Flirting with the Frenemy (Bro Code #1)(8)

I’m safe.

This is not real.

I grip the edge of the leather recliner and focus on a single green leaf fluttering on an oak in the front yard.

Cool summer breeze. Warm summer sunshine.

I’m safe.

I’m safe.

I’m safe.

My fingers tingle, and my legs wobble, but I can see past the tree now. My lungs expand a little wider, and the rushing in my ears fades as quickly as it arrived.

I’m okay.

I’m okay.

My skin prickles as the last of my panic recedes—it’s been two months since the last one, I should’ve been done with these by now—and a reflected movement in the glass makes me tense up harder.

“Go. Away,” I grit out.

Wyatt’s at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t hear him coming.

But I hear Wyatt from six months ago.

Fuck, Ellie…shouldn’t have done that.

We made a mistake.

You’re a mistake.

I squeeze my eyes shut, because he didn’t say that.

He didn’t say any of it beyond we shouldn’t have done that.

But why shouldn’t we?

Didn’t take much to fill in the blanks.

I was a mistake.

First Patrick—staying together this long was a mistake. If I was supposed to love you, I wouldn’t be in love with someone else—and then Wyatt. Fuck, Ellie, that was a mistake.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and his voice prompts another round of cold chills.

But this isn’t the same panicked cold chills still making my thighs and knees quiver, and sending that ache deeper into my left femur.

Nope, that’s regret cold chills.

“Just a little naked,” I reply, because I am naked under my robe, and I’m apparently feeling like being an asshole.

I watch his subtle reflection in the window as his head jerks sideways, like he doesn’t want to look at me naked.

Who’s uncomfortable now?

“Beck didn’t mention you’d be here,” he tells the wall. “I didn’t mean to walk in on you. I thought—I thought one of his old flings had moved in.”

I’m fully aware Beck didn’t mention me to Wyatt, because he didn’t mention Wyatt to me either. I love my brother, but he’s obtuse at best and mischievous at worst. “Sounds about right.”

There. That was dignified and aloof without being a total asshole.

“Tucker’s never been to the Pirate Festival,” he adds.

I look past the trees to Shipwreck, nestled amongst more trees in the valley below.

We’re 250 miles inland in the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Virginia, an hour outside the booming metropolis of Copper Valley, overlooking a pirate town called Shipwreck, named thus because of the legend of Thorny Rock.

Thorny Rock, the pirate. Not Thorny Rock, the mountain named after him and which this house is built on. Which is a crucial distinction, since mountains can’t smuggle pirate treasure in wagons, nor could they in the eighteenth century when Thorny Rock founded Shipwreck and supposedly buried all his gold here to hide it from the authorities who were on his trail.

“I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time,” I tell Wyatt while I tighten my robe ties.

I love the Pirate Festival.

Adore it, even.

But I’m not here for the pirates this week. Or to help dig up the town square—again—in search of Thorny Rock’s treasure. Or even to hunt for the peg leg hidden somewhere around town.

Not for myself, I mean. I’m here to be maid of honor while my ex-boyfriend plays best man in my best friend’s pirate wedding, since she’s marrying his brother.

Apparently while Wyatt gets to dig for treasure and hunt for the peg leg and drink his heart out at The Grog.

Or maybe not the drinking part.

Not when he’s here with his son.

That would be a mistake. And Wyatt Morgan doesn’t make mistakes.

Not twice, anyway.

An uncomfortable silence settles between us. I want to squirm, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he’s getting to me.

“You looked like you needed help,” he says. “In the bathtub.”

I bite my tongue, because my pre-teen years were basically me telling Wyatt I’ll tell you when I need help, now back off, followed by my early teen years where he grew a foot, discovered weights, got hot, and finally left me to my own devices while he did everything with Lydia.

Pretty, perfect, helpless-without-Wyatt Lydia.

Who is none of my business.

Although I’d rather think about Lydia than think about the last time I saw Wyatt.

“Thank you for trying,” I say, politely, because it would make my mother proud, and my mother thinks Wyatt hung the fucking moon. And I don’t want to argue with him right now. I have to save my energy for tonight. And tomorrow. And the next day. All the way until Friday, when Monica and Jason are getting married in the biggest pirate wedding ever seen in Shipwreck.

“Are you…sticking around for a while?” he asks.

“All week.” I study the furniture again, looking for the sparkly cover of my doodle pad, but no luck.

He clears his throat like he’s eaten a bad banana pepper.

“But I won’t be here much,” I add “so…”