Fix Her Up (Hot & Hammered #1)(94)

“When Travis told me you two were dating, I told him to back off so you wouldn’t get hurt,” Stephen said, dragging a hand down his face. “I thought he’d leave you alone if I told him you’d been in love with him since you were a kid. But he didn’t. He . . . I can’t believe this, but he used it. He called you a kid with a kid’s crush.”

The blood drained straight out of her. She couldn’t breathe.

“What the fuck, Stephen?” Bethany muttered.

For some reason, Travis calling her a kid landed the hardest blow. How many times had he demonstrated the opposite with his words and actions? Something about the revelation didn’t sit exactly right, but she was too bogged down in mortification to examine what it was.

“A kid with a crush. So you knew how I felt the whole time?” Georgie whispered. “Poor little Georgie. God, you must have felt so bad for me.”

Her mind cluttered up with images of the last couple weeks. Travis above her, his mouth open on a moan. Travis opening a takeout carton in a towel, winking at her across the kitchen. The morning on the baseball field when he picked up a bat again. Was any of that real? Her stomach pitched, sharp jabs of pain penetrating her rib cage. Finding their mark.

“No. No, I didn’t feel bad for you. I knew . . .” Travis rocked back on his heels, a hand plowing into his hair. “The kind of love Stephen told me about wasn’t real. It was just . . .”

“What?”

“A young girl’s crush,” he answered quietly, his jaw flexing. “Hero worship.”

The oxygen vacated her lungs. “You made that judgment without even asking me, didn’t you?” A punch of misery hit her in the stomach. “Do you have any idea how stupid I feel? Knowing you were aware of how I felt the whole time? Silly clown with her silly, meaningless crush. I guess you never took me seriously, either. Not me and not our friendship,” she managed, moisture gathering in her eyes. “The love didn’t pass, Travis. It just became so much more. I still loved the guy who hit the home runs and showed off for the crowd. I also loved the imperfect man.”

“Don’t say ‘loved.’ Say ‘love.’” Travis made a rough sound. “And Jesus, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.” He tried to come toward her, but Stephen grabbed his arm, holding him off. “Let go of me. My girlfriend is crying.”

“She’s not your girlfriend.”

Georgie couldn’t even be sure who said those words. Her head spun too fast to keep up. She only knew it was true. He’d thought of her as a stupid kid, didn’t take her seriously, just like everyone else. He was aware of her feelings and sloughed them off like they weren’t real. They were. So real that her heart was capsizing under the rupturing pressure.

“Georgie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Dominic joined Stephen to pull a struggling Travis farther away. It was a losing battle until security joined them, herding a belligerent Travis toward the parking lot.

“Get off of me. Fuck. Just let me talk to her.”

Despite all the doubt paralyzing Georgie, her heart shouted at her to run to Travis, making her cry all the harder. But in the end, she let her sister and friends close ranks around her, shielding her from the crowd as she absorbed reality. Shielding her from the man who’d broken her heart.





Chapter Twenty-Eight


Travis lay on the couch in the darkness facing the door. Staring at the hinges and knob, willing them to move. But they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t move.

He’d lost the one person who busted down his door.

As he’d done time and time again over the last several days, he turned onto his stomach and searched for her scent in the pillow he’d brought from his bed. It, too, was gone. He’d sucked it all up on day one. Absorbed it into his bloodstream, along with countless swigs of whiskey and no food.

His first night on the air was in a matter of days, yet the muddy clothes he’d worn to the Tough Mudder were stuck to his unwashed skin, a bristling beard overtaking his cheeks. Getting up to take a shower or make himself a sandwich sounded more difficult than training to be a fucking astronaut. Nothing could get him off the couch when he ached head to toe. Inside and out.

He kept his face buried in the softness anyway, wondering if he could die from carbon dioxide poisoning this way. Worth a shot.

Out of nowhere, the memory of Georgie crying slammed into his consciousness again and he let loose a bellow into the pillow, forcing himself to remember every nuance as penance. How she’d shrunk into herself, going from confident to unsure right in front of his eyes. How she’d trembled and cupped her elbows. Almost immediately, the mental torture became too much, so his hand dropped to the floor, searching for a bottle of whiskey with something left inside of it.

“Come on.” He barely recognized the hollow voice emerging from his own mouth. “Come on.”

Travis’s hand closed around the neck of a bottle and he sat up, wincing as his brain performed a somersault. Please, God, let there be enough whiskey in this bottle to numb the memory of hurting Georgie. Because fuck, he’d hurt her so bad.

Travis unscrewed the top of the bottle, but when he tipped it toward his lips, he stared down into the golden contents instead. Was this where he was at? Drinking himself into a stupor over losing a woman? That’s exactly what his father had done. Or what he’d used as an excuse to drink himself into an oblivion anyway. Maybe he and Mark Ford weren’t so different after all. Travis started to lift the bottle again and paused.