“Yo, Brick! Bricky Tikki Tavi?”
Brick, in the midst of calculations that included where he’d left his service weapon and how to keep Remi in sight without putting her in danger, heard her ditch the knife on the table behind him. At least that meant he wasn’t about to get stabbed in the back. Before he could react to the intruder, she grabbed him by the waistband and held on.
“Spence?” Remi called weakly from behind his back. “Is that you?”
“Audrey?”
Remi’s hands slipped away from the back of his pants, and he swore under his breath.
He stepped into the doorway and came face-to-face with his little brother, who had no idea he’d just barely avoided an ass-kicking. “Spencer? What the hell are you doing here?”
Spencer took one look at him, shirtless, barefoot, ready to commit murder and blanched.
“Oh. Oh, shit. I’m sorry. Valentine’s Day. I didn’t realize you two were back together—Shit. Sorry.”
“What?” Brick needed a second to shake off the fog of adrenaline…and lust.
Spencer Callan was shorter than Brick, leaner, too. His hair was a light brown that went to blond under the summer sun. He had the kind of look Remi used to call Country Club, dressing as if he spent all his free time on the tennis court or golf course. Now, in fancy, name-brand winter gear, he looked like he’d just strolled off the slopes at some ritzy resort in the Alps.
“I’ll go. I just thought—Never mind. It was stupid.”
“Spencer Callan, you stay right where you are,” Remi commanded from over Brick’s shoulder. Well, more accurately, around his bicep.
“Remi?” Spencer went from kicked puppy to elated brother in the span of a single heartbeat. “Boy, am I glad to see you!”
“Not half as glad as I am to see you!” She elbowed Brick out of the way, leaving him to watch as his brother swept her up in his arms.
Jealousy sliced deep. His brother and Remi shared the kind of carefree, affectionate bond he could never be a part of.
“What are you doing here?” she asked when Spencer put her back on her feet. Brick had to squash the urge to yank her back to his side.
“The big guy glaring at me didn’t respond to my last two texts. Figured I’d fly in, make sure he was alive. Maybe do some tearing around on the ice bridge while I’m at it.”
Brick had the sudden urge to find and open a bottle of bourbon and drink until he fell down. His brother had either ruined a moment he’d been waiting for, or saved him from making a huge fucking mistake. “You could have called,” he said blandly, turning away from the affectionate reunion and pouring himself a glass of water for his burning throat.
“Since when do I need to call ahead to tell my big brother I’m crashing at his place for a couple of days?” Spence asked, dropping his duffel bag on the floor and wandering into the kitchen to open the fridge.
Halfway through his foraging, he poked his head up over the door like a prairie dog. “Hang on. Are you two…” The unfinished question lingered as Spencer looked back and forth between them, taking in Remi’s inappropriately short shorts, Brick’s bare chest.
“No.” Brick’s answer was stony.
“I mean, if you are, I can go find someplace else to stay for the night. It is Valentine’s Day.”
“I know how this looks. But—”
“Don’t be silly, Spence. You know your brother looks at me and sees just another sibling. He’d rather pluck out his own eyeballs with a cocktail fork than look at me that way,” Remi said sweetly. There was fire beneath that sugary surface, and Brick was afraid it might burn him alive.
“Good thing I never thought about you that way,” Spencer said smugly. “Thanks for taking my virginity, by the way.”
“Hey oh!” Remi smirked.
They high-fived, his little brother and his…whatever the fuck Remington was to him, in his kitchen as if it were all some hilarious joke. And maybe it was. But not to him. Brick wished he could just lock them both out of the house and go back to his nice, quiet life.
“Well, I should get going. Thanks for letting me soak up some of your lights, Brick,” she said, starting for the door.
“No,” he said again. And when she didn’t listen—because the woman never fucking listened—he had to grab her by the hood of her sweatshirt. “You’re staying here.”
“You know what that means,” Spencer announced. “Sleepover! I brought popcorn and beef jerky. We can light our farts on fire and tell ghost stories.”
“Boy sleepovers are gross,” Remi observed.
Brick played dirty. While Spencer went upstairs to change, Brick hid Remi’s boots in the dining room so she couldn’t sneak out before they’d had their little talk.
He bided his time through the inevitable catching up portion of the evening. Through the popcorn making and the ensuing rounds of competitive Jenga. Nostalgia slapped at him. The three of them had done just this in this exact room. A fire roaring in the fireplace. A movie no one paid attention to on the TV. His grandmother providing the popcorn. His grandfather, the commentary.
His grandparents would have approved.
It felt…right. Like they all belonged here. But anyone could stick around for the good times. That wasn’t the true test. And Brick knew from experience that most wouldn’t stick through the bad, the hard, the inconvenient. The new, shiny adventure would always beckon to some to shake the dust off their shoes and move on.
