The Lemon Sisters (Wildstone #3)(73)

Brooke: Wait—Cole thinks about marrying me??????

Cole: USED TO. Note the past tense. Because falling for you is the equivalent of jumping without a parachute. No offense.

Tommy: He’s not the right one for you anyway, sweetness. Just don’t run from the one who is. Don’t shut it down because you get scared.

Cole: You’re reading Cosmo again, aren’t you.

Tommy: So I like to be in touch with my feminine side, bite me.

Brooke: This convo is over. Good night.

She turned off her phone, even knowing Tommy was right. She shut things down when they got too personal. It usually happened somewhere around date three, at the inevitable “I’d like a family someday” dinner talk. That’s when she made the decision for them both that it wouldn’t work out. She knew this was because deep, deep down, she knew she didn’t want to face talking about the option she’d lost in the helicopter accident, the option she hadn’t even known she’d wanted.

Exhausted, she closed her eyes.

The thump, thump, thump of the helicopter rotors spinning startled her, as did the sound of the pilot speaking with intense steadiness into his radio about making an emergency landing.

Then she was in free fall.

She jerked awake with a silent scream on her lips, cold and clammy and utterly terrified. She was on her feet and out the door, her body taking control. She grabbed her keys with the intention of getting the hell out of Dodge, but she didn’t go out front to her car.

It wasn’t until she ran into Garrett’s dark bedroom a minute later that she realized what she’d done.

Garrett sat straight up in bed. “What the—”

She dropped her keys and, without even counting her steps, launched herself at him. For a guy who’d clearly been dead to the world a second ago, he thankfully woke up fast, wrapping his arms around her, pulling her into his warm, hard body with a low, worried murmur, holding her tight. “Brooke, what is it?”

Unable to answer, she burrowed in closer.

GARRETT SHOOK OFF the last dregs of sleep and ran his hands over Brooke’s body. No injuries that he could tell, at least no new ones. But she was alarmingly chilled—icy, even—and trembling like a leaf. “Bad dream?”

She nodded.

“It’s okay now.” He pressed his jaw to the top of her head. “You’re okay, you’re safe.”

She didn’t loosen her death grip on him, so he leaned back with her in his arms, pulling the covers up over them both. Again he stroked his hands over her to soothe and warm, until she slowly began to stop quivering and her body began to unclench.

He thought maybe she’d actually fallen asleep on him when she finally took a slow, deep breath and lifted her head, her eyes luminous in the dark as they met his. “I knew better than to fall asleep without going through my nighttime routine. I knew something bad would happen.”

“What happened?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“For what? Bee, help me out here.”

She choked out a laugh. “Everything. I’m sorry for everything.”

“That covers a lot of ground.”

She shrugged and bit her lower lip, and he gently pushed the hair back from her face, worried about the way she was breathing and the look in her eyes, worried because the last time she’d looked like this, she’d bailed for seven long years. “Talk to me, Bee.”

She hesitated. “You’ve spent your life making good, smart choices. And I’ve spent mine doing the opposite of that.”

“I’d never judge you on the decisions you’ve made.”

“Except for the one where I walked away from Wildstone and my family. And you,” she said.

Well, she had him there, and he winced.

“I really do regret how much I hurt you—”

“Don’t,” he said, closing his eyes. “You apologized and I heard you, and we’ve moved on.”

“Not all the way,” she said.

Their gazes met.

“You’re still mad,” she whispered.

“No. No,” he said again, when she looked at him with doubt. “Not mad.”

“Mistrusting, then.”

There, she was right on. And he hated that it was true. Hated, too, that she could clearly read it in his expression, because she slid out of his bed. “I closed you out,” she said, “and now you’re returning the favor. And I understand. I do. I honestly had no idea how much it would suck, and I’m sorry for that, more than you’ll ever know. And something else I now understand? This”—she gestured between them and then at the bed—“you knew this would be a bad idea, and you were right, because I’m having trouble separating the sex and the emotions that come with it.” She gave him a small smile. “I should go. Night,” she whispered, and walked out.

He leapt out of the bed to go after her and realized he wasn’t wearing any clothes. The front door slammed while he was pulling on a pair of jeans. Forgoing anything else, he ran outside in time to see her running toward the Lemon property.

“Shit,” he said, and started after her, but a scraping sound from behind him made him turn back.

His dad waved from the porch chair, Snoop at his side. He wore a T-shirt and boxers and nothing else.