by Lexi Ryan
“That’s ironic.”
“I thought so.” I close my eyes as I take my first taste. When Levi laughs, I look at him. “What?”
He smirks. “You’re moaning.”
I shrug. “It’s excellent.”
“As good as Shay’s?”
“No one’s coffee is as good as Shay’s.” But it’s damn close. I swear, God made the Jacksons to brew good beer and strong coffee.
“We’ve got Jackson family brunch this morning. Want to join me? Get your mind off everything for a bit? Ava will be there, and I’m sure Lilly would love to see you.”
My chest warms at the invitation. I always wished I could have had a family like the Jacksons. There are so many of them. Any time you’re with one Jackson, there’s bound to be another close by. They dish out no small amount of shit, but they’re always there for each other. I, on the other hand, grew up with a mother who spent long days working to try to make ends meet and a sister too busy with problems of her own to share secrets or make new traditions. Growing up, I would’ve killed for what they have. Hell, I’d kill for it now. Especially now.
“No thank you,” I say. “I really need to talk to Colton.”
“You don’t owe him any explanations. If you want me to go with you to talk to him—”
I shake my head. “That’ll just make it worse.”
“Call me after?” There’s a hitch in his voice, but I don’t know what to make of it. Worry? Insecurity?
“He won’t hurt me, Levi.”
“I know. I just . . .” He shakes his head. “I don’t understand why he would have been with Molly last night.” When I squeak an objection, he holds up a hand. “I’m not doubting what you saw, but regardless of what mistakes he made, he’s not going to let you walk away from him without a fight.”
“What if there’s nothing left between us worth fighting for?”
“Ellie?” He steps forward and dips his head down, touching his forehead to mine. I close my eyes. I feel the heat of him, so close, and focus on the steady sound of his breath. In. Out. In. Out. “You aren’t in this alone.”
I’m not sure how he knew it, but those are exactly the words I needed to hear, and gratitude rushes through me and pricks the back of my eyes with tears. “Thank you.”
When he pulls back, his face is too serious. “You have no idea how much I want to kiss you right now.”
“Oh.” I wait, but he doesn’t move forward or dip his head. “Are you going to?”
His gaze drops to my mouth and stays there for three booming beats of my heart. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re still his.”
My heart twists. I’m not even sure what to make of that statement or what to do with the fact that I want Levi to kiss me. Colton and I haven’t even officially broken up yet, and here I am wishing for another man—this man—to put his hands and mouth on me. “He cheated on me.”
Levi gives me a sad smile, the kind that doesn’t stand a chance of making it to his eyes, and the vulnerability in his expression tugs at my heart. “You’re still his. And you will be long after you ask him to move out.” He draws in a ragged breath. “But I’ll be waiting for the moment that you’re not.”
“What the fuck is all this?”
“It’s your shit.” I prop my feet up on the ottoman and glance in Colton’s direction. He’s standing in the doorway, letting the cool air out and staring at the collection of his belongings.
Three industrial-strength black trash bags. That’s all it took to remove him from our house. When those are gone, it’ll be like he was never here.
“Why is all my shit in trash bags, Ellie?”
I shrug. My raw emotions are hibernating somewhere behind my heart, leaving me feeling numb and robotic. “Because I didn’t have any boxes. Will you please shut the door? The air’s on.”
He rubs his eyes and slams the door behind him. He’s dragging his feet like he’s exhausted. Like maybe he was too busy fucking his stepsister to bother with something as mundane as sleep.
The house was empty when I returned from Jake’s, so I started packing Colt’s things.
“You’re kicking me out?” He sets his jaw into a hard line, but when he looks at me, he does a double take. “What happened to your face?”
“I tripped down some stairs.” Anger unravels from my chest at the reminder, and I let it, feeling my cheeks heat and my fingertips tingle with indignation. You cheated on me, you asshole. “Do you want me to help you carry this stuff out?”
He shakes his head. “Just because I didn’t come home last night? Because I partied a little too much? What? Are you my mother now?”
“It’s not because you didn’t come home. It’s because of where you stayed. And with whom.” I want to pull my hair out and scream at him. Instead, I grab a magazine from the basket by the couch and start flipping through it as if it’s just another day. As if this conversation isn’t sending sharp slivers of my heart right through my lungs.
“What do you mean?” He shoves a bag to the side and walks into the living room, sinking onto the couch beside me. He really does look as exhausted as I feel. “You’re kicking me out because I was with Molly?”
“Pretty much.”
“Does it matter if I wasn’t fucking her? Do you even care?” His questions make me want to crumble, to believe anything he’ll tell me. I don’t want to be alone.
I lift my chin and hold tight to my anger. “You lied to me. You said you were having drinks with Grant, but Grant’s out of town. You said you were staying at Jake’s, but you were with Molly.”
“I wasn’t cheating on you.”
“Then why were you at her hotel room in the middle of the night?” I throw my magazine across the room, my façade of calm abandoning me.
“I was—”
“Stop.” I hold up a hand. “Think very carefully before you feed me any more lies.”
