ego.”
She made it worse by smiling. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” But he couldn’t help smiling, too, as he turned to go. “’Night, Olivia.”
She didn’t say anything, so he turned back to look at her. She was standing there in the doorway, lit only by the moonlight. But he didn’t need to see her face to know she was still looking a little dazed.
Which was only fair. He was dazed all the way into next week.
“Bye,” came her soft whisper.
“I said good night,” he said, “not bye.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A whole hell of a lot,” he said.
“Not to me.” And then she slipped inside, the click of the lock sounding in the night.
A challenge.
Cole was halfway home when his cell rang. His mom. “Everything okay?” he asked. The question was habit, one born of fear. When his father’d had his heart attack, Amelia had called Cole first. It’d fallen to him to handle his mom, his sisters, all the arrangements, everything, and he’d done it without fail.
But his heart still skipped a beat whenever she called him late at night.
“I’m fine,” she said, her voice light and happy, signaling that everything truly was okay. And given the party atmosphere he could now hear in the background, things were more than okay.
“I’m just wondering about you,” she said in the way people did when they were trying to get you to spill your guts.
There was no possible way the gossip mill could’ve gotten ahold of the mind-boggling, heart-stopping, pulse-racing kiss he’d just laid on Olivia.
Right?
He stopped right there in the middle of the sidewalk and looked around. Nope. All alone. “I’m fine,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Fine would be you married with kids so I could be a busybody grandma to them—”
“Mom. Focus.”
“I am. You’d make a great husband and father, Cole.”
He’d never been one to see himself with a wife and a family. He had all that craziness already on his plate with his mom and sisters. “Mom, what did you need?”
“To know why you aren’t here.”
He tried to visualize the calendar he rarely bothered to keep updated, tried to remember whatever it was that he’d forgotten. Not that anyone could blame him, because there was some sort of family gathering every week. He did his best to skip as many of them as possible, but he was rarely successful in this endeavor.
Blood was much thicker than water.
“Need a hint?” his mom asked.
Apparently so, since his brain was currently replaying that kiss with Olivia on repeat, leaving little room for anything else. “No, I remember.”
“Uh-huh,” his mom said, sounding amused. “So we’ll see you in a few then, yes?”
“Absolutely.” Cole disconnected. “Shit,” he said, and called Tanner.
Tanner’s phone connected, but he didn’t speak. Through the phone Cole could hear the same party sounds he’d just heard from his mom’s phone. “Shit,” he said again.
Tanner laughed. “Need a hint?”
“No!” Cole disconnected. He stared off into the distance, racking his brain, but nothing came to him. On the off chance Sam was in bed with Becca—which was where any red-blooded man would be if he were engaged to the gorgeous brunette—Cole texted him instead of calling, and went with casual. He had to, because if Sam sniffed out that Cole had forgotten tonight’s gig, he’d laugh his ass off and not respond.
So what’s up?
Cole was pretty confident that Sam would know, as they’d had Sam as a foster kid on and off through his teen years and he was part of the family. And sure enough, Sam responded almost immediately:
You forgot, huh?
Hell. Cole stared down at the phone, pride warring with good sense. Good sense won, and he texted:
Just %#!#$@# tell me.
Again, Sam responded within seconds.
Your great-aunt’s second husband’s retirement party.
Cole’s eye twitched. He pressed a thumb into his eye socket and got into his truck to drive over to his mom’s house.
She lived on the bluffs overlooking the bowl shape of the town and the harbor, and the house was lit up bright as day. He no sooner entered the place than he was pounced on by everyone.
“Darling,” his mom said, and pulled him in for a hug. She was petite and fit, making her look a decade younger than her fifty-one. “So sweet of you to finally show up.”
He sighed. “Who ratted me out?”
“Tanner.”
Cole lifted his head, searched the crowd, and found Tanner leaning against the mantel nursing a drink, which he lifted in a mock toast to Cole. “Ratfink bastard,” Cole muttered. “He could have told me at the Love Shack earlier.”
“Don’t blame him,” his mom said. “I withheld my meringue pie until he squealed. Not even a Navy SEAL can hold back from my pie.”
This was true.
Amelia ran a hand over Cole’s shoulder. “You’re going to get this looked at again before you go back to work, yes?”
“It’s fine.” Judging from the sounds of laughter and talking and music coming from the living room, the party was still raging. He ignored it. “How are you doing, Mom?”
She smiled with no little amount of irony as she repeated his earlier words back to him: “I’m fine.”
He rolled his eyes, and she laughed as they entered the fray together. His sisters Clare and Cindy were there, with their rug rats and husbands, and it took him twenty minutes to wade through them.
“Where’s Cara?” he asked.
Clare’s smile faded, and she jerked her chin toward the back of the house.
“She alone?” he asked.
“Yes. She said she broke up with that guy she was seeing. Ward.”
If only it were that simple, Cole thought. He took in Clare’s worried expression and tugged on a strand of her hair. “It’s going to be fine,” he said.
His mantra tonight, apparently.
He went through the house, stopped along the way by what felt like a billion people, including Sam and Tanner, but he didn’t find Cara anywhere. The house was a sprawling one-story ranch-style, shaped like a big U. The party had spilled out into the courtyard that the house surrounded on three sides. Beyond the courtyard was a small grove of trees, one of which held their childhood tree house. His dad had built it for him.
For most of his childhood, that tree house had been his escape from pesky sisters who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be bothered to climb it and get at him.
He walked through the courtyard, past the pool, and to the grove, stopping at the base of the biggest tree. He drew a big breath, preparing for battle. Because it was always a battle with Cara. “Hey,” he said upward to the flicker of light he could see between the wood slats.
