Page 19

“That’s not—” She blows out a breath, shaking her head as she rubs at her eyes again. “One dinner, okay? Can we not fight for one, single dinner?”

No , I almost reply. Not to be a bitch, but because I really don’t think we can.

I don’t think I can. I think fighting is all I’m capable of.

I think being in a room of people who like each other as friends just as much as they love each other as family in a way I never quite felt I managed to achieve makes me even more uncomfortable than literally anything else ever has or will.

But then I look at Lux. I really look at her. I look at the bags beneath her eyes, the shiny brown irises, the crinkled corners as she half-cringes, already anticipating a rejection.

“Depends.” I drop my gaze to my lap, watching my fingers mess with the hem of my dress. The pretty, dark red dress that I picked because I wanted to look nice today, and not for a group of strangers gathered in a dingy community center. “What did you make?”

“Food, ” Lux quips playfully—momentarily losing a battle against her own snarky instincts, I think—before adding, “Pork roast. Jackson cooked.”

I glance at her out of the corner of my eye. “That’s my favorite.”

There’s a pause, and then a gentle hand—calloused from years of ranch work and stained ink-blue around the fingertips from hours behind a desk—slides across my cheek, guiding me to face the woman it belongs to.

“We know.” Lux’s thumb slides across my cheekbone, and I almost don’t catch myself in time to stop from leaning into the affectionate gesture. “Let’s go. It’s Alex’s favorite too, and if we don’t—Oh. There he is.”

Her hand drops and, with my heart in my throat, I follow my sister’s gaze out the windshield, to the little boy throwing himself down the porch steps.

I follow her out of the truck too, numb and nervous at the same time, and round the hood just in time to watch my nephew, my Alex , wrap himself around his mother’s legs.

He was just a baby the last time I saw him. A tiny little one-year-old with short, fluffy hair and a round belly and very few motor skills. He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t do anything but be utterly adorable.

He can run now. His hair is long enough to weave into a thin braid. He talks to his mom at a mile a minute with real, almost perfectly enunciated words, filling her in on every little thing she missed in the meager hour they were apart. But when he catches sight of me, that stops.

I swear, his lips make an audible noise as they slam shut. He shrinks in on himself, hiding behind a pair of jean-clad legs, whispering something I don’t hear, but Lux’s response fills in the blanks. “That’s your Aunt Lottie, sweet boy.”

With bated breath, I wait for confusion. For a who? In five seconds flat, I convince myself the kid doesn’t remember that. That no one’s cared to make sure he does.

In one quiet sentence, I’m proven wrong.

“Oh.” Alex nods, so fucking serious. “She made my blankie.”

I suck in a breath. Rolling my lips together, I glance at Lux and find her gazing at her son, smiling softly in a way that makes my chest pang. She doesn’t look up when I ask, “You still have that thing?”

But she does reply, “He sleeps with it every night.”

Fuck . “Yeah?”

Alex nods again. “I told Izzy you would make him one too.”

Double fuck . I try to smile, but it feels shaky. “Won’t look as good as yours,” I understate—it’ll look terrible, considering that blanket of his was probably the last thing I ever knit. “But I can try.”

The most stoic three-year-old I’ve ever seen in my life considers that for a long, anticipatory moment before saying, in a lisping, toddler voice that doesn’t quite suit him, “That’s fine. Can we go inside now?”

Laughing quietly at her kid, Lux hoists him onto her hip.

“Your old knitting stuff is still upstairs,” she tells me as she starts towards the house, and I trail behind if only because the little boy in her arms urges me to do so with a clumsy wave of a small, chubby hand. “You can grab it after dinner.”

Dinner. Right. Yeah. That’s what I’m here for.

Starving for it, actually, but as Lux goes inside, I hesitate.

The screen door closes behind her and I peer through the mesh at the handful of bodies moving around the kitchen.

I spot Eliza and Jackson standing at the stove with their backs to me, shoulders brushing, their laughter drifting outside.

I watch Lux set her son on his feet and crouch to talk to him, ruffling his hair and peppering his face with kisses.

I look at them and I feel… not right. Out of place.

Like I’d disturb something by going in there, upset the balance.

I take a step back. I move to the side, out of view. I hide, for all intents and purposes, as I flatten myself against the wall. Inhale for four seconds, hold my breath for another four, and exhale for four too. Twelve seconds that do nothing to dull the dense, hot unease constricting my diaphragm.

