“How can you suggest that?” I demand.
“Please.” His lip curls. “I know how you operate.”
I should come up with some cutting comeback, but nothing pops into my head.
“What happened to you, Alex?” His anger eases, replaced with something sharper.
My guard instantly rises. “Nothing happened to me.”
“Bullshit. You changed your senior year of college. You were always on the narcissistic side, but after that year? It’s like you stopped giving a damn about any of us.”
“I grew up, Tyler,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Funny. I grew up before you, and I didn’t cut my family off.”
“I didn’t cut you off,” I lie.
“Bullshit. I can’t even remember the last time we saw each other outside a family function.”
I remember. It was four years ago, when I was at a conference in Boston. We met for dinner, and it hadn’t gone well. I was still too raw and ashamed, and terrified Tyler, who had always been the noblest of the King boys, would see what I’d done written all over my face. He’d seen my behavior as aloof and arrogant. He’d left before we’d finished the meal, saying I was a stuck-up asshole who thought I was too good for my family.
He had no idea that the opposite was true, and that was why I stayed away.
But Tyler doesn’t know about the mess brewing inside me and takes my silence as further proof I didn’t give a damn.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” I say. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Only because you must care a little about Mom. She begged you to come home.”
He’s not wrong.
“What did we ever do to you?” he asks, shaking his head.
“Nothing. This isn’t about you.” I flinch. I’ve already given him too much.
“If it’s not about us, then what’s it about?”
I refuse to answer. We drive the rest of the way in silence. When he finds a spot and turns off the engine, he turns to me, all business. “If I find out you are using Finley for your own selfish gain, I will be the first in line to bash your face in.”
“Why the hell do you care about Finley?” I snap.
“Because she’s too good for you.”
It lands like a punch. I want to tell him she isn’t too good for me, that she’s not even up to the catalog of my usual requirements. She works two part-time jobs, lives in a low-income apartment, and probably drives a piece of shit car. Tyler already knows that—she told them last night. I’ve been closed-minded about the women I’ve dated, expecting them to check off the boxes of my required attributes like they’re applying for a job.
And yet—and painfully obvious even to me—Finley is a better person than any of them. Better than all of them combined.
He jabs a finger into my chest, hard enough it probably leaves a bruise. “If you screw with her, I swear to God, Alex, I will screw with you.”
I don’t argue with him. Part of me is quietly relieved he’s being protective of her. She’s been mostly alone for the last six years, other than her adopted grandmothers, and she needs someone in her corner. So, I say nothing, and hope that if I somehow do screw her over, he’ll hold true to his word.
When I see her with Mallory, all I feel is shame, because I am using her.
Worse, I’m pretty sure she heard enough of my conversation with Roland to think I find the idea of sleeping with her revolting. The thought turns my stomach.
The irony is that the opposite is true, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
Chapter Nineteen
