Page 37 of Settling the Score (The Karma Club #4)

Watching as she lifted a hand to her ponytail and flicked it over one shoulder.

Or when she laughed at something that Astrid’s uncle said, or almost lost her footing on an uneven cobblestone and Chuck ‘Cut Your Lunch’ Daly was right there to swoop to her rescue, wrapping an arm around her waist to steady her so Aiden’s blood pounded in his ears so loudly it was like the ocean.

Her skin was a deep tan and she seemed to glory in the feeling of the sun on her. Several times, he saw her stop walking and tilt her face to the sky, as if basking in that small pleasure. Such a familiar gesture and like a bolt from the sky, he realised why.

He’d seen her do that before.

Memories wrapped around him like a boa constrictor, making breathing almost impossible.

On the way home from school, one of the first days of spring, when the sun had finally come out and the sky was clear, she’d stopped walking, put both hands on her hips and done exactly that.

Back then, her hair had been unruly, even when she’d jammed it into a ponytail, and little bits of it had caught on the breeze and made the air sweet with the fragrance of her conditioner.

She’d closed her eyes, parted her lips then sighed, and he’d looked at her then like he was now: like she was the damned embodiment of every single one of his dreams.

He groaned audibly and turned away from the group, who had stopped to admire an ancient building.

They were heading for lunch and afterwards, thank Christ, they were going back to the island, where he could get some time to himself.

Away from harmless small talk and visions of Sienna morphing into the woman of his teenage dreams, threatening every shred of his equilibrium.

How could he want to be around someone so much and also desperately need to get the hell away? What was happening?

He was Ice.

That was his name, his reputation. Hell, it was his whole freaking philosophy in life.

Feelings – bad. Control – good. Emotions – bad. The ability to walk away and not look back – excellent proof that you were in control.

Now all he could do was look back, and the overwhelming sense that he might have made the biggest screw up a person could make in their life – the kind that was impossible to fix – was now sitting in his gut like a lead balloon.

One more glance at Sienna as she laughed, and he felt the world tilt wildly off its axis.

Fuuuuck. In the end, it was the only word that could do justice to how he felt. And even that wasn’t quite strong enough.

* * *

Given the lack of ice on this tropical island paradise, they settled for playing football instead. Titans, ex-hockey players, friends who just liked sport, gathered on one of the grassed areas near the house and set up for a casual evening game.

‘Just don’t get a black eye before the wedding,’ Astrid warned, but she was grinning as Blake waved over his head and ran onto the field.

Aiden watched them, and felt it again. Just like he had on the boat. Jealousy.

Jealous, because Blake and he had been given the same cross to bear.

And Aiden had always thought he’d been the one to sort his shit out, better than his brother, anyways.

Blake who’d taken the opposite approach to Aiden – to ice his emotions – and instead felt everything.

But it was Blake who’d finally put their shitshow of a childhood in the past, and was moving on with the love of his life.

Blake was the one who looked carefree and blissed out.

Blake had been unafraid to reach for what he wanted with both hands and hold on, and never let go.

Blake hadn’t run.

Not for good.

He’d faced his feelings and his fears, and he’d conquered the latter.

Whereas Aiden… his eyes shifted to Sienna, who was now huddled in conversation with the other three musketeers. For once, they weren’t laughing and being silly, but rather, their expressions were serious. Thoughtful.

Astrid put her arm around Paige and drew her close. Paige smiled at her, but it was a strange smile. Haunted. Disbelieving.

He frowned, looking back to Sienna, who was holding her hands in front of her chest in a sort of prayer motion, looking hopeful.

Worried. All the things. Then, Paige nodded, and they hugged, and laughed, like something miraculous had happened.

He kicked his toe into the grass and looked away, bitterness flooding his gut as he felt completely on the outside of Sienna’s life.

She was a mystery to him in so many ways, and a part of him in others.

But the mysteries were something he was now finding impossible to accept.

He wanted to know her. To know everything about her. He wanted to see her and hear her, to just watch her go through life, achieving things because she worked so hard and gave everything her all.

