Bliss Brothers: The Complete Series Boxed Set, page 31
To attraction. To all-consuming, blinding attraction.
Holiday swallows hard. “It’s yours,” she says softly.
It hits me like a punch in the gut, then another one straight across the jaw. I take it like a sucker and my mind reels backward to four weeks ago. I know I used a condom.
I don’t know if it broke.
As much as I search for the memory, I can’t find it. Both things are true in my memory. The condom was whole, the condom was broken. Anger sears across my chest. Am I mad at Trojan? Is that it?
No. I’m furious with Holiday.
I didn’t think I’d ever have the chance to be furious with her. Get the chance—no. I didn’t want to fight with her. I never wanted to fight with her. I only wanted to be subsumed by her, again and again, and it’s only now I see how foolish that was.
I let it happen, and she took full advantage of it.
“I’ve been here for four days.” My voice is so deadly sharp I don’t recognize it. “I’ve been here, in your house, and in your bedroom, for four days.”
“I wanted to tell you.”
“You didn’t, otherwise you would have told me.”
Her head snaps up, and her gray eyes laser in on mine. “Fine. I was scared to tell you. I got the nerve up a hundred times, and then…”
“And then you just didn’t say anything. You decided that was a better plan of action.”
“Yeah.” Holiday deflates, her shoulders sagging. “I thought you’d be pretty pissed.”
“You were right about that.” My heart beats too hard and too fast for me to figure out what the hell is happening in this moment. “I have to go.” I make a move toward the door, and Holiday steps farther into the room.
“I wish you wouldn’t go.”
The look on her face breaks my heart.
But so does the fact that she waited this long to say a word, and she knew. She knew. Holiday knew, and her friend knew—if not the details, then at least that something was going on. She, at least, had a chance to grapple with the possible outcomes on her way here. I had no such luxury.
The walls of the bedroom close in, and I need to be gone. I need to be moving. I can’t stay here. I can’t think like this.
“I wish you would have been honest.”
Holiday flinches. Her mouth drops open, but after a moment she closes it again and steps away from the door.
I go out the way I came in—across the back deck, looking out over Ruby Bay—and I start walking.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
At first, the voice sounds enough like my own thoughts that I don’t register it as something separate.
“Driver. Wait.”
I’m off the beach. I’m in the middle of the road, past the gate that separates the resort property from the club property. I have no memory of coming up the stairs from the beach or crossing the resort parking lot, or even going through the gate. Halfway up the hill, I stop and turn around.
Charlie’s coming up behind me in a pair of athletic shorts and a t-shirt. He’s been out running, and he jogs up the hill toward me, coming to an easy stop that’s not reflected in the set of his jaw. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on with me?”
What’s going on is that my lips feel numb and my brain is struggling to sort through…everything. And everything keeps crashing into me like waves off the lake. It’s relentless.
Charlie puts his hands on his hips. “You came stalking across the beach like you’re thinking about committing a crime. I don’t think I’ve seen you look this angry since Beau made fun of your car.”
When I was sixteen, Beau took some lighthearted jabs at the first car I ever bought. There was enough money for us all to have new cars at sixteen, but I didn’t want my parents to choose a car. I wanted to choose it, and I wanted to own it. If I owned it outright, I figured they could never take it away from me, no matter what happened.
I unclench my teeth and arrange my face into what I hope is an easygoing expression. “I’m not angry.”
“Bullshit.” He looks over at me, the picture of patience. “Aren’t you supposed to be out on the road?”
“You know, for a smart guy, Roman’s pretty dense about his ability to order people around.”
“He can order all of us around. He’s managing this circus.”
“I don’t know where he thought I’d go. I have to set things up in advance. It’s not like I drive around and find sponsorships at truck stops.” This is not strictly true. There have been a couple of occasions where I did end up with mutual sponsorships from vendors I met at truck stops.
“Driver.”
“What?” I look toward the top of the hill like it’s Charlie who has wronged me and is now keeping me from the house.
“What is it?”
I look back at him. It’s my brother, and as fond as Charlie is of making cutting remarks about how other people are stupid and lazy, there’s genuine concern on his face.
“Is it seriously Roman you’re angry with?”
“No.” The breath goes out of me in a whoosh, and for a long moment I wonder if I’ll ever breathe again. “I…met a woman about a month ago.”
“Holiday.”
“Roman told you about her?”
“Roman mentioned you’d brought someone to the pool. That’s pretty uncommon.”
“I brought her there because we had…a pretty intense night. It was supposed to be a one-time thing.”
“And it wasn’t?”
The wind rustles through the leaves on the trees around us, and an ache forms in the pit of my gut. I need to be in my car.
“When I got back in town earlier in the week, I saw her on the beach again. She was sick.” It makes my throat tight, remembering how overcome she looked. “I thought she was just sick.”
Charlie shakes his head. “I’m not following. She wasn’t sick?”
“She was, but mostly she’s pregnant.”
He blinks. Once. Twice. “She’s pregnant.”