“We were talking. Jesus, when did you become so uptight? There’s nothing between us. Not like that. I was with her, but I wasn’t sleeping with her. We had shit to talk about.”
I pull a bottle of pills from between the couch cushions. The thing about packing up someone’s belongings is that you get to see what they have. I found these in the back of the dresser behind his jeans. “What about these? Are you just with these but not taking them? You and the pills are just talking?”
His face pales.
“You promised,” I whisper. “You promised there wouldn’t be any more of this. But it was just another lie. And I can’t do it. I can’t stay and watch you throw your life away. I can’t throw mine away with it.”
“I’m not perfect, okay?” His voice is softer now. Just seeing the pills in my hand seems to have made his anger fade fast. “The last couple of months have fucked my world, and I haven’t handled it well. I get that, but I’m fixing everything now. Let me deal with this, and then we’ll focus on us.”
Colton always has a reason when he relapses, and I’m too tired to hear the excuses this time around. “Is there even an us anymore?”
“I fucking thought so, before you dragged my shit out into the living room.” He shakes his head as he scowls at the bags. “Jesus, Ellie. It’s like I’m some bum you’re kicking out on the street.”
“What did you think we were, Colton? Where did you see this going? You and me?”
He drags a hand through his hair. “You’re just dying for a fight this morning, aren’t you? Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t have it in me. I’m fucking tired, and I don’t want to argue about this.”
“If you want even a minute more with your crap in my house, I want to talk about us. I don’t want to argue. I want to talk about our future.”
“Tomato, to-mah-to,” he mutters. “I don’t want to predict the future. I want to live right now.” He slides across the couch and leans in, closing the distance between us until he’s closer than he’s been in weeks. Months.
He brushes
his fingertips along my jaw, sweeps his thumb lightly across the bandage on my forehead, and I close my eyes because my heart aches. I’ve been so lonely. My life is about to change in the biggest way possible. I want to believe he’ll be by my side when I have this baby. I want him to convince me everything’s going to be okay. To reassure me. To be my rock. But he’s never been that. That’s a job he delegated to his best friend from the very beginning. Instead, Colton’s been my thrill. My wild ride. And then he pulled away when I needed him most and he isn’t even that anymore.
“You like to live in the now,” I whisper, opening my eyes to look at him. “And last night, living in the now meant being with her.”
“We didn’t sleep together.” His voice is rough, and for the first time in weeks, I feel like he’s really seeing me when he looks at me. He’s seeing me, and he knows I’m slipping through his fingers. “I swear to you.”
“That’s just it,” I whisper. “I don’t think it matters. Whether you fucked her or not, you’ve left me for her already.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The late-night phone calls? The way you barely touch me anymore?”
He looks away, but not fast enough to hide the guilt on his face. “I’m trying to help her get through some complicated shit.”
“The fact that she had your kid and kept him a secret from you for four years? Is that what you’re helping her through?”
He’s quiet for a long time. “This is something I have to do. Don’t confuse secrets for a betrayal. You have to trust me.”
“I’m going through some shit too, Colton.” I blink back tears. “A few months ago, I’d have argued that anything we had to face, we’d face together, but it turns out I was wrong. Because here we are, two people on our way to being strangers. I don’t know what your secrets are.” I press my hand to my stomach. “And you don’t give a damn about mine.”
He flies off the couch and steps away, squeezing the back of his neck with both hands before spinning back to face me. “Like where you were last night? Like why you weren’t in our bed at five a.m., and who you were with? That secret?”
“I was at Jake’s. You know, the place you told me you were spending your night?” Folding my arms, I meet his steely gaze. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Why the fuck were you . . .” He drops his arms to his sides, and his red-rimmed eyes go wide. “Were you with Levi?”
The heartache in his expression makes my stomach drop through the floor. I want to be a robot again. Programmed, mechanical, going through the motions. But I’m falling apart. One piece at a time. I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around them, trying to hold my broken pieces together. “Tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine,” I whisper, barely able to speak the words around the lump in my throat.
“You want me to leave? I’ll leave. I can’t do this right now anyway.”
“Do what?”
“I can’t deal with your drama, Ellie. Your need for constant attention.”
Betrayal and anger slice through me. I cling to the anger. “Constant attention? Are you kidding me? You’ve barely acknowledged my existence lately.”
He scans the bags with his belongings and shakes his head. “I’ll be back for my shit later.” He doesn’t even look at me before he stomps away and slams the door behind him.
I coil myself into a tighter ball, trying so hard to hold on, to keep it together. But it’s useless. Like squeezing a fistful of sand and watching it slide out between your fingers and fly away on the wind.
Levi
“What’s going on?” Shay asks, her voice sharp.
I blink up at her from my coffee and cover a yawn.
“That’s, like, the twentieth time you’ve yawned in the last ten minutes. What kept you up so late?”
On the other side of the kitchen peninsula, my oldest brother, Brayden, grunts. “Questions that have X-rated answers for two hundred, Alex?”
Ethan chuckles, then adds, “No, more like questions that shouldn’t be asked in front of my six-year-old daughter.”
