Heroes Are My Weakness(107)

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He wanted to pick her up and carry her back to the cottage where she belonged. Where they both belonged. “The reason you dumped me, remember? So you’d be free to find somebody to marry. Les Childers is single. So what if he’s seventy? His boat’s paid for. Why don’t you call him up?”

She sighed, as if he were nothing more than an irritant. “Oh, Theo . . . Stop being a jerk.”

He was being a jerk, but he couldn’t make himself back off. “I guess my definition of friendship is different from yours. In my life, friends don’t just pick up one day and call it quits.”

She buried her hands inside the cloak. “Friends who make the mistake of sleeping together do.”

It hadn’t been a mistake. Not for him, anyway. He stuck a thumb in the pocket of his jeans. “You’re making it too complicated.”

She glanced out at the sea and then back at him. “I’ve been trying to do this nicely . . .”

“Then stop!” he exclaimed. “Make me understand why, with no warning, you decided to take off. I want to hear this. Go ahead. Do it ugly.”

And she did. In a way he should have expected. By telling the truth.

“Theo, I wish you the best, but— I need to fall in love . . . and I can’t do that with you.”

Why the hell not? For one horrified moment, he thought he’d spoken the words aloud.

Her gaze was steady. Strong. She touched his arm and said with a kindness that made him want to grind his teeth, “You have too much baggage.”

He shouldn’t have made her say it. He should have known—did know. He managed a brusque nod. “Got it.”

That was all he needed to hear. The truth.

He left her on the wharf. When he got back to the house, he saddled Dancer and pushed him hard. Afterward he spent a long time in the stable rubbing him down, grooming him, concentrating on brushing out briars and picking hooves. For so long, he’d felt as if he’d been frozen inside, but Annie had changed that. She’d been his lover, his cheerleader, and his shrink. She’d forced him to look at his inability to make Kenley happy in a new way—at Regan who’d killed herself to set him free. Somehow, Annie had managed to breach the borders of his darkness.

His hands stilled on Dancer’s withers. He stood there thinking, replaying the last six weeks. His reverie was broken by the sound of Livia’s voice.

“Theo!”

He came out of the stable. Livia broke away from her mother and ran to him. As she slammed into his legs, he experienced an overwhelming urge to pick her up and hug her. So he did.

She wasn’t having it. Planting both her hands against his chest, she pushed back and glared up at him. “The fairy house didn’t change!”

Finally, a mistake he could fix. “Because I have a treasure to show you first.”

“Treasure?”

He’d spoken without thinking, but he knew right away what it had to be. “Beach jewels.”

“Jewels?” Livia breathed wonder into the word.

“Stay right here.” He headed upstairs to his old bedroom.

The oversize jar that held Regan’s collection of beach glass was stored at the back of his closet, shoved there years ago because, like so much else in the house, it triggered bad memories. But as he pulled it out and carried it downstairs, the edges of his dark mood lifted for the first time all day. The sweet, generous side of Regan’s nature would have loved passing on her precious beach stones to Livia, one little girl to another.

As he descended the stairs that his sister had raced up and down a dozen times a day, something brushed past him. Something warm. Invisible. He stopped where he was and shut his eyes, the glass jar cool in his hands, his sister’s face vivid in his mind.

Regan smiling at him. A smile that said Be happy.


JAYCIE LEFT LIVIA WITH THEO, and as the two of them added the beach glass to the fairy house, they talked, although it was mainly Livia who did the talking. All the words she’d been storing up in her head seemed to need to come out at once. He was amazed at how observant she was and how much she understood.

“I told you my free secret.” She pressed the final piece of glass into the house’s new mossy roof. “Now it’s your turn to tell me.”


BY NIGHTFALL, HE WAS BACK in his turret, a lonely prince waiting for a princess to climb the tower and free him. “You have too much baggage.”

He tried to write but found himself staring across the room and thinking about Annie instead. He didn’t want to enter the twisted pathways of Quentin Pierce’s mind, and he couldn’t deny the truth any longer. Whatever nomadic ghouls fueled his imagination had fled, taking his career with them.

He closed the computer file and leaned back in his desk chair. His gaze fell on the drawing he’d swiped from her. The studious kid with ragged hair and a freckled nose.

Theo’s hands moved to the keyboard. Opened a new file. For a moment, he simply sat there, and then he began typing, the words flowing from him, words that had been trapped inside him for too long.


Diggity Swift lived in a big apartment that looked down over Central Park. Diggity had allergies, so if too much pollen was in the air and he forgot his inhaler, he started to wheeze and then Fran, who took care of him while his parents worked, made him leave the park. He already felt like a freak. He was the smallest kid in seventh grade. Why did he have to have allergies, too?