“Yes, and let’s repeat it out loud until it sinks in.”
“Sorry.” Charlie stares. “She’s…”
“Yes.”
“And you’re…” He raises one hand in front of him.
“God, Charlie, tell me you’re not going to make up a hand gesture for the father right now.”
He lets out a snort of a laugh. “No. I would never do that.” Charlie drops his hand to the side and blows out a breath through rounded lips. “Shit. How are you…you’re not taking it well.”
I give him a big, fake grin. “I’m taking it so well.”
Charlie steps forward and claps me on the shoulder. “All right. Let’s go.”
“What do you mean, let’s go?”
“I mean, you’re clearly headed out for a drive, but you’re not in any state to go alone. I’m coming with you.”
“No way.”
“No time for argument.” He jogs up the hill, putting a few feet between us. “Come on. I don’t have all day.”
“Yes, you do,” I call after him.
“What I mean,” he shouts, “is that you don’t have all day. You have to get your head on straight.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know things,” he shouts back. “Your car or mine?”
9
Driver
“I haven’t been this way in a long time,” Charlie says. He’s settled himself back into the passenger seat. I don’t think of him as a guy who’s faster than a speeding bullet or anything, but somehow he managed to shower and change in the time it took me to pull my car out of the driveway at my place and trundle down the street to his.
To be fair, I’m still in shock. It’s possible I sat there stroking the wheel of my own car for longer than I thought.
Out here on the highway, my shoulders relax and my head can begin the process of clearing. We’re going north, not west or south like I’d normally go, but this road feels as familiar to me as any of the others. This is where I’d go in high school, when even the sprawling Bliss Resort didn’t feel large enough to contain me.
I glance over at Charlie. “You don’t get out much, do you?”
He doesn’t look at me. “I’m busy at the resort.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on, then?”
“What’s going on where? We’re out here for you.” Charlie bounces his leg up and down a few times, then forces himself to relax.
“Sure we are.”
Trees whiz past on either side of the road. There was a bit of cloud cover when I left Holiday’s place earlier, but it’s breaking up now, the sun still low in the sky. It doesn’t thrill me. On a day like today, when the things I’m finding out make my pulse pound in my ears, I don’t want the extra sunlight. I want to be able to drive without sunglasses.
“I’ve spent the last year or so trying to figure out what Dad was doing with all the records and the finances at the resort.” Charlie scowls. “It…hasn’t been the job I thought it would be.”
“What do you mean?” Dad was always a jovial guy, proud of the resort and proud of us, Roman especially. He had it together in a way that I could easily find suffocating. There was always a simple solution to any problem one of us was having. I miss him, sometimes so much it makes my throat go tight and hot, but I don’t miss the tone he’d use to deliver those solutions. So many solutions. Not a lot of listening to anyone. “I thought he had a finance department to take care of that.”
“The finance department was one woman named Mary Campbell, and she retired as soon as he died.”
That doesn’t sound right. “I thought there was a…firm. A firm, or something.”
“He had an accounting firm for the taxes, but for some reason, he ran everything through Mary. She was even the one who worked with the accounting firm. From what I can see, Dad signed off on everything.”
“So…how does this affect us now?”
Charlie looks at me.
“When you look at me like that I can tell you’re deciding whether to keep a secret, and keeping secrets like this is fucking stupid.”
“I’m trying to decide whether to stress you out about this.”
“Trust me. Whatever’s going on in your finance department is nothing compared to what happened to me already this morning. Give me something easy, Charlie. Throw me a bone.”
He takes a deep breath and lets out a sigh. “There’s money disappearing from the resort.”
“What? Like…disappearing how?”
“Like every month, when it’s time to compile the records of all the different sources of income and expenditures, it doesn’t add up. Here and there, across a bunch of different accounts. The system they set up—” He shakes his head. “It’s an ad-hoc thing. Dad never moved to modern accounting software, so it’s all these linked spreadsheets that started out based on paper records…”
“So somebody’s embezzling money?”
“That’s the thing.” Charlie’s hand clenches into a fist. “I can’t tell. I don’t think anyone has access to the accounts, other than us.”
My heart stutters and pounds. “Please tell me you didn’t want to come out here to see if I’m the one taking the money.”
“Hell, no,” Charlie scoffs. “Your accounts are the most transparent of them all. You only use one. Unless there’s something you want to admit to me.”
I shoot him a glare that’s so withering he laughs.
“If anyone, it’s Asher. Do you even know where he is?”
Charlie shakes his head.
The highway turns into the main road leading into Lakewood, and I hit the brakes, slowing as we enter the downtown area. “Stop there.” Charlie points at a corner up ahead where there’s a coffee shop that looks sparkling and new. “We’ll get coffee, and then we’ll go back.”
“The Coffee Spot. Cute. Why do I have to go back, again? Driving away seems like the right thing to do.”
“Because she’s pregnant, and it’s your baby,” Charlie says, echoing all the things I’ve already been thinking. “You can’t run away from that.”