The fact he’d already missed more than ten years, hadn’t been there for her when she’d needed him most, was the kind of ache he wasn’t sure he’d ever not feel.

Yet the future stretched before him, like a fork in the road.

Go back to New York, his real life, his job, and the fact he was choosing every damned day to keep on running from his feelings and his fears.

Or be brave, like Blake, and finally accept that against any and all probabilities and sense, he’d met his goddamned soulmate at sixteen, and the most important thing to him now, as a man approaching thirty, was to win her back at all costs.

Because facing the rest of his life without her in it just didn’t work for him.

To hell with his personal philosophy and his aversion to feelings.

Sienna was his. And unequivocally, he was, and always had been, hers.

* * *

‘You look… not at all stressed,’ he said to Blake, a couple of hours later when they were finally alone.

‘Why would I be?’

‘I mean, you’re getting married tomorrow.’

‘Yeah. To Astrid,’ he said. The duh was implied.

Aiden shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat, reaching for the ice-cold beer and taking a drink, before cradling the bottle neck between his fingertips and thumb.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Blake asked, leaning back in his own chair, one ankle crossed casually over the other knee.

‘Get what?’ Aiden tried to flatten the defensive note from his voice.

‘What it’s like to meet the one person you just know you need in your life. I’m not saying I couldn’t live without Astrid. I’m just saying, I wouldn’t want to. It’s like, before I met her, I was running at maybe 40 per cent capacity. I wasn’t… unlocked.’

Aiden threw his brother a quizzical look. ‘Careful, bro. You sound kinda New Age.’

‘I’m turning over a whole new leaf.’

‘Yeah, I can see that,’ Aiden said, serious again.

‘You’ll meet someone one day, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about,’ Blake promised, with all the smug indulgence of someone who secretly believed that they alone had found true love, and no one else would ever really know the sublime, soaring heights of their happiness.

Aiden grunted, turned back to the view of the water, sipped his drink. Tried not to listen to his thumping, irritated heart. The same heart that had been shouting at him all day to stop being such an ass and wake the hell up.

‘Unless you already have,’ Blake inserted, a little too innocently to be without forethought.

Aiden threw him a glance then looked away.

Blake sighed. ‘You’re not gonna talk about it?’

‘Talk about what?’

‘The fact you’re clearly as in love with Sienna as you were as a kid.’

Aiden bristled. His heart rejoiced. He continued to ignore it.

But his stomach rolled and clenched and his eyes filled with stars and visions of a future he’d already discounted as impossible.

A rosy future with a big old house, white picket fence and a town that he was single-handedly saving from desperation.

The good he could do, with Sienna by his side…

‘Come on, man. I’ve got eyes,’ Blake continued.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t know what to say to that.’

‘Why can’t you just face it?’

Aiden sat a little straighter. His temples pounded.

His certainty on the beach that afternoon that he couldn’t let things go with Sienna again slammed into him, but he wasn’t ready to admit it yet.

It was terrifying. Too big. Too huge. Like a black hole of what ifs. ‘You really have to ask me that?’

Blake made a noise. A groan. A sigh. All mixed in one. Then, he laughed. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘What?’ Aiden couldn’t quite keep the defensive note from his voice.

Blake visibly sobered. ‘Ice is running scared.’

Aiden’s spine couldn’t have gone any straighter if he’d had a hockey stick pressed to it. He opened his mouth to deny it, but the words died before he could find them, because his brother was right.

‘Holy shit, man. You’re scared. You’re scared like you’ve always been, that you’re going to morph into him.’

Aiden turned to him quickly. ‘What?’

‘You told me. Once. Years ago. I remember, because it was like the most patently absurd thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You be like Dad ? Me, yes, but not you.’

Aiden bristled. His voice though was perfectly calm. ‘Just because I don’t show what I’m feeling like you do, doesn’t mean I don’t still feel it.’

Blake’s jaw squared. ‘Feeling things isn’t the problem,’ Blake muttered.

‘Feeling things is normal. Healthy. It’s what you do with those feelings that matters.

Dad never got that. He never learned to regulate.