Lilly props her hands on her hips and lifts her chin. “I’m almost seven!”
Shay rolls her eyes. “You two shut up,” she says, pointing at Brayden and Ethan. “This is different.” She turns back to me. “Am I wrong? Is this all because you’re tired from some wild night out?”
“Hardly. I closed the bar for Jake so he could go home with his beautiful fiancée.” I wink at Ava, who’s standing with Jake on the other side of the kitchen. “Pretty obvious who got the better side of that deal.”
Ava blushes prettily. She’s been an honorary Jackson for most of our lives, so she’s used to me teasing her, but she still embarrasses easily when it comes to talk of her and Jake. In a way, they’ve been a couple forever—best friends since they were kids and never apart for long—but in another way, they’re brand new. They can’t keep their hands off each other.
Jake wraps his arm around his fiancée’s shoulders and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Can’t argue with you there.”
Shay looks at her watch. “Okay, so you closed down the bar and then didn’t bother sleeping in the subsequent eight hours?”
“Shay’s on the case, Levi,” Carter says. “Better spill your secrets.”
“I crashed at Jake’s place,” I tell her. “Just didn’t sleep well.”
“Did I see Ellie leaving the bar this morning?” Brayden asks, piling eggs onto his plate. “What was she doing there so early?”
Every pair of eyes turns to me now, except for Lilly’s—she’s too enamored with the ooey-gooey cinnamon roll on her plate to bother digging for Uncle Levi’s secrets. I know it’s going to look all kinds of bad if I deny the truth, so I shrug. “Ellie needed a place to crash, so she stayed at Jake’s.”
“With you,” Carter says.
Shay’s eyes go wide, and she holds up a hand. “I was wrong. It is that kind of tired. Okay, okay, no more details needed.”
Brayden’s oblivious, but Jake studies me carefully. “Ellie needed a place to crash?” He looks at Ava, who bites her bottom lip. Who knows what they’re secretly communicating? But I don’t really care.
“She woke up in the middle of the night, and Colton wasn’t home.” I shrug, making light of it. “She went out looking for him. She was upset.”
Ava perks up at the mention of her brother’s name. “What’d he do this time? Christ, that boy needs a keeper.”
“Not your circus, not your monkey,” Jake gently reminds her.
I set my jaw. I should keep my mouth shut, but I don’t fucking care. I’m so pissed at Colton for doing this to her. “She found him with Molly. It screwed her up.”
Shay frowns. “So what? They’re close.”
“In Molly’s hotel room,” I add. “After two a.m.”
All eyes go to Brayden, who’s stiffened at the mention of Molly’s name.
We all like Molly. She’s been a great asset to the family business. We’re going to open a tasting room and banquet facility in Jackson Harbor, and she’s moving home for the first time in years to run it for us. We know she’ll make it a success. We all like Molly and appreciate what she does for our business.
But Brayden’s appreciation for Colton’s stepsister extends beyond the realm of the professional and into the realm of unrequited infatuation. One night in New York, they drank too much, and one thing led to another. The night did something to Brayden.
“Did you see them together?” Brayden asks, keeping his eyes on his plate.
“No, but I believe Ellie. She’s not one to fabricate shit like that.”
“It’s not what she thinks,” Ava says.
I arch a brow. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Did you miss the after two a.m. part?” Shay asks.
“Or the in her hotel room part?” Carter mutters.
“Ava,” Shay says, “you’re sweet to assume the best, but your brother is no saint.”
<
br /> Ava looks at Jake again, and he shakes his head. They hold each other’s gaze for a long time, having some sort of silent argument before he closes his eyes and shrugs in defeat. She turns to me. “We should talk, Levi. Go outside with me for a minute?”
“Sure.”
She takes my arm and drags me out. It’s scorching today. It’s barely past ten and the sun is blazing. The air is thick with humidity, and I immediately miss the sweet chill of the air conditioning. “Don’t jump to conclusions,” Ava says.
“What does it matter what conclusions I jump to? I’m not part of their relationship.”
She shakes her head. “I can just see you and Colton going at each other over this, but you don’t have the full story.”
“Of course I don’t, Ava. Nobody has the full story. That’s the way shit like this works. But the fact of the matter is he was with Molly last night. When Ellie texted to ask where he was, he said he was crashing at Jake’s.”
She winces. “I know the lying is a problem,” she says softly. “You know Colton’s never been a fan of the truth if a lie was easier.”
“And it’s an even bigger problem in the context of Ellie seeing Molly in Colton’s arms.”
“Were they making out or just hugging?”
I throw up my hands. “What the fuck do I know? Does it really matter?”
“Yes, it matters. Molly has a kid, you know.”
“I’m well aware of that.” That little bomb was dropped a few months back when Molly started working for our company and enrolled her son, Noah, into our health insurance plan. The fact that she was a single mother wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that prior to that she’d kept her son a secret from everyone in this town. Including her stepsiblings.
“Have you seen him?”
“Colton?”
“No.” She smacks my arm, as if I’m being deliberately obtuse. “Have you seen Molly’s son?”