Spencer seemed good, happy even. He worked in sales in a complicated position Brick had given up on understanding years ago. He kept them entertained with stories about Detroit and his friends, razzing Remi, reminiscing with Brick. The mood was light like it always was with Spence around.
But every few minutes, Brick would lock gazes with Remi and the smolder there threatened to ignite again. He couldn’t ignore it. And if he wanted answers out of her, he was going to have to embrace it.
So he waited until Spencer was snoring in the recliner. Remi was curled in a ball on the end of the couch under a throw his grandmother had knitted. Brick occupied the opposite end, his feet propped on the coffee table. Something his grandparents would not have approved of.
Remi stirred.
“Do you want me to turn on more lights?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
She shook her head. Those emerald eyes searching his face.
“Are you hungry? Cold?”
“No.”
He kicked off the quilt he’d used to cover his legs. “Then come here. I want to show you something.”
He towed her off the couch and back into the dark hallway, noting how she drew closer to him in the dark. She might not like him right now, but he damn well made her feel safer. He led her to the door and nudged it open.
“I did a little rearranging,” he said, fumbling for the light switch. Finding it, he moved aside so she could step out first.
“Oh, come on,” she groaned. “Why’d you go and show me a thing like this when I’m trying to stay mad at you?”
She wandered down the ramp into the room. Where kayaks and outdoor gear had once hibernated, clean work tables and empty shelves stood, waiting. He’d put down drop cloths in the center of the space and built a framework for her to hang larger canvases.
He’d rescued several of his grandmother’s glass canning jars from the basement and grouped them on the work tables.
“I changed out the lightbulbs in here to those smart LED ones,” he explained, pointing at the pitched ceiling. “You can download an app and change the color and brightness.”
She looked up and sighed.
“I also cleaned out Pop’s old tool cabinet,” he said, gesturing at the red metal chest. “You can use it for storage. Or whatever.”
He watched as she wandered the space, pausing to run a hand over neat stacks of boards. “Those are if you decide to make your canvases.” He scraped a hand over the back of his neck, wishing she would say something.
She glanced his way again, a considering look on her pretty face.
“I honestly don’t know what the hell to do with you,” she said finally. “One minute you’re pushing my buttons, the next you’re stealing my breath. You make my head spin.”
“Talk to me, Remington. Tell me what happened.”
“You never give up, do you?”
“Not when it matters.”
“Fine. You asked for it.” She hopped up on one of the folding tables and let her legs dangle. “There was an accident. My friend and I were driving back to her place after my showing at a gallery downtown.”
“You had a showing?”
She bit her lip. “I’m gonna say this, and it’s gonna sound like I’m being funny, but I’m kind of a big deal. Or I was. Or I still might be. I don’t really know. I’ve been painting. But not as Remi Ford. To the art community, I’m Alessandra Ballard.”
“Why?”
She swung her legs. “Because Remi Ford got arrested for skinny dipping. Because she’s a troublemaking screw-up who’s always on the brink of disaster.”
“That’s not who you are.”
“That’s who people here see me as. I’m the girl who fixed the street hockey championship. Or the one who got in a bar fight when she was nineteen. I didn’t want that girl following me into the world. So I’m Alessandra Ballard who wears beautiful clothes, goes to fancy parties, and paints music.”
He didn’t much care for the idea that Remi felt she had to hide who she really was. But he decided not to derail the conversation into an argument. Yet.
“Anyway, my friend Camille was driving us back to her place. It was late. The roads were icy. We ended up going through a guardrail. I broke my arm, but Camille was really hurt. She was knocked unconscious. And there we were, stuck in the dark. I felt so…helpless. So alone. I didn’t know if the car was going to slide into the blackness. I didn’t know what was in the blackness. A ravine. A river. A gentle slope. I didn’t know.”
Not wanting to distract her from the tale, he was careful not to move a muscle. But his arms ached to hold on to her so she’d remember she wasn’t alone.
“Anyway, we were finally rescued. I didn’t realize at the time that my arm was broken. I was more worried about Camille. She still hadn’t woken up. They wouldn’t let me go to the hospital with her, and I was rightfully very upset. They had an officer drive me home.”
She bit her lip and looked to the side.
“Rajesh—that’s my agent—showed up at my place to tell me how the showing had gone, but I ruined his fun with an asthma attack. The cold, the adrenaline. Being upset. Anyway, he called an ambulance, which, for the record, I still think was overreacting.”
“And that’s when they noticed your arm?” Brick guessed.
She nodded.
