The Lemon Sisters (Wildstone #3)(2)

Tommy caught the movement of her hands before she could stop herself and he frowned. “Because you’re upset about something.”

She shoved her hands in her pockets. “I’m fine.”

“She had a flashback,” Cole said. “She always gets especially testy after one of those.” He met Brooke’s gaze, his own warm and full of concern. “Come home with me tonight. I’ll make you feel better.”

Though she knew he could do just that, she hadn’t shaved in a few days. “I said I’m fine.” She slung her backpack over her shoulder. To keep either of them from following her, she went up on her tiptoes and brushed a kiss first on Tommy’s scruffy jaw and then on Cole’s shaved one. “I’m fine,” she repeated. “I’m also out. Saving you some overtime.”

“You’re on salary.”

“Yeah, which reminds me, I’m due for a raise.” She shut the door before he could respond and exited the studio into the LA heat.

It was seven p.m. in Los Angeles, and ninety-eight degrees in late May. The humidity was high enough to turn her ponytail into something resembling a squirrel’s tail. Not that it mattered. She had no one to impress, nor the will to change that. Twenty-eight years old, and she was completely burned out on men.

And possibly on life.

She drove home, which was a rented bottom-floor condo in North Hollywood only eight miles from the studio—thirty minutes in gridlock traffic, like tonight. So she added LA to the list of things she was burned out on. She missed wide-open spaces. She missed fresh air and being outdoors. She missed thrill and adventure.

She parked in her one-car garage and headed through the interior door into her kitchen, mindlessly counting her steps, doing a little shuffle at the end to make sure she ended on an even number. Another self-soothing gesture. Some days required more of that than others.

Inside, she took a deep breath and tried to let go of the ball of stress in her gut. The flashback had been the first she’d had in a long time, and she’d nearly forgotten the taste of bone-deep terror, a sensation most people would never experience.

She looked around. Her place was clean, her plants were alive—well, semi-alive, anyway. Everything was great.

She was working on believing that when a knock came at her door. And actually, it was more of a pounding, loud and startling in the calm silence of her living room. Not Tommy—he would’ve knocked while yelling her name. Cole would’ve texted her before getting out of his car.

No stranger to danger, Brooke grabbed her trusty baseball bat on the way to the door. She hadn’t traveled the planet over and back more times than she could count without learning how to protect herself. Just as she leaned in to look out the peephole, there came another round of pounding.

“Brooke!” called out a female voice. “Oh God, what if you’re not home? Please be home!”

Brooke went still as stone. She knew that voice, though it’d been a while. A long while. It belonged to her older sister, Mindy. Mindy had her shit together. She wore a body armor of calm like other women wore earrings, didn’t have to count in her head, and had never lost her way or screwed up her entire life.

The frantic knocking continued, now accompanied by something that sounded suspiciously like sobs.

Brooke yanked open the front door, and Mindy fell into her arms. They hadn’t seen each other in over a year, hadn’t spoken in months, and the last time they had, they’d hung up on each other.

“What the hell?” Brooke asked.

They weren’t a demonstrative family. Hugs were saved for weddings and funerals, or the very occasional family gathering where there was alcohol, copious amounts of it. Emotions were kept tight to the vest. But Mindy was demonstrating boatloads of emotion at high volume, clinging like Saran Wrap while crying and talking at the same time in a pitch not meant for humans.

“Min, you gotta slow down,” Brooke said. “Only dogs can hear you right now.”

Mindy sucked in a breath and lifted her head. Her mascara was smudged so badly that it was possibly yesterday’s mascara that just hadn’t been removed. She wore no other makeup. She was at least fifteen pounds heavier than Brooke had ever seen her. Her clothes were wrinkled and there was a suspicious-looking dark stain on her T-shirt, which was odd because Mindy didn’t wear tees. Her shoulder-length hair was the same honey color as Brooke’s, but Mindy’s hair always behaved. Not today. It was outdoing Brooke’s in the squirrel-tail impersonation and looked like it was a week past needing a shampoo. Mindy hiccuped, but thankfully stopped sobbing.

Brooke nodded gratefully, but braced herself. She had a very bad feeling. “Okay. Now who’s dead?”

Mindy choked on a low laugh and swiped beneath her eyes, succeeding only in making things worse. “No one’s dead. Unless you count my personal life.”

This made no sense. Mindy had been born with a plan in hand. At any given moment of any day, she could flip open her fancy binder and tell you exactly where she was in that plan. “You’ve got a little something in your hair,” Brooke said, and gingerly picked it out. It was a Cheerio.

“It’s Maddox’s. He was chucking them in the car.” Mindy’s eyes were misting again. “You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have kids!”

It used to be that a sentence like that would send a hot poker of fire through Brooke’s chest, but now it was more like a dull ache. Mostly. “Why are you falling apart? You never fall apart.”