Page 88 of Crack the Ice

“She is!” Her hands bounce off her thighs. “You were supposed to take Melanie out. I’ve been begging you for years. You agreed, and then Cecy decides she wants you and you bail.”

“Who the hell is Melanie? I’ve never entertained the idea of anyone but Cecy. Ever.”

The first tear falls, and a numbness sweeps through me as my fingers rhythmically tap against the side of Mav. This feels like a twilight zone or something, like I’m here, but this isn’t actually happening, it can’t be. She’s my best friend. She’d never hurt me on purpose.

“You were supposed to take her to her charity banquet.”

He stiffens against me, and I pray with every fiber of my being that it doesn’t mean he’s been caught in a lie. His hands fall from me, and he slowly turns toward his sister, shifting me slightly behind him. I don’t hesitate to lean my head against his back, hands fisting the fabric of his shirt.

“You asked me to make a donation, to make an appearance at said banquet, Lana,” he seethes, his voice so deceptively calm it drops the temperature by about ten degrees. “You never asked me to go with her. Are you telling me that you tried to set me up, knowing my answer would have been no otherwise?”

“I– I,” She stammers.

“What has gotten into you? Why are you trying to dictate my love life? There’s a reason there hasn’t been much of one, and that’s because of the woman behind me. My heart has only ever belonged to her, and it would have remained hers whether she gave us another chance or not.” He takes a small step toward her, but he reaches back and catches one of my hands as it falls from his back.

My breath hitches. He did wait for me. He set his heart in my hands and let me hold it, or maybe squeeze it to the brink of death while I was too busy trying to keep my own from bleeding out all over the place. He didn’t ask for it back. He didn’t want it back.

God, how did I get this so wrong for so long? How did I not see how much we were hurting each other? A sob gets stuck in my throat, my body shaking with the force it’s taking to keep quiet and not break down right where I’m at.

“You don’t get to talk to my woman that way.” Another step. “She didn’t do anything wrong, and if I hadn’t been so hell-bent on solving everyone else’s problems, I could have been there for her during the darkest time of her life. But I wasn’t. I let her suffer alone. A mistake I couldn’t be paid enough to make again.”

Another step, our hands extending in the space between us, but he doesn’t let me go. “If you can’t respect her, if you can’t respect the life and relationship we’re trying to repair, then you can leave and not come back.”

“You can’t fire me, Maverick. You’re not my boss.”

“I’m not,” he says flatly. “But I do love your boss, and I won’t leave here knowing she’s in a hostile work environment because you’re on some soapbox you have no right to be on in the first place.” His voice rises in volume, yet his tone is still even-keeled.

I don’t know what it says about me that I’m almost more turned on right now, on the verge of tears, than I was in the kitchen at the house this morning.

“She may not say anything about it because she loves you, but she’ll suffer. She’ll suffer in silence like she’s done for years. You may be my sister, Lana, but she’s my future wife. This is her business. You don’t get to ruin that for her.”

His fingers squeeze mine seconds before he turns toward me, cupping my face. His green eyes bore into mine, searching for the answer he already knows, so he doesn’t even bother to ask. Instead, his thumb brushes across my cheekbone, catching a few stray tears as they escape the confines I failed to keep them in.

“Thank you,” I manage to get out. He has no idea how much him simply showing up means to me. I told him I didn’t need him to, but I did. I didn’t want to be disappointed if something more important were to come up.

He nods, then his lips find my forehead. They quiver against my heated skin, but he makes no effort to move away.

“Why her?” Lana asks. “Why, after all this time, is it her?”

“It’s always been her, Lana. Since I was twenty-three years old, it’s been her,” he says. “Why does that bother you?”

She sighs. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her cross her arms over her chest. “We’ve lost enough, Maverick. Don’t you think?” She blows a hair out of her face. “Why my best friend? What happens when this all blows up? Now you’ve put two kids who were in our position in an even shittier one. You guys are barely friends, and now you’re on your way to banging and playing house. It makes no sense. It’s reckless.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Lana,” Mav growls.

His sister shrinks back at the sound.

“You don’t know what the two of us have been through together and on our own. I’m not about to bare her scars to you. That’s her decision. But I will bare my own. I ran every time someone called. I turned into the father you never knew. I left her in my bed in the middle of the night more than once because someone somewhere else needed me. Hell, I did it last week to her and the kids. I pushed her to the point that she didn’t think she could talk to me without trying to fix something. So she handled it herself, and that led to her taking herself out of my life. I don’t blame her one bit.”

He slides one hand into the back pocket of my jeans, my head falling onto his shoulder as we face his sister as a united front.

“Make no mistake, though, Lana. There is no ending where I’m not completely hers. I’ll beg, plead, roll around in broken glass, willingly cutting myself open to bleed the way I made her bleed in silence. I’m nothing without her, and if you can’t see that, I’m sorry. If you can’t support that, then don’t.”

“I don’t want to lose you both,” she whispers, eyes falling to the floor.

My heart breaks for her. I’d hug her if I were confident my legs would support the walk across the room.

“I don’t think acting like a madwoman is the way to keep us around,” I add. “I understand the fear and disappointment of finding out how you did, but your behavior is way out of line. And as much as I love you, I can’t work like this. I can’t be wondering what’s going to set you off today, or if we get into an argument, if you’re going to come in here and say I told you so.”