“And that’s why you’re afraid of the dark.” Because she thought her friend was dying next to her in the dark and there was nothing she could do. Her pain, her fear was agony for him.
She nodded again, eyes closed.
“Breathe.”
He closed the distance between them and took her hands, hating the feel of the cast. She opened her eyes and looked up at him, then took a slow, deep breath. She kept on breathing until her shoulders lowered.
“You look like you could use a breath or two,” she observed.
“You could have been killed.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“You broke your arm. That’s still too much for me.”
“Before you go all big brothery, you might as well hear the rest.”
“There’s more?”
“Camille is still in the hospital. I don’t know how badly she was hurt. I don’t even know if she regained consciousness. She hasn’t answered any of my calls or emails. So it’s hard not to imagine the worst.”
“Why can’t her family give you an update?”
“Well, that’s the other problem. Camille is kind of well-known in Chicago, and so is Alessandra. Together, we got a lot of attention. So there’s been some…speculation.”
He wasn’t going to like this part. He could already tell.
“What kind of speculation?”
“Do a search for Alessandra Ballard online, and you’ll find a few dozen articles hinting that maybe I was driving. That maybe I had too much to drink at the gallery and that maybe the accident was my fault. That maybe I put my friend in the hospital.”
Brick swore under his breath. He wanted to get on a plane, fly to Chicago and purposely knock the teeth out of every blogger and journalist who dared write lies about her.
“I swear. It isn’t true. I didn’t cause the accident.”
“You think I don’t fucking know that?” He reeled it back in. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to say it like that.”
Her eyebrows were high on her forehead. “How did you mean to say it?”
“You take your lumps. When you screw up or get caught, you apologize and take your punishment. If you had been driving, you would have already apologized publicly and privately about a hundred times.”
She heaved a sigh, her fingers tightening their grip on his. “I wish someone would tell her family that. They’re inclined to believe the gossip. When I tried to visit her, they had security escort me out of the hospital.”
“What about the police report? It would prove Camille was behind the wheel.”
“It would say that, if I hadn’t pulled her out before they got there. The car was sliding, and I thought we were about to plummet off the side of a cliff.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s just my word against a bunch of people speculating about a sexier story.”
“So you came home.”
“Yeah. I came home. I figured it might be nice to be Remi Ford again.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she immediately looked away. “I just wish I knew if she were okay. The news just keeps saying the same thing. Condition unknown. And no one will give me any answers. So I just sit here waiting for her to call, to say she’s okay.”
He couldn’t stand it anymore. Brick pulled her against his chest and held on tight. The muffled sob that escaped damn near broke his heart.
He didn’t tell her that everything was okay. Because it sure as hell wasn’t. But he’d find a way to make it okay. He’d find a way to reassure her.
“You know another stupid thing?” she asked, sniffling against his chest.
“What, baby?”
“I haven’t painted since the accident.”
“You broke your arm,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, that should just mean I can’t paint well. But there’s this block. Every time I pick up a brush, I just relive it over and over again. The impact. The horrific sound of metal scraping. And then the drop.” She shivered against him. “It’s like there’s no room for music in my head anymore.”
“You’re healing. Cut yourself some slack. You went through a trauma. You can’t just bounce back from it physically or emotionally.”
“What if I never bounce back? What if I never paint again? Or what if I do paint again, and it’s terrible?”
He cupped her face in his hands, hating the tears he saw there. “You’re Remington Honeysuckle Ford—you will fucking bounce back.”
Her laugh was half-hearted. “Is that an order?”
“You’re damn right. And here’s another one. Stay here. Don’t try to sneak out and go home tonight. I’ll sleep better if I know you’re here.”
“Just a couple of siblings having a sleepover?” She sniffled, and he handed her a paper towel from the roll he’d put next to the mason jars.
“Remington, sometimes men say stupid things. Not because it’s the truth, but because they wish it was.”
“That’s Brick speak for either you wish I was your sister or you wish you thought of me as a sister,” she said, those green eyes sweeping him from head to toe. He felt the heat of her curious perusal like it was a caress.
“I’m not answering that. But you are staying tonight so I don’t have to worry about you.”
“Fine,” she said, noisily blowing her nose. “But only because I know you hid my boots somewhere and I’m too tired to tear your house apart looking for them.”
“Good girl. Now let’s go draw a marker mustache on Spence,” he said, plucking her off the table.
She grinned up at him and then froze. “Hey. Did I say anything about butt bongos the other night?”
“Yes. Yes, you did.”
“Damn it. I was afraid of that.”
He watched her take one last look around the room before she headed up the ramp into the house. He had a lot of complicated feelings. One of them stood out more than the others. She’d told him the truth. But he was damn sure there was more to the story than she’d shared.
