Protecting You: A Small Town Romance Origin Story (The Bailey Brothers Book 1)

by Claire Kingsley

He grinned at me, the cocky little shit. Not that he was little anymore. He was eighteen, and we’d been the same height for a couple of years. My brothers and I—there were five of us—had inherited our father’s stature. None of us were under six-two, even Gavin, who was only sixteen.

  But I was the oldest, so I still had big brother power.

  “I’ll take a raincheck on that. I’m going out tonight. Don’t want to mess this up.” Logan gestured to his face. “Although a black eye is a great way to meet girls. Maybe I should take you up on it.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  He grinned again. “Maybe, but at least I’m not a stalker.”

  I stepped away from the window. “I’m not stalking her.”

  “Sure you’re not.”

  Maybe I would give him a black eye. “Shut your face, asshole.”

  “Boys! Language.” Gram’s voice carried upstairs.

  Logan and I furrowed our brows. We could start up our grandad’s old truck, which had an engine so loud it rattled the windows, and she’d barely notice. But let us utter a single curse word above a whisper in Gram’s house and she’d scold us like we were still kids.

  “Sorry, Gram,” I called down.

  Logan wandered over to the window and glanced out. “Cool that she’s home, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  Even without my face practically touching the glass, I could see her. She’d popped the trunk and pulled out a big suitcase. Her little brother, Elijah, burst out of the house and barreled into her, throwing his arms around her. She leaned down and kissed the top of his head.

  “Quit being weird, dude.” Logan said. “It’s Grace.”

  “I know it’s Grace, and I’m not being weird.”

  His forehead creased and he raised an eyebrow. “I can see that. Just like you’re not stalking her.”

  Before he could react, I hooked an arm around his neck. I yanked him down, going for a headlock, but he twisted out of my grip and wrapped his arms around my waist. Driving with his legs, he pushed until my back crashed against the wall.

  I got my feet under me and changed my grip on him. Lowering my center of gravity, I pivoted and flipped him over my shoulder. He landed hard on the bed, and his foot sent something on the bedside table crashing to the floor. I spun, getting chest to chest to maintain control. I’d wrestled in high school and now I took jiujitsu at an MMA gym in town, so my grappling skills were still sharp.

  They had to be, in this family.

  He grunted as I held him pinned down beneath my weight.

  “Can you not break my stuff?”

  A mirror image of Logan’s face glared at us from the doorway. His twin, Levi, stood with his arms crossed. They looked a lot like me, but their features were more angular than mine, their cheekbones sharper. Even though they had the identical DNA, I’d never had a problem telling them apart. Levi was so serious, whereas Logan always looked like he was up to something.

  “Sorry.” I stood and helped Logan up. This was the bedroom they shared, and I’d just body-slammed Logan onto Levi’s bed.

  Levi grunted and moved past me to pick up the lamp we’d knocked over. At least it didn’t look like it was broken.

  “Grace is home,” Logan said.

  “Yeah.” Levi replied without looking at his brother.

  “She needs a proper welcome. We should go give her a five-moon salute.” Logan smirked and mimicked pulling his pants down to show his ass.

  “Why would we do that?”

  “Because it would be funny.”

  I shoved Logan. “Leave her alone.”

  “You two are boring as fuck,” he said under his breath, then paused, as if waiting to see if Gram had heard him. The scolding didn’t come, and he grinned. “Gavin’ll do it with me.”

  I was about to tackle Logan again—or maybe Levi, just because—when the smell of strawberries wafted upstairs from the kitchen.

  We all froze, sniffing the air, our eyes widening.

  “Is Gram baking?” I asked.

  Logan nodded. “Smells like—”

  “Strawberry rhubarb,” Levi finished.

  I moved toward the door, but Logan knocked into me with his shoulder. Levi pushed past us both and we all scrambled to get to the kitchen first.

