The Lemon Sisters (Wildstone #3)(26)

“But there is.” She drew in an unsteady breath, like she was fortifying herself. “You’re part of the reason I’m here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I promised Mindy I’d take the kids for a few days to give her a break. I was thinking Disneyland, but while I was driving, I started to think about my sister, and how hard she always tries. If Mindy the control freak can ask for help, then I could man up, too.”

“About what?”

Her gaze met his and she let out another long, purposeful breath. “For a long time now, I’ve known I need to make some changes. My life . . . it’s not what I thought it would be. So I formulated a plan and changed lanes, and came north.”

He was fascinated in spite of himself. “What was the plan?”

She held up a finger. “One, to face Wildstone again.” Then a second finger. “Two, help Mindy by kicking Linc’s ass.”

He choked out a laugh.

She held up a third finger. “And three . . . apologize to you.”

He didn’t know what to make of that. “That’s only three things,” he said. “There’s no way you made a list with an odd number of things on it.”

She looked surprised at how well he knew her, which he could admit rankled. “You’re right,” she said. “Four, I want to return to LA and get my old job—and my life—back. The life I’ve been missing.”

He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. “What’s the apology for?”

She drew a deep breath. “For what happened after the helicopter crash. Not just for how I left, or that I stayed gone. But how I ruined you and me.” She swallowed hard. “And that I never acknowledged that you’d been hurt by the crash, too, and the loss of our baby, every bit as much as I was.”

He hadn’t realized until that very moment how much he’d needed to hear that from her, but she was breathing roughly, the air hitching in and out of her lungs, and her eyes were shiny, so shiny he could have drowned in them. He pulled her in and tried to soothe her with his body heat. “Losing the baby wasn’t your fault. You’re hearing me, right?” He’d say it as many times as she needed him to.

When she didn’t look at him, he gently wrapped his fist up in her hair and gently tugged her face to his. “Listen to me, okay? Listen and really hear me—the crash wasn’t your fault. The injuries, all you went through . . . losing the baby,” he said carefully. “None of it was your doing.”

She closed her eyes. “We both know how I felt about getting pregnant.”

He did know. She’d been clear on that. When she found out, she’d been upset, in shock, and not at all sure she wanted to be a mom. At the time he’d had zero idea of how he felt about it, but in the end, it hadn’t mattered.

In the years since, he’d had plenty of time to dwell, and he’d come to a realization. He wanted to be a father someday. He wanted that quite badly. But when it was the right time, with the right woman. “You were young—”

“Twenty-one,” she said. “Old enough to conceive that baby, and old enough to face the consequences. And what did I do? The day I found out, I—” She squeezed her eyes shut and tears leaked out, pouring down her cheeks. With a frustrated sound, she covered her face, trembling from head to toe with suppressed emotion. “I wished our baby away.”

Heart aching, he pressed his forehead to hers. “It doesn’t work like that, Brooke. None of what happened was your fault. Please tell me you know that.”

“But what happened after was. I walked away from Wildstone, from my family. From you.”

And he’d never understood why. He’d assumed she’d simply decided to put it behind her. All of it, including him. Her gaze was shattered and haunted, and his breath caught at the pain she’d kept hidden. “I really didn’t want to come back here and face this,” she said. “You have no idea how close I was to going to Disneyland.”

“But you came here.”

She shrugged off what he actually considered to have been an incredible gesture on her part. “When I got here, I felt . . .” She shook her head. “Everything. It all came back, what I lost by walking away. I destroyed my relationship with Mindy. And I did the same thing to us. I’m sorry, Garrett. I know I should’ve said all this a long time ago, that it’s way too late, but—”

He set a finger over her lips. “There’s nothing to forgive,” he said truthfully. “Your body, your life, your choice, Brooke. Always.”

“No, you can’t say that,” she murmured. “You don’t know.”

There were tears in her voice again, and through the mixed feelings that her presence caused, he ached for her. “What don’t I know, Bee?” he asked softly. “You can tell me. You can tell me anything.”

“Can I?”

How could she not know?

Because you’ve been a dick. Aloof. Distant. You made it clear that we weren’t going to be anything to each other, not ever again. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. “Yes, you can. Tell me why you stayed away so long. Tell me why you wouldn’t let me back in.”

“I can’t get pregnant again. I can’t have another baby.”