The Closer You Come (The Original Heartbreakers, #1)(9)

“I’ll mail you a bill,” he said, deciding he wouldn’t charge her more than twenty dollars for items he’d spent well over two grand on.

“Thank you.”

“And I’ll pay for the damage to your hearing aids.” He wondered why she had them in the first place. Had she suffered with deafness all her life?

“No.” She shook her head with confidence. “I was out of line, barging in on you and Jessie Kay and then starting a fight in your room. I don’t blame you for tossing me in the pool,” she admitted, surprising him. “I can’t in good conscience allow you to pay for anything.”

He made sure she had a perfect view of his face. He wanted no misunderstandings between them. “Refusing payment isn’t going to do you a bit of good, honey.”

She peered at him for a long while, silent, before recognizing his own determination and sighing wearily. “Fine,” she said. “Whoever owes more can deduct what the other owes and pay the rest.”

“Agreed. And now...” He motioned to the back door of the house.

“Dismissed?” With a humph, she stalked around him—but didn’t head toward the house. She exited the yard through the side gate. He followed at a discreet distance to make sure she reached her vehicle safely.

She climbed into a rust bucket that couldn’t have been close to street legal.

“Are you okay?” her sister asked. “What did Jase say to—”

Jessie Kay’s voice was cut off by the slam of Brook Lynn’s door. As the engine sputtered to life and the headlights blinked on, Jase returned to the house.

West and Beck were waiting for him inside his bedroom, where they knew he couldn’t avoid them.

Beck reclined on the bed, flipping channels on the TV. West sat beside him, tossing pieces of popcorn in the air and catching them with his mouth.

“Hiding from your own party?” Jase asked.

Both glanced over at him.

“I’m the crotchety old man who doesn’t like having people in his space—after I’m done with them.” West threw several pieces of popcorn at him and missed. “I’m currently done with them.”

“Old?” Jase arched a brow. “We’re twenty-eight.”

“Physically twenty-eight. But our souls? Those are older than dirt.”

Beck grabbed the last handful of kernels and stuffed them in his mouth. “I don’t mind people in my space, but we’re currently out of fresh lady meat, and you know I never go back for seconds.”

Exasperated, Jase said, “Then why did you invite everyone over?”

They peered at him, expectant. Guiltier than usual.

“Maybe we thought you could use it,” West said, his tone thick with emotion.

“Whatever you want, you get,” Beck said. “No questions asked.”

They were trying to make up for everything he’d lost. He wished he could comfort them, reassure them, but he’d never even been able to comfort or reassure himself. “For future reference,” he said, “a party isn’t the way to make me happy. I’d rather be alone than surrounded by strangers.”

More guilt from West, sorrow from Beck. Regret from Jase.

“I wanted to move here,” he said. “We’re here. That’s enough.” Six months ago, he’d asked the two to find him a new place to live. Somewhere outside city limits, where the crowds were thinner and the pace slower. West had connections out here, and what he’d described had enthralled Jase. Trees, hills, the closest neighbors miles away. And when the isolated famansion—farm-mansion, as he’d heard it called—suffered a foreclosure a short time later, the two had uprooted their entire lives, unwilling to let him make the move on his own. True, the estate needed a little TLC, but that was something Jase excelled at and was actually enjoying doing.

Beck had lived next to a golf course and West inside a room adjacent to their plush office suite in downtown Oklahoma City. Each place had been purchased soon after they’d created and sold some kind of computer program, hitting it big, and even when they’d made far more money, investing a huge chunk for Jase, they hadn’t bought bigger and better. Change had never been easy for either man. Jase knew that well, hated change himself, but the two had been willing to move here for him.

Besides, it wasn’t as if he would have survived the past nine shudder-inducing years without them or as if he’d have any kind of life now.

“Remember when we first met?” he asked, switching topics. Anything to distract the pair.

West cracked a smile. “The fosters had no idea their request for troubled adolescent boys to guide and nurture would lead to the three of us joining forces.”

Beck snorted. “I believe the mother—what was her name?—told my social worker we were fully capable of building an actual Death Star to destroy the world.”

They’d been eight, and the ten months Jase had spent living with the boys had been the best of his life, an unbreakable bond forming. Even after the system split them up, they’d never lost touch. They’d occasionally attended the same school or lived in the same neighborhood, but at sixteen, when they were able to pool the money they’d earned doing odd jobs, they’d bought a car, and that had been that. It had been the three of them against the world. Still was.