  Our feet thundered on the old wooden staircase. We shoved each other all the way down, as if we were a pack of rowdy kids, not three guys who were technically adults. The tantalizing scent grew. We burst into the kitchen just as Gram pulled a pie out of the oven and set it on a wire rack next to another. Despite the noise we’d just made rushing down here, she only spared us a quick glance over her shoulder.

  Silver was replacing the black in Gram’s long hair. She wore it in a thick braid down her back, and had for as long as I could remember. Although she’d recently turned seventy, her dark skin was only just starting to show her age and her posture was still straight. Kind of surprising, considering she’d had to unexpectedly raise five unruly boys, years after having raised her own children.

  She claimed it was the mountain air, copious amounts of bacon, and her Native American ancestry that kept her young. I tended to think she was simply too stubborn to let age have its way with her.

  For over two decades, my grandmother had been known as Gram to everyone who knew her—related or not. But before she’d married my grandad, Frank Bailey, she’d been Emma Luscier, descendant of both the Chelan and Wenatchi tribes. Her ancestors had lived in the Cascade mountain range for countless generations.

  Gavin already sat at the kitchen table, a wide rectangle our grandad had built out of thick planks. The chairs placed around it were sturdy, but worn from years of use. Grooves in the wood floor marked the passage of two generations of kids who’d grown up in this house.

  Our youngest brother looked like a clone of the rest of us. Dark hair, brown eyes, olive skin, and a semi-permanent shit-eating grin. He was going through a phase of keeping his hair so long it hung in his eyes, and he hadn’t quite lost his round cheeks yet. When I really wanted to piss him off, I called him babyface.

  “The pie needs to cool,” Gram said. “And there’s no need to fight over it. I made plenty. Still have two more to bake.”

  The three of us hadn’t tried to climb over each other to get downstairs because we thought we’d run out of pie. With five boys in the house, Gram always made enough food to feed an army. For us, it was just habit. We were brothers; wrestling was our love language.

  Logan walked up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her cheek. “It just smells so good we can’t help it. Plus, I’m starving.”

  “You just ate lunch.”

  “I ran five miles this morning.” He leaned against the counter and grabbed an apple out of a bowl.

  “Do you want a medal?” Levi asked.

  Grinning, Logan tossed the apple at him. Levi caught it and threw it back.

  “Go find Evan,” Gram said.

  Logan took a bite of the apple. “Which one of us?”

  “All of you.”

  “Where is he?” Levi asked.

  Gavin jerked his thumb toward the back door. “Woods. I saw him leave earlier.”

  Evan kept to himself a lot, often wandering in the woods out behind our house. He had come home from his second year of college a few days ago, but even though we shared a room when he was here, I hadn’t seen much of him.

  “Go on then,” Gram said, shooing us with the oven mitt. “No pie until you bring your brother back, or you animals will eat it all before he has a chance at any.”

  A chorus of groans went around the kitchen, coupled with the scrape of Gavin’s chair against the floor.

  While my brothers headed for the door, I hung back. If Gram really wanted to be rid of all four of us, she’d shoo me out too. But I didn’t want to wander the woods searching for Evan, so I hesitated next to the table, waiting to see if she’d insist I go.

  She didn’t.

  The back door banged shut. I pu
lled out a chair and sat while she put two more pies in the oven.

  “You finish up your finals?” she asked.

  “Yep. All done until September.”

  “How’d you do?”

  “Pretty sure I aced everything.”

  She closed the oven and put her oven mitts on the counter. “Of course you did.”

  Unlike Grace and my brother Evan, I’d stayed in town after high school and enrolled in Tilikum College. It was a good school, and had one of the best fire sciences programs in the state. Logan and Levi were starting there in the fall. All three of us planned on going into fire safety. I’d been a volunteer firefighter since I’d graduated high school, and my plan was to make a career of it. Eventually become a fire inspector. Maybe even fire chief someday.

