Besotted: An Enemies-to-Lovers Small-town Romance (Carmel Cove Book 3)

by Dr. Rebecca Sharp

  The next chunk was comprised of information dumped into my brain and on my lap. I felt like a cup of milk being steamed with every tidbit of pregnancy info until I began to bubble over. It wasn’t their fault. I was sure it was the normal amount of information. But I could only take one uncertainty at a time.

  The first was confirmed in that office.

  The next would be when I told Miles. As soon as I figured out how to do that…

  As I turned on my car, the sudden grumble of my stomach bellowed demandingly with the desire for a hot dog. A life or death desire.

  A few minutes later, without much more clarity of thought or action, I stood at the window of the Dog House and waited for my order.

  I was going to have Miles’ baby.

  I repeated the words over and over in my head as I ate, hoping that the two hot dogs would help me swallow the facts down more easily.

  Miles’ baby.

  The man who wanted no permanence. The man who’d hardly wanted more than one night at a time was now getting eighteen years in one shot.

  I didn’t need him.

  There were two sureties that came along with the blue word on the stick this morning. One, I was going to have this baby. Two, I was going to have this baby with or without him.

  The crowd on the beach faded into a dull soundtrack as I walked toward the cove, feeling like the silence and seclusion there would help me find a way to muddle through this with enough strength to leave and tell Miles.

  Sure enough, it was empty.

  The ocean lapped at my toes like a familiar friend coaxing my fears from my worried bones. I thought about calling a lot of people. Laurel. Addy. Gwen. Taylor. But in the end, I settled on Jules, hoping her relationship with Mick might give her enough insight to predict my future.

  An unreasonable expectation…

  “Hello?” Jules’ voice came through the line like soft sunshine, bright and warm.

  “Hey, you busy?” I asked, noting the higher pitch to my voice.

  I heard her grunt and huff over a strange sliding and scraping noise. “No, just moving some boxes around the apartment that we haven’t unpacked yet before I head to the gym. What’s up?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  I wasn’t subtle or hesitant. I was honest, like a tempest on the open ocean in the night. Thundering truth and crashing with candor.

  And Jules… she was the calm waters that met the sand. No matter what I threw at her, she would absorb it and it would be nothing more than a gentle lull by the time her response reached the shore.

  Only a few seconds passed, the shuffling stilling on her end of the line. “Where are you?”

  “Standing on the beach.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” she suggested calmly. “I’m going to sit down. And then you’re going to tell me everything.”

  She was probably right.

  I made my way to the line of rocks and sat down. Not on that rock, but a different one closer to the water.

  “You’re not going to congratulate me?” I asked quietly, wondering if I’d misread everything and she was disappointed in me.

  “Oh, Eve.” Her sigh was pushed out with the full weight of her heart behind it. “Of course, I want to congratulate you… but I don’t think that’s really why you called is it? Because from the sounds of it, I might be the first person you’ve told.”

  The lump in my throat grew bigger, like a sponge swelling up with salty water.

  “I took the test this morning, and it read pregnant,” I spoke thickly. “I went to see Taylor’s doctor, and they confirmed it.” My whole body shook. “It’s still unbelievable. I was on the pill. I’ve been on the pill for almost as long as I’ve had a period. And then, all because of a stupid cold—a cold that was entirely his fault for making me want to swim in the stupid cold ocean—”

  The irony wasn’t lost on me that the whole reason I’d had the cold was because I decided to go swimming in the frigid ocean in the middle of the night just to prove a point. Well, my point just backfired.

  “Oh no,” she broke in, and I could hear the zing of the lightbulb going off in her head. “You didn’t realize that antibiotics make them not work?”

  Of course, she would know about this, she was going to school for nursing.

  “No,” I admitted hollowly. “I never knew. And why would I need to? I never thought I would… until I got married…”

  I shivered as the wind wrapped around me, reminding me to stay present.

  “I’m pregnant with Miles’ baby,” I murmured, feeling like I took a full breath for the first time since last night. “And he’s going to leave me when he finds out… he’s going to hate me when he finds out.”

  And then I broke.

  Not when my sister returned a shell of herself. Not when Larry had passed away. Not when I decided I would move out of the only home I’d ever known. Not when I didn’t have enough money for the apartment. Not when… ever… had I cried like this.

  “Eve, it’s all going to be okay,” she soothed me. “Miles isn’t going to hate you. He’s a lot of things but not that… never that.”

  “Y-You don’t know,” I blubbered, desperately trying to get ahold of my emotions. “He thinks I’m a romantic fool. H-He thinks I’m just so completely in love with him that I-I practically stalked him to get into his life. He’ll think I did this on purpose—that I was so besotted that I betrayed him like this…”

  “Are you?”

  I choked and coughed on my cries. “A-Am I what? Enamored—”

  “In love with him.” My heart stopped. “Are you in love with him, Eve?”

  Maybe I hadn’t been waiting for the one this whole time. Maybe I’d been waiting for him.

  “Yes.” The word was my rose. My glass slipper. My voice box and my apple. It was the one element of my fairy tale that would harm me but lead me to a happily-ever-after in the end.

