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She’d been on the outside looking in since they’d arrived in Somerset. Never quite comfortable. Never quite certain when her past would catch up with her, when it would destroy her life and hurt everyone she loved.
She’d tried, she thought. She’d tried to fix it, but the price had been far too high. She couldn’t fix one betrayal by creating another, could she? She couldn’t betray her brother, her cousins. Her sisters. That was the price of freedom, and realizing that she couldn’t pay that price was destroying her.
“Hey, munchkin. What are you doing out here by yourself?” The question came as bare feet stepped up beside her, the ragged edge of a pair of men’s jeans brushing against the sand.
“Nothing. Just watching the sun set.” She moved to get up.
“Please don’t, Zoey.” Dawg touched her shoulder as he moved to sit next to her, his larger body dwarfing hers. “Here, have a beer.”
He extended the chilled bottle as Zoey turned to him warily.
“Thank you.” Accepting the bottle, she turned back to the lake and took a sip before sitting it on the sand next to the nearly full beer her cousin Natches had given her earlier. That bottle was sitting next to the soft drink Rowdy had brought her.
What was up with all the drinks anyway?
“You know,” he sighed, long minutes later, “when you and your sisters first arrived at the marina, I had a second I wished Chandler was still breathing so I could kill him myself. Especially when I saw you. All that wariness and fear in your eyes . . .”
“Do we really need to go over this, Dawg?” She sighed. “We’re here, we’re safe. It’s over.”
That usually managed to get him to back off. At least for a few months.
“Yes we do, little girl, and by God, this time you can give me the courtesy of looking at me while I’m talking to you,” he ordered, his tone lowering, darkening, causing her to jerk around and stare at him in surprise.
This was not the gentle giant she was used to. Dawg never spoke sharply to his sisters. Ever.
“What did I do?” She frowned back at him.
Dawg wiped his hand over his face before staring back at her, the firm, commanding look giving way to a loving exasperation that always made her feel as though she had no chance of measuring up.
“You didn’t come to me,” he answered then, and for a second she saw a flash of pain in his eyes. “Even your sisters come to me when they need me. But when it was important, you didn’t do that, Zoey.”
God, no. He couldn’t know. There was no way he knew.
She jumped to her feet, aware that he was moving just as quickly. So quickly that as she moved to rush past him, he still managed to get to his feet and catch her by her arm. Gently.
“Let me go.” Pushing the words past clenched teeth as she refused to look at him, Zoey fought back the anger, the betrayal she’d kept a handle on for a year now.
“Why didn’t you come to me, Zoey?” he questioned her, the command in his tone once again. “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on instead of hating us . . .”
“Is that what you think?” Jerking away, she turned on him, anger still a force that raged through her with such strength she had no idea how to contain it sometimes. “Do you think I hated you, that I blamed you somehow?”
Confusion flickered across his expression. “I would have helped . . .”
She laughed, a broken, bitter sound that caused her brother to flinch. “What would you have done, Dawg? What do you think you could have done?”
“Zoey, what have we done to you?” He gentled then. Reaching out, he pushed back a heavy fall of curls that trailed down the side of her face, until he could meet her gaze fully. “What have we done, baby sister, to make you think we’d not protect you?”
She trembled at the question. She couldn’t stop the tears that filled her eyes or those that overflowed to run down her cheeks.
“I love all of you,” she tried to reassure him. “You haven’t done anything. Nothing is your fault.”
“Why not tell him what you did, Zoey?”
Dawg jerked around, dragging her behind him as his big body blocked hers from the sight of the man stepping from the tree line.
Elegant. So handsome he made her heart break every time she saw him. The one man she’d prayed she could avoid just a little while longer.
The day of reckoning was here, though. She couldn’t hide from it any longer. She couldn’t fight it any longer.