  But even if the college here hadn’t been a good school, I still would have stayed. I couldn’t leave Gram or my brothers. Our parents had died in an electrical fire when we were young—fortunately for us kids, we hadn’t been in the house—and Gram and Grandad had taken us in.

  We hadn’t exactly made things easy on them. Whether it was just the nature of a family of five boys, or because we were all a little messed up from losing our parents—probably both—we’d been rowdy. Troublemakers, even.

  Maturity was calming us down, at least a little. And I was doing my best to get—and keep—my shit together. As the oldest, it was my responsibility to be the man of the family, especially since Grandad had passed away a few years ago. I hadn’t always done a great job at it, but I was trying.

  However, I was seriously considering moving out—getting an apartment in town. I was twenty-one, three years out of high school, and itching to have my own place.

  Still, I was worried about leaving, even if I’d only be a mile or two away.

  Gram cut a piping hot piece of pie and brought it to the table. Slid it in front of me and handed me a fork with a wink.

  “What troubles you, Bear?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Hmm.” She got her tea from the counter and sat across from me. “Grace is home for the summer.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You could go next door and see her.”

  I took a bite of pie without meeting her eyes. “I’m sure she’s busy. I’ll see her at some point.”

  Gram didn’t reply, just kept watching me eat.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She took a sip of her tea.

  “Gram, stop. You do this every time she comes home for a break. We’re friends, but that’s all.”

  “Friends can be excited to see each other when it’s been a while.”

  I shrugged.

  When she spoke again, her voice was soft. “It’s okay to miss her, Bear.”

  She didn’t mean miss her because I hadn’t seen her since Christmas, and I knew it. She meant miss the way we used to be. We hadn’t just been close, we’d been inseparable. As kids, Grace and I had been best friends. Basically glued to each other.

  Not anymore.

  We sat in silence for a while. Gram sipped her tea and I devoured the slice of pie. It was the perfect blend of tart and sweet, with a flaky crust that melted in my mouth.

  I ate my last few bites, still thinking about Grace. The last time I’d seen her, the distance between us had felt like a canyon. It had sucked, but after she’d gone back to school, I’d mostly put her out of my mind. I was busy all the time, so that had made it easier. But now she was home, and I once again had to face the truth.

  I had a thing for Grace. I had for a long time. And I’d never told her. Never told anyone.

  I had my reasons, and it didn’t matter now anyway. She was dating someone else. In a few short months, she’d go back to school. And maybe next summer would be the year she didn’t come back home.

  Thinking about a world without Grace—my world without her—was putting me in a shitty mood. Maybe I needed more pie.

  “This was amazing.” I gestured to my empty plate, then stood and took it to the counter where the pies were cooling.

  “Don’t even think about it, Bear.” Gram wagged her finger at me. “You want more, you go pick me more strawberries.”

  “There’s two more in the oven.”

  “I expect we’ll have company soon.” She paused to sip her tea. “In fact, go next door and ask Naomi and the kids to come on over before that wild pack of wolves you call brothers gets back.”

  I shot Gram a look. I should have known she’d have an ulterior motive for giving me the first slice of pie.

  “Go on, now,” she said, shooing me with her hand. “Don’t make me tell you twice.”

  With a soft chuckle, I put my plate in the sink and lifted my hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

  I gave Gram a kiss on the head, then left to go tell Naomi and Elijah—and Grace—that we had pie.

  3

  Grace

  I always had mixed feelings when I came home from college.

  On the one hand, it was good to see my family. My mom and I were close, and I missed her when I was away at school. My little brother, Elijah, was growing up so fast he was taller every time I saw him. And I really did like my hometown. I wasn’t one of those people who’d left because I hated where I’d grown up. Tilikum was a quirky place, but it was home.

  On the other hand, going away to college was a step forward, and coming home felt like taking two steps back. Like this house, and this town, resisted my efforts at growing up. I was trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted for my life. It was hard to do that here.