  It seemed crazy how the answer was surprising to me. I’d liked him for so long—I’d wanted him for so long, I thought love would be obvious. But through it all, loving Miles had snuck up on me like dawn creeps up on the night. Now I realized love was something that happens to you—something that changes you—and wasn’t something to be found.

  For too long, I’d been too set on the idea of perfect, that love would come riding in on a white horse to save the day. Instead, love had walked into a bar, homeless, with the only goal in mind of sinking himself.

  And I’d been the one to save him.

  I hoped.

  God, I hoped.

  “But I don’t know that he loves me.”

  “Oh, Eve.” She chuckled.

  “What?” There was a twinge of affront in my tone.

  My face was still red and streaked with tears and she was laughing.

  “Miles loves you.” I wished her surety could make it true. “Let me tell you something about the Madison brothers. Well, a few things. One, they are as stubborn as they are strong. Two, they, without fail, will give themselves what they think they deserve.”

  “I-I don’t understand.”

  “I can’t tell you I know the whole story because I don’t. But I know that Miles was hurt pretty badly by an old girlfriend—so badly that he, clearly, felt he didn’t deserve a future or love.”

  I couldn’t argue. It was always the one thing that stuck out in my mind—no matter what Amanda had done to him, the last thing Miles always ended with was that he’d been the one at fault for believing her, that it was his judgment that couldn’t be trusted.

  He blamed himself.

  “And in spite of that fierce resolution to be alone, he still found his way to you. He still chose you, knowing what it would mean.”

  “You know about that?” Dumb question.

  “Mick called me right after he hung up with his brother,” she confirmed. “I may not have talked to Miles, but I know my man. And I know that from the second we pulled out of Carmel, there wasn’t a day that went by where he wasn’t wo
rrying about his brother and how much farther he was sinking.”

  I laid back on the rock and closed my eyes as she spoke.

  That was the thing about Jules, when she talked to you, it was like you were the only person in the world and somehow, just by a conversation, she could ease your troubles. Like warm tea and a book on a cold winter day. It was how everyone who met her knew she would make an excellent nurse.

  “And then, whether it was fate or folly, the orbit you and Miles kept around your feelings for each other shifted, and Mick worried but not in the same way. He worried with anticipation, like he could see happiness on the horizon for his twin if only Miles were smart enough to head toward it.”

  I shuddered.

  “I-I just don’t know, Jules. I don’t know what to think. I’m so unsure… and afraid. I’m so afraid I’m going to lose him.” There was no point in denying it. There was no point in pretending that lying to myself about it made me strong.

  I. Was. Afraid.

  I was afraid because I was human.

  I was afraid because I had a heart.

  “He loves you, Eve. Even if he’s stubborn and reluctant to admit it—and reluctant to admit that he deserves you. But just remember, every fairy tale has trials. How else are you going to find out that love perseveres?”

  A good ten seconds went by, her words dripping through my pores like water through sand.

  “Thank you.” It wasn’t enough, but the rest of my thoughts were being bottled up for the conversation I was about to have with Miles.

  “Don’t thank me, Eve. You’re my friend. I’m always here for you.”

  I let out a long breath. “Okay, I guess I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  “Out of all the things to have faith in, love is the surest.”

  I groaned. “You know, that was so easy to believe back when it was just a thought. Back before it was attached to a man who was living out of a tent and insisted that forever wasn’t for him.”

  But I did still believe it.

  “And Eve…”

  “Yeah?” I pushed myself up from the rock and sunk my feet into the water again.

  “Congratulations.” Even through the phone, her smile was contagious.

  “Thank you.”

  The sand shifted under me like a giant hourglass, reminding me that time was always moving and life was always changing. But even though the little tiny grains might rise and fall below me, didn’t mean I still couldn’t stand through the shift. There was a balance between the changing tide and the steady sand. And in that balance, I found my breath.

  And held onto my belief in my fairy tale.

  Miles

  “What the hell took you so long?” I grumbled as the door to Roasters dinged and my brother shifted his massive frame inside.

  His steps faltered as he gave me a ‘what the hell’ look. “You wanted to meet at eight a.m. on a sunny Saturday mornin’ when literally every tourist within a fifty-mile radius is on their way here. You’re lucky I’m only five minutes late, dick.”

  I grunted, and quickly spoke when I saw him begin to make his way to Laurel behind the counter. “I already got you your usual. Just sit down.”

  I pointed to one of the cups at the table. I knew I was being short, but I had hardly slept or focused on work for the past two days because I couldn’t stop thinking.

  “Who’s that for?” The chair groaned in protest as Mick sank his gigantic weight onto it and nodded to the third cup at our table.

  “Eli.” I looked over my shoulder and spoke to Laurel. “Can you let your man know we’re ready?”

  He’d had to finish up some ordering in the back while we waited for Mick.

  “What’s goin’ on? Christ. You made it sound like Noah got in touch with us to build his damn arc on the phone earlier.”

  My laughter broke the edge of anticipation that ran through my body. It wasn’t Noah who needed something, but another Biblical character.

  “Alright, what’s going on?” Eli asked, wiping his hands on a napkin as he sat down with us. “Who’s the big client?”