HOLIDAY
I’m never leaving this deck chair.
In fact, I may never leave this house. This is a disaster of epic proportions, and I’d rather hide here on Ruby Bay forever than have to explain how badly I’ve botched this. Running away and starting a new life under a false identity is an attractive prospect, but how long would it take for it to feel like home? My mouth goes dry even considering it. I’d never feel totally secure.
It didn’t seem prudent to risk the hammock after last week, so after Driver left I came out and planted myself here. Sophie brought out an iced tea and a bagel and we sat in silence for a long time.
“Well,” she said finally, “I’ve been on the road for days. I’m going to go take a shower.”
“Towels. Guest bathroom. Clean. Blah, blah, blah.”
She laughed. “You’re an excellent hostess.”
“I really am. Even for unexpected guests.”
Sophie grimaced. “I didn’t mean to bust up your whole…situation.”
“My situation was busted already. I just didn’t know it.” I shaded my eyes with my hand. “Go shower. I’ll still be here when you come back.”
“You’d better be.” She waggled a finger at me and left. I don’t know how long ago that was.
The sliding glass door opens behind me and I don’t open my eyes. “Tell me it’s lunchtime. And tell me you brought pie.”
“It can be lunchtime if you want, but I don’t have any pie.”
I sit bolt upright, my eyes flying open. It’s too bright and I have to clap my hands over my eyes. “Driver?”
He’s dressed in different clothes from earlier this morning—a blue shirt that makes his eyes look deeper than the ocean and pressed shorts—and his hair is still damp, like he’s been swimming or showering. He’s probably here to deliver another killing blow, and still, heat gathers between my legs. From imagining him in the shower.
I am a lost cause.
“If you’re hungry, I’ll cook.” His jaw is set, his eyes bright. I feel like an idiot for lying here and stand up, exercising enough care to make sure I’m not going to fall over or throw up. Anything seems possible at this moment.
“Listen.” I lick my lips. “I’m—I should have told you the moment I found out. I was only…” All those reasons seem like shitty excuses now. “I didn’t want to ruin your life with the news, and it was so nice when you were…when you were in my bed.”
He raises his eyebrows and his lips curve in an echo of the way he’d smile at me in bed.
“And I’m not sure it’s a good life for the baby, always traveling.” The truth comes out in a rush, as if I’ve pulled some stopper out of an invisible drain. “And I don’t know if you…if you’re the kind of guy who would want to settle down, or if I’m the kind of girl who can live with it if the father of her baby’s always crisscrossing the country while I’m in New York with the baby, since I got a job. And my job…”
“God, I can’t stand it.”
I tear my eyes away from the deck and back to Driver’s face. “What? Me?”
“I can’t stand how, even though I’m pissed at you for keeping this from me, I still want to kiss you. And make you pancakes, if that’s what you want. I must be a fucking fool.”
My stomach growls. “Honestly, you could…” I swallow a lump in my throat. “You could make me anger pancakes, if that’s what you wanted.”
Driver steps closer and reaches tentatively toward my face. The moment his fingers brush against my cheekbone, I lean into the touch. It’s like magic. The clean scent of him, the careful way he makes contact as if it’s our own secret language…
“I’m not giving up the road,” he says softly.
“I know,” I answer back.
“I’m going to kiss you. We can fight later.”
10
Driver
Holiday takes the plate with the grilled-cheese sandwich with huge eyes and her bottom lip caught between her teeth. “This looks so good.” Her eyes meet mine. “Thanks for making it.”
“It’s no problem.” I settle into the deck chair across from hers and put my own plate on my lap. Despite the sunshine warming the deck, the moment feels surreal and strange. One second, anger curdles at the center of my chest. The next, I remember she’s pregnant. In those moments, it’s like I’ve taken an exit off the freeway at the last minute without knowing where it’s going to lead or whether the road continues at all.
Holiday lifts the first half of her sandwich from her plate and takes a bite. Chews. Swallows. She closes her eyes for another bite, and I dig into my own so I have somewhere else to look. There’s no way we can have a real discussion when all I can think about is the way her dress is inching up her thighs or how pink her cheeks are or how she pretended for days on end that nothing was out of the ordinary at all.
“Where’d your friend go?” I saw her through the sliding-glass door a few minutes ago, giving Holiday what looked like an encouraging wave.
“Sophie went into town to do some shopping.”
I want to be petty, to demand to know when Sophie found out about all this, but I’m a grown man and there are bigger things to worry about. “Doesn’t she know the housekeeper does the shopping?”
Holiday huffs a laugh at my joke. “She probably wants to bake pies. That’s what she does for a living.” She looks at me from beneath her eyelashes. “The two of you would get along.”
“Would we?”
“She lives on the road, too. Well—out of a vintage Airstream in Portland. Soph runs her business out of a food truck.” Holiday studies me. “She wouldn’t give that up, either.”
The air is thin out here on the back deck. Was it always this thin, or is it just during conversations like this? “What are you not willing to give up?”