No answer.
“Aw, come on,” he said. “Don’t make me climb up there.”
More nothing.
“Shit, Cara. Really?”
The tree house door creaked open and a head peeked out. “Go away!”
There she was. “I’d love to, but my sister’s miserable and sharing that misery with everyone in the family, and they’re all clueless as to why. Only I know that she’s a big, fancy liar and her guilt’s eating her up. If she’d stop being an idiot, then yeah, maybe—”
“Must be nice to be perfect!” she yelled down at him.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “There’s something seriously wrong with you if you think my life’s perfect.” No answer, and he sighed. “Look, I think you—”
“Stop thinking for me! You think you know everything, but you don’t!” With that, she slammed the door shut.
“What the hell,” he muttered. He looked around, but not a single tree or breeze or jackshit offered to help him out here.
Then he heard it.
The sound of Cara’s quiet sobs.
He tipped his head back and stared at the stars for a beat, but nothing came to him, no miracle cure. Grinding his teeth, he began to climb. Which, thanks to his shoulder, hurt like a son of a bitch. It wasn’t an easy climb, either; that had been the beauty of the design, and his dad had done it on purpose. No ladder, no easy steps. If you couldn’t climb a tree, you didn’t get into the tree house. That simple.
And that difficult.
“Haven’t done this in over a decade,” he muttered halfway up. He was pretty sure he heard Cara’s derisive snort, and the sound spurred him on. Two minutes later he flopped into the tree house and lay flat on his back, breathing heavily.
“You’re out of shape,” came Cara’s disembodied voice in the dark.
“My shoulder’s killing me.”
There was a rustling, and then a bright light in his eyes.
Her Kindle.
He slammed his eyes shut and covered them with his arm. “Jesus—”
“I thought your shoulder might be better by now. How did you climb the tree if it’s not better?”
“I could climb this tree in my sleep,” he said. “Why are you out here in the dark?”
“Why do you care?”
He resisted the urge to strangle her. “You know I care.”
“I know you’re angry with me.”
“So?” he asked. “What’s new about that?”
She set the Kindle—still on—between them. “I want to be alone. I’m reading.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “The party boring you?”
Her gaze met his in the pale light from the e-reader. “The constant, nonstop questions are,” she said.
“Questions?”
“The usual,” she said. “How’s school, what am I majoring in again, how many units am I taking, when am I going to be finished, am I the oldest one there, what am I going to do with my life…pick one.”
“You sound like a sixteen-year-old,” he said.
“Yes, well, as it turns out, being thirty-two is no picnic either.”
“Because you’re lying to everyone,” he said.
“Hi, Kettle. Black much?”
“Telling people my shoulder doesn’t hurt so they won’t worry about me is different from letting everyone think you’ve gone back to law school when you haven’t,” he said. “Or hiding the fact that you ran off and eloped with the guy you’d known for a week.”
She went still, then backed up just enough that he could no longer see her face from the glow of the e-reader. “I thought I loved him.”
“After a week.”
“You and your unrealistic expectations,” she said. “What do you know about love?”
Well, she had him there. “You told me you were going to have the marriage annulled. That didn’t happen. Then you said you were going to divorce him.”
“It’s not that easy,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because, damn it, I still love him. Sort of.”
Sort of. Jesus. “He cheated on you,” Cole reminded her.
“He thought I’d left him.”
Cole wasn’t going to win this fight. “And lying to Mom?”
“I’m going to tell her.”
“About which?” he asked. “That you’re not really in school, or that you got married without telling her?”
“It’s so easy for you,” she said. “You went to college for a couple of years, found your thing, hit the rigs, made bank, and now get to sit around on your boat all day. You’ve got it easy.”
“Is that really what you think?” he asked incredulously. “You think I have it easy?”
She just looked at him.
He struggled to find something to say that wouldn’t have her chucking her e-reader at his head. At least she’d turned it off so they were in the dark.
Easy. Christ. The rigs had been anything but easy. It’d been hard work, the hardest fucking work of his life, day in and day out. And yeah, he’d been lucky enough to be with the guys, and for a while, Susan.
Until Gil had died. Until the day of his funeral, when Cole had turned to Susan for comfort and realized that she was grieving for Gil even more than he was. She’d been grieving for Gil like a woman who’d lost the love of her life.
Kind of a game changer in a relationship, realizing that you were the only one in love…
He thunked his head back on the wall a few times to clear it, shoving the memory deep as he waited for his sister to say something more.
He’d given up on that when she finally spoke, her voice once again disembodied in the dark. “I get that I’ve disappointed you, Cole. But it’s my life.”
“You didn’t disappoint me,” he said. “This isn’t about me.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” she muttered.
“You let Dad think you were going back to law school, to be an attorney, like he was. For the entire last year of his life he thought that,” Cole said.
“And I was in school.”
“For what, three weeks?”
She blew out a sigh and there was some more rustling, and then he felt her lie flat on her back next to him, so that only their arms were touching. It was something she’d done when they’d been young, when he’d been so sick. She’d lay with him, and it made him ache.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I’m still right here,” she said, but they both knew that wasn’t true.
“I hate it that you have to keep my secrets,” she whispered in the dark.
“Then stop the madness. Either tell everyone you married Ward, or dump him. Stop taking Mom’s money for tuition and books. Come clean with everyone.”
“It’s not that simple, Cole.”
“Yeah, it is. No one’s going to judge you for your life choices, Cara. But they will for the lies.”
“I’m not spending Mom’s money, you know. I have it all in my account. I haven’t spent a penny of it.”
“Whatever, Cara; lying is lying.”