I’ve got a minute, tops, before someone comes looking for me.

Just enough time to slip a hand into my jacket pocket and fumble around for the pack of cigarettes that are a lot more than half empty now, despite my valiant attempts at self-control.

Pinching one of the remaining four, I reach into my other pocket for my lighter.

Only to remember I don’t have it.

Slumping with a huff, I scowl at my feet as I twirl the useless cigarette between my fingers. “Fucking Finn.”

“You talk about fucking me an awful lot, princess.”

I close my eyes. Take another twelve second breath. Prop the unlit cigarette between my lips and hope it might calm me down anyway. “You should be grateful,” I mumble around it, watching my booted foot tap the porch aggressively. “Only action you’re getting, I imagine.”

In my peripheral, I watch a tall, toned body lean against the wall beside me. “You imagine, do you?”

My head lolls to the side, my eyeballs rolling, getting caught on the ebony skin exposed by yet another obscene bicep-bearing crop before finding a smirk that makes me squint. “It’s a recurring nightmare, actually.”

With a low laugh, Finn holds a fist out towards me, unfurling it, palm-up, to reveal my stolen lighter sitting in the center. “Guessing you’re looking for this?”

Grunting, I reach for it, fingers just brushing the plastic before it’s snatched away. I make another discordant noise, I make another grab for it, but like a fucking overgrown child, Finn holds it above his head, keeping it hostage.

He does the same thing to the goddamn cigarette he steals right out of my mouth too.

“What the fuck is your problem?” I snap as I attempt to retrieve both of them, failing miserably because while no one would call me short, that word doesn’t even exist in Finn’s vocabulary, and evidently, he’s dead set on using every extra inch he has to keep me from indulging in one of many nasty little habits.

Grinning like an asshole, Finn drops his thieving hand and moves it behind his back—like he thinks his body is an adequate obstacle, that I wouldn’t dare get close enough to try to take it.

All this time spent around Jacksons, and he hasn’t yet learnt that we have no concept of boundaries? Dumbass.

I step towards him and his eyebrows jump, but he doesn’t move other than to evade another grab—other than to slip his fucking loot into his back pocket, something that makes me huff a laugh because really? He thinks that’s going to stop me?

It won’t. I’ll dive right in there. I can’t imagine there’s a woman alive who wouldn’t grab that bull by the horn—or grab that ranch hand by the ass cheek, if we’re being literal about it.

His mouth, on the other hand, does cause me pause. “Isn’t smoking a little taboo among runners?”

“How do you know I run? Ran ,” I quickly correct because I don’t run anymore, I haven’t in… a while. Years. My high school track career ended even before high school did.

A pretty damn good career, as Finn reminds me, “All those medals in your room kinda gave it away.”

My old room, he means. The one at this house. “And when the fuck were you in my room?”

“It was my room for a while.”

Oh, I do not like that. I don’t like that one bit. If I’ve done the math right in my head, I was barely even gone when he came onto the scene. My bed was barely cold before he rolled into it. If I had any wild notions of my room being some kind of mournful shrine…

I didn’t. Hopeless optimism is not a mindset I’ve ever managed to achieve. But shit, did I think my siblings would waste no time moving in a nicer, shinier replacement?

Fuck. That guts me. Makes me cross my arms protectively over my chest, like I’m keeping something from falling out, spilling onto the porch, exposing me.

Although, I think I do a little of the latter anyway when I snark, “They kick you out too?”

Dark brows drop and pull together as the tilt of his head becomes a lot less taunting, and a whole lot intrigued. Confused. As questioning as whatever words I’m sure are about to spill from parted lips.

Except when a voice fills the air, it isn’t Finn’s.

“Well, well, well.” A perpetually sultry tone has me tensing, sighing, and shitting myself in equal measures. “What’s going on here?”

Gaze trained on the man I didn’t realize was quite so close until now, I tell the love of my brother’s life, “Foreplay, I think.”

Finn chokes.

“Can you come back in…” I purse my lips, staring at Finn’s bottom one as his tongue traces it. “Thirty seconds is enough for you, right, darling?”

Obsidian eyes narrow, but he doesn’t get the chance to object.

“Step away from the cowboy, chaos girl. He’s way too nice for you.”

Tell me something I don’t know.

Winking sardonically at Finn, I pat him on the chest as I step around him, my smirk abruptly dropping when I get my first look at Luna Evans in two years.

Luna, the toddler on her hip, and the rock on her slender finger.