Protecting What's Mine(100)

He’d have to listen. To let her back in.

And then she thought about the old fire station. About Karen. About the hurt that had radiated off him at the rejection of the woman he cared about.

The shame, the guilt, took her out at the knees, and she sank to the kitchen floor.





48





Linc entered the station under a dark cloud. Sunshine, not a fan of Dark Linc, scurried off in search of friendlier people.

“I thought you had the day off, chief,” Zane called out from underneath the carriage of the ladder apparatus. Zane, like the rest of the men, was back to stubble now that the real Movember was in full swing.

Linc didn’t bother answering. Instead, he took his mood upstairs and closed the door of his office with a definitive slam.

“Uh-oh,” Skyler sang.

“Not good,” Zane said.





He wasn’t hiding in his office. He just wasn’t opening the door. Or answering the phone. He just wanted to stay in here until he didn’t feel a goddamn thing.

He’d called it. He’d known from the beginning that Mackenzie O’Neil was going to pulverize his heart into a thousand shards. And then she’d gone and done it, and he was the idiot who was surprised.

There was a brisk knock at his door.

“Go. Away,” he snarled.

It was either an idiot or a very brave person who opened the door. Apparently, it was several of them. Women filed into the room. His sisters, followed by Harper, Gloria, and Sophie, stepped in and closed the door behind them.

“Hey, buddy,” Rebecca said.

“How’s it going, kiddo?” Christa asked.

“Now is not a good time,” he said, glaring at the grant request on his computer monitor that he’d been staring at for the last thirty minutes.

“We heard about the breakup,” Sophie said, flopping down in the chair across from him.

Of course they had. This damn town and its damn big mouth.

“We’re here for you,” Jillian said.

“Do you want to talk?” Harper offered.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look. I appreciate the show of support. But I’m really not interested in talking about anything right now.”

“I’m so sorry,” Gloria said, sliding a fresh pumpkin pie onto his desk. It smelled like cinnamon and sadness.

“I really thought she was going to be the one,” Christa complained.

“Me, too,” Sophie agreed. “You guys were a match made in hot sex heaven. Plus, firefighter and trauma doc? Who else is going to understand your work better?”

“Don’t you all have jobs that you should be at?” Linc asked.

“We’re here for you, little brother,” Rebecca said, shooting him a look with so much sympathy he briefly considered jumping out his office window to get away from it.

“Did she give you a reason for wanting to break up?” Harper asked.

“She didn’t break up with me. I broke up with her,” he said.

Several pairs of female eyes snapped to attention.

“You did what now?” Christa demanded.

“She was going to do it. I just beat her to the punch.”

Gloria took the pie off the desk.

“Wait, if you’re all here, where are the guys?” Linc asked.

Harper and Gloria exchanged a look. “They don’t know we’re here,” Harper said.

“We promised to stay out of it,” Gloria added.

“This is you staying out of it?”

“Can we go back to the part where you broke up with her?” Jillian asked.

“Look. It doesn’t matter. It was always going to happen. She was always going to pull away. She was always going to leave. I’m the idiot that got hopeful that she’d change her mind.”

Harper pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and blew out a breath. “Okay. Let’s break this down. Soph, man the whiteboard.”

As the women diagramed the timeline of his relationship with Mackenzie, Linc wished desperately that he’d kept a bottle of whiskey in a desk drawer like his predecessor.

“So she flies home unexpectedly from a trip to visit a mother that she never talks about?” Sophie clarified.

“She’s mentioned foster parents, but her going to Chicago was for her mother,” Christa said.

“Foster parents mean that there’s some…at the very least inconsistency in her childhood,” Harper said. She knew from experience. “It could be worse. A lot worse.”

“She was removed from the home at age six for parental neglect,” Sophie announced, drawing an arrow behind the timeline and wrote the words shitty childhood in red.

Everyone froze. Linc came halfway out of his chair. “What?”

Sophie pointed to the Benevolence Police Department sweatshirt she was wearing. “You guys do know I’m married to Ty, right?”

“Did she ever talk to you about it? About growing up?” Harper asked him.

“Or were you too busy constructing a self-fulfilling time bomb?” Rebecca demanded. “What? Come on. You got yourself all tangled up over Karen Aucker and then convinced yourself that you were never going to be worth taking a chance on for a long-term relationship.”