  I laughed again because I really hadn’t said anything of the fuckin’ sort. Then again, I must have a tone that suggested when it was a bigger project coming down the pipe.

  My quirked smile grew. “Eve.”

  The looks on their faces were comical—wide eyes, sky-high eyebrows, and dropped mouths, and their expressions wiped blank with shock and intrigue.

  Eli was the first to respond. “Eve? For what?” He shook his head. “I mean, of course. You know we’d do anything for Eve. After what she did for Roasters after Larry passed. I mean. Anything.”

  My brother, ever the silent type, waited for my response.

  I pulled out my work binder and flipped it open to the stack of papers I’d printed over at Covington yesterday morning and turned it toward them.

  “She wants to turn this house into a yoga studio on the bottom floor and living space on the second.”

  They pulled the printed images of the Victorian on Sunflower Lane toward them, browsing through the interior shots I’d grabbed from the internet along with some of the ones I took with my phone.

  “Holy shit,” Eli muttered, looking between me and the photos. “I forgot about this place…”

  It seemed like everyone in this town had forgotten about that old house except Eve. Of course, except Eve. She was the only one who saw her future in the things that appeared not worth saving.

  “She bought it?”

  “Not yet.” I cleared my throat. “I’m goin’ to buy it and pay you—us—to do what needs to be done,” I said casually, like it was the most natural thing to do to fund someone else’s dream. “From what I’ve seen, it’s mostly structurally sound, but we will need to gut a bunch of it to make sure all the piping and electrical and everything is still in good working order. I don’t want to take any chances, puttin’ it all together only to have somethin’ burst or catch on fire.”

  I knew I was rambling but I didn’t care.

  “I think the hardest thing we’ll have to find is someone to create and match the stained glass for some of the broken panels as well as for some ideas I have for the interior. I have those jotted down here somewhere…” I flipped through some of the papers looking for my quick sketches and only after a second or two realized that my friends and business partners were sitting in complete silence.

  Glancing up, I was pinned by both their stares, and it wasn’t until that moment when I realized maybe it wasn’t the most natural thing to buy a house for someone and renovate it.

  “Woah, let’s back up there a second, Miles.” Mick’s giant mitt came gently to rest over my stack of information, pushing it flat. “You’re goin’ to buy this? And fix it up?” He paused. “For Eve?”

  My mouth thinned.

  He knew I had the money. He knew because he did, too. We were small-town boys from Texas who were makin’ far more money up here than I’d ever thought or knew what to do with—until Eve and her fucking forever invaded my life.

  “She almost has the money saved. She can pay me back, you know, as soon as she has it; I’m not worried. It’s just been on the market forever and with everything goin’ on up at Rock Beach and the new crowd that’s movin’ in, I don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.” I shrugged.

  So what if Ace told me earlier that it was unlikely the Crown Cartel would pick up an abandoned house like that for their purposes? These two didn’t need to know that; it was still a possibility.

  “It’s a shit-ton of work,” I continued blindly. “And it’s going to take some time, so I don’t want you to think I expect you to do this for free.”

  “You know damn well that’s not even a concern at all,” my brother growled, his gaze softening as he looked at me. “I just want you to tell me the truth right now, why you are doing this?”

  I wondered if they could see my body shake with the heavy thump of my pulse. I knew what Miles was asking me to admit t
o. It was the same damn thing I’d buried under my excitement because I was so damn afraid of it.

  “You’re in love with her,” Eli chuckled, breaking the stare-down between the two of us.

  Fuck.

  Fucking fuck.

  I shook my head like it would make any difference in how I felt. “I’m just doing what I can. Using what I have and doing what I can…” I tipped my head to where the carved wooden plaque Mick had made hung high on the back wall of Roasters above the espresso machine.

  Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

  One of Larry’s most famous sayings around these parts.

  “And if Larry were here to hear you say that, brother, he’d call you a liar. And then he’d probably take down that damn plaque and hit you over your stubborn thick skull with it,” Mick responded like he was tempted to do the same. And then a slow smile spread over his face as he looked to our other friend. “Eli’s right. And I know because I’ve seen the change in you. I’ve seen the brother I thought I lost when we moved here back again.”

  My mouth opened to argue that I hadn’t changed, but that was horseshit, too.

  I’d always been the one who was fighting for love—whether it was with romantic gestures or with fists so no one would mistake my feelings. When we moved here, I gave up that fight. I drifted between one-night stands, not caring if I got rid of everything that belonged to me.

  And then Eve trespassed into my life and suddenly I was fighting for my cove, wondering why she was working in my bar. Suddenly, it was my dog’s fault that I’d given in to the temptation of tasting her. In one night, she’d become my woman, and then, my roommate. And even though this was her dream, I wanted it to be mine, too.

  With a growl, I buried my head in my hands for a second before I met his eyes again.

  “You’re right. I am a liar,” I confessed. “Fuck. I didn’t want—I didn’t plan—” I screwed my fingers into the bridge of my nose and I slumped against the back of the chair.

  This wasn’t what I came here for. I came to tell them the plans. I came to ask for their help. I didn’t come to realize that I’d gone and fucking fallen.