  I pulled a stack of shirts out of my suitcase and set them in the open dresser drawer. Living in my childhood bedroom exacerbated the sense that I was being pulled backward in time. Not much about it had changed. Same twin bed shoved against a wall. Same pink comforter I’d had for years. Whitewashed dresser and nightstand with pink drawer pulls. A beat-up desk we’d found at a garage sale when I was twelve. I’d taken all my old posters down last year. They’d mostly been boy bands and a movie series I’d been obsessed with for a while. Now the walls were almost bare.

  My eyes darted to the bulletin board in front of my desk. It was still covered with a collage of photos. Seventeen-year-old me holding a newborn Elijah. Another one of my little brother, taken last summer in Gram’s kitchen. A few pictures of me with my high school girlfriends, including us in prom dresses. We’d gone as a group instead of taking dates.

  But mostly, they were of me and Asher.

  The two of us at the graduation party the Baileys had thrown for me in Gram’s backyard. Sitting in the back of his grandad’s old truck when we were in middle school. Us at ten and eleven, with dirty faces and skinned knees, hanging from the branches of the big tree out by the creek.

  My favorite was one my mom had taken on my eighth birthday. Something had upset Asher—I couldn’t remember now what it had been—and he’d gone outside by himself. I’d brought him a balloon to make him feel better. Mom had captured the moment I had handed it to him—the two of us standing apart, our arms outstretched, the balloon floating between us.

  Leaving my suitcase half-unpacked, I wandered over to the window. My bedroom was the smallest in our little house, but I’d always insisted on keeping it. I’d wanted it for the view. This room faced Gram’s house—and Asher’s bedroom window.

  As kids, we’d waved to each other from these windows. Signaled each other with flashlights after dark. Taped up Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas signs for each other to see.

  At some point, we’d stopped. But every time I came home, I still found myself gazing at his square of glass. Missing those times.

  Missing him.

  The last time I’d seen Asher had been at Christmas. It had been good to see him, but it had also been a painful reminder of how things had changed. How we’d grown apart.

  It made me think of a story Gram had once told me, about a seed buried in the dirt. She’d said something inside the seed knew when the
temperature was just right, and the sprout would break through the casing. Then it had to struggle through the soil for a while, pushing past pebbles and roots, before finally breaking the surface to find sunlight.

  I hadn’t understood what she’d meant at the time, but I thought I might now. Growing up was hard, and sometimes we had to struggle through the dirt to find our way. If Asher and I were both seedlings, we were finding separate paths to the surface of the soil. Ultimately, we’d both reach sunlight, just in different places.

  “Hey, Grace?” My mom poked her head into my room. Her dark blond hair was in its usual ponytail, like she didn’t have the time or energy to do anything else with it. She wore a light gray t-shirt and a pair of jeans she’d probably had since I was little. But even with her busy-single-mom wardrobe, she was beautiful. “I picked up some pizza for dinner. Want to come down?”

  “Sure, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  She smiled. “It’s good to have you home.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  As ready as I’d been to find my own path to the sunlight, I hadn’t taken the decision to go away to college lightly. There was a perfectly good school right here in Tilikum, and I could have saved money living at home. As the child of a single mother and a mostly-absent father, I’d been very conscious of the financial ramifications of college.

  But I’d been dying for something new. A new place, new people, new experiences. And my mom had encouraged me to go away to college. Enthusiastically, in fact. I got the sense that she didn’t want me to wind up stuck here, like her.

  I glanced at Asher’s window again. I’d never admitted it out loud, but he’d been the deciding factor. My senior year he’d been a freshman in college, and he’d started dating a girl he’d met at school. It had made me realize that staying here would mean watching Asher build a life with someone else. Even if it wasn’t her—and ultimately, they hadn’t stayed together—it would be someone. I wanted that for him. I wanted him to be happy. But living with it every day would be torture.

  I’d spent high school working my ass off to get good grades. Participated in extracurricular activities to make my applications stronger. And applied for every scholarship under the sun.