To take himself for a run or, I don’t know, get a punching bag in the backyard, or a really good shrink. ’

Aiden squeezed the beer bottle tighter. ‘But he loved Mom.’

‘So?’

‘So how do you know, I mean, you love Astrid, but how do you know …’

‘Because I’m not him. And you’re not him either.

That kind of violence, it’s not genetic.

It’s not hard-wired into us. If anything, seeing what he was like, knowing what it’s like to live with that fear, it’s made us both the total opposite of him.

I know when I’m getting pissed off. I feel it.

Like a hum in my ears, and I know what to do, how to deal with it.

Most of all, I know I would never, ever hurt Astrid, or anyone else. We’re not him.’

Aiden dropped his head, staring at the ground between his feet, his breath burning as it tried to whoosh from his lungs. It was like being winded, or puffed out. He could hardly think straight. Sienna had said the same thing, but he hadn’t believed her.

Or maybe he’d just been so determined to keep running from her, to close down the door of possibility to any kind of future with her, that he’d refused to listen.

But Blake knew him in a wholly different way to Sienna.

And now, the past was wrapping around him like a patchwork blanket, memories of nights he’d spent with Blake, planning how they could fix everything, how they could make it better for their mom, how they could get away.

They’d never once thought of turning to violence to hurt their dad.

Even when all hell had broken loose and Blake had lashed out, it had been to defend Cynthia, not premeditated.

They had seen the wreckage of their family and sought to do something good, not make everything worse.

They weren’t him.

They had looked at him and known they wanted to get away from him. They’d chosen a different path.

And they’d walked it all these years.

His gut rolled.

Regret was a sinking pit of despair he skirted the edges of.

‘It doesn’t matter, anyway.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she’d never take me back. Not in a million years.’

Blake considered that. ‘Have you told her about me?’

Aiden shot him a look. ‘The fact we’re brothers? I think she’s aware.’

‘About the charges. About that night. About what would have happened to me if you hadn’t gotten us out.’

Aiden took a sip of his beer. ‘That’s not why I left her.’

‘You had to leave.’

‘No, I didn’t. I could have kept seeing her. We loved each other, man. The kind of love that would have survived a few years apart. I wanted to end it – that was nothing to do with you. It was… all the other shit. How I felt about her… the fact I felt anything at all…’

‘Right, got it.’ Blake nodded slowly. ‘Like I said, you were scared.’

‘Can we think of a different word? Like… avoiding commitment?’

‘You were scared,’ Blake replied, but grinned, in that brotherly teasing way.

‘Fine. I was scared. I was terrified. I loved her so freaking much, the idea of ever being like him…’

‘But you’re not. We’ve dealt with that.’

‘Yeah, and it’s more than ten years later and she’s still pissed.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I mean, I guess so.’

Aiden stared at his brother, long and hard, wheels turning. ‘Hold up. Do you know something?’

Blake groaned. ‘Nope.’

‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘Don’t ask me to spill Astrid’s secrets.’

‘Astrid’s secrets?’ Aiden stood up then, turning to face his brother, palm flat against his hip. ‘Astrid’s secrets, or Sienna’s secrets?’

Blake blanched, then swore. ‘Seriously, bro. Stop.’

‘No, come on, man. This is my life we’re talking about.’

‘Yeah, I know. I know.’ He dragged a hand through his hair. ‘Just… hang on a sec.’

He pulled his phone out and started to type.

Blake

Hate to interrupt secret girls’ business, but do you have a second?

Astrid

Hmm, a second? Or a little longer…

Blake laughed.

‘What?’ Aiden asked.

‘Astrid’s just… being Astrid.’ He went back to typing.

Blake

Love that idea, but my brickhead of a brother is here.

Astrid

Oh.

Blake

Yeah. So put that on ice for now.

Astrid

That’s what she said.

Blake laughed again.

‘What?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

Aiden nodded, anxiety spreading through him like the tide. Blake started typing again.

Blake

It won’t take long.

Then:

Blake

It’s about Sienna.

Her dots appeared immediately.

Astrid

I’m on my way.