the first time since the fight. “He has good intentions.”
I pointed to my face. “Misguided, but good.”
Kinsey walked into my open arms and placed her head against my chest. “You’re not going anywhere?”
“No.” I squeezed her tight. “Not unless you’re there with me.”
“So this is really real.”
“It’s been really real since Vegas, I was just too chickenshit to admit it, Kins. I hope you can forgive me for that.”
“It’s why I called you Chicken.”
“Then why are you always the Waffle?”
She grinned up at me. “Because I’m really sweet.”
I claimed her lips. “Yeah, you are.”
She took a step away from me and walked into the kitchen. “You know, we do have all of this food—”
“Touch the food and you’re a dead man.” Sanchez came running down the hall. “Oh, and good talk, guys, I really felt the emotion.”
Emerson smacked the back of his head and gave us a knowing smile. “He literally only heard the last part, because I had the TV up so loud before that, but I’m happy you guys talked.”
“Me too.” I kissed Kinsey on the temple, and forced a smile I didn’t feel, not because I wasn’t happy that she’d actually listened to me. But because it wasn’t the ending I wanted. The ending I wanted was Jax approving of us, telling me that he accepted me, accepted what we had, and right now, the guilt was eating me alive and making me feel like shit.
The guy needed time to cool off.
Which meant I had to wait to talk to him again.
I just hoped that our friendship wasn’t damaged past the point of no return, because he and Sanchez were literally the only family I recognized, next to Em, and I refused to break up my family.
Even if it was for a good reason.
Kins slid her hand into mine. “You okay?”
“I should be asking you that.”
“Your face looks worse than mine.”
Pain radiated off my cheek. “I bet.”
Sanchez tossed me an ice pack.
I pressed it against my cheek and winced in pain.
“Gotta hand it to Jax”—Sanchez crossed his arms and leaned against the couch—“the man knows how to throw a crazy-ass right hook.”
“My cheek’s well aware,” I grumbled.
Kins shrugged. “He has a black belt too.”
All eyes fell to her.
“You’re shitting me, right?” Sanchez smirked. “Good ol’ Jax is a fighter? Huh, would have never guessed.”
“I swear he could have made it in the UFC,” Kins added, “but he loves football more.”
I knew the feeling.
“Well, hopefully he gets his head clear before next week. We’re playing Seattle, and as much as I’d love to say it’s going to be an easy game, we all know the Sharks put up a good fight.”
Kinsey nodded seriously. “I’ll talk to him, it’s going to be fine.”
Lie.
I
saw it in her face.
Her body language.
Nothing was going to be fine.
Chapter Thirty-One
KINSEY
“He’s not talking to me.”
I was watching the away game with Dad, ready to punch through a wall. Jax was playing like a complete moron, and Miller was saving the game by way of blocking—a technique that the other team’s offensive line was not implementing at all, leaving their quarterback vulnerable to the Bucks’ defense.
Dad patted my knee. “He’s just upset, honey, give him some time. You remember, he’s seen you at your worst, helped you through it. Show him a little grace. It’s your turn to help.”
My shoulders sagged. “He doesn’t want my help.”
“He does. He just doesn’t know it.”
I swiped a cookie from his plate and took a bite. Ever since the whole cancer and lupus thing came out, I’d been on pins and needles, waiting for Miller to ask me for details.
What was lupus?
How long had I been sick?
Would I get sick again?
How long had I been in the hospital?
But he didn’t pry. I knew he was waiting for me to talk about it, but I didn’t want to, because talking about something made it real. Besides, I was so emotionally spent from worrying about my dad that talking about my own health made me feel like I was going to have an anxiety attack.
I sighed again.
Dad turned up the volume. “You gonna sigh during the whole game?”
“Sorry,” I grumbled.
It was tied three to three. Seattle had a crazy good team, but I knew ours was better. The battle between the Bucks and the Sharks went back all the way to the 1940s, and because we were in the same division, we almost always had to play them twice before playoffs.
Both times, I held my breath the entire game.
Their defense was intense.
My eyes were drawn to Anderson. I shivered. The guy had basically ignored me for the past few weeks, and I had Miller to thank for that, but there was always that lingering fear that he’d corner me, say something mean, or just bring me back to that helpless place that I was so terrified I’d never get out of. He was an emotional bully—he fed on the weak, and being cornered by him left me feeling afraid, and I was done with that feeling.
The Sharks tight end blocked then went into a run. Anderson was there, he jumped up, caught the ball, and made a run toward our territory. Twenty, thirty, forty yards.
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