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She’d finished her breakfast and set her fork on her plate, giving him a hopeful smile. “Would you like to go into the city with me?”
He tipped his head curiously. “What’s in the city that you need to do?”
She ran a finger along the rim of her coffee mug, still looking a bit uncertain. “There’s a place that sells barstools for restaurants, and I saw a few online that I really liked, possibly for Wilder Things. I’d love for you to go with me so I can get your opinion.”
The fact that she wanted his advice on such important things, that his ideas and point of view even mattered to her, still floored him. To Remy, this went above and beyond the casual affair they’d agreed upon, yet the thought of spending more time with Tempest—something he truly enjoyed—wasn’t an invitation he was about to turn down.
“Sure,” he said, leaning back in his chair and smiling at her. “I’d like that.”
“Oh, good.” Relief and enthusiasm lit up her entire face.
The cell phone she’d set on the table vibrated with what sounded like a text message, and she lifted it up, a frown forming on her brows when she saw whatever was on the screen.
“Go away,” she muttered beneath her breath, her good mood from a moment ago now tinged with irritation.
“Everything okay?” he asked in concern.
She glanced up at Remy, clearly hesitating a moment, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to confide in him. Her phone buzzed again, but this time she didn’t bother to look at it.
“It’s just Kyle,” she finally said, her tone frustrated, as was the look in her eyes. “The guy who came to my apartment the evening of the ball,” she added, as if Remy needed the reminder.
Everything inside Remy went cold as ice—same as it had that night when he’d come face-to-face with his half brother for the first time in his life. “Yeah, I know who Kyle is,” he bit out, belatedly realizing what he might have possibly revealed by the startled look on Tempest’s face. “What does he want?”
“He wants what he can’t have,” she said, her exasperation clear as she rubbed her fingers across her forehead. “He wants me to go out with him again. I can’t make it any clearer that I’m not interested in him, but he’s so damn persistent.”
As if what Remy had just said finally dawned on her, a confused look passed across Tempest’s features, and her gaze narrowed on him. “Wait . . . you know him?”
Remy’s entire body tensed. His chest felt uncomfortably tight, like a ten-ton weight was just sitting there, making it difficult for him to breathe as the woman sitting across the table from him waited for an answer. Realizing he was standing at a fork in the road, Remy was faced with two choices . . . deny that he knew Kyle personally or tell Tempest the truth. But he’d never revealed that dark anger, the inescapable, humiliating hurt, the devastating rejection to anyone else. Not even his ex-wife.
To do so now would be like opening up a vein and letting it bleed all over the place. It would be ugly and painful and would strip him bare emotionally. It was a huge, colossal moment in his life that would require ultimate trust, and his greatest fear was that this woman he was coming to care for would look at him differently. That she’d see how a mother’s abandonment, then outright rejection had royally fucked him up for any other woman.
As if Tempest could sense his internal struggle—though she had no clue as to the cause—her gaze softened with concern. “Remy?”
He forced his clenched jaw to relax, and before he lost the fucking nerve, he revealed the truth. “Kyle Jenkins is my half brother.”
Shock jolted through Tempest at Remy’s statement, which was quickly followed by confusion. “Your half brother?” she repeated incredulously. “I don’t understand. That night in my apartment, Kyle didn’t know who you were.”
The bitterness etching Remy’s features was undeniable. “It’s because he’s never met me, and chances are, he doesn’t even know I exist.”
His vague reply perplexed her even more. “Remy . . . explain this to me,” she said, her tone imploring. “Please.”
He looked away, every muscle in his body tense. The hand he had on the table was curled into a tight fist, making the veins in his forearm flex. “I never should have said anything,” he said, his voice gruff.
“But you did say something,” she said, refusing to let him off so easily. Not after dropping such a huge bombshell on her. “Don’t shut me out, Remy. This is too important. Whatever this story is of yours, it matters to me. You matter to me.” And he truly did. In a very short span of time, everything about Remy’s life was becoming significant to her and her growing feelings for him.
When he finally glanced back at her, there was no disguising the pain and humiliation she saw in his eyes. “I guess you’re going to learn exactly where this tramp came from,” he said, his mouth twisting with a caustic smile that was clearly meant to warn Tempest of the terrible secret he was about to reveal.
But she wasn’t thwarted, and she sat there, waiting for him to explain.
Finally, he did. “My mother, Crystal, who is now Kyle’s mother, met my father when they were nineteen,” Remy said, describing the situation from the beginning of his life with his parents. “They both came from abusive, drug-addicted families who didn’t give a crap about them, so when Crystal got pregnant with me, my father did the rig
ht thing and married her, even though they had nothing to their names. My mom worked as a waitress at a truck stop, and my father was a mechanic, and all they could barely afford with a new baby was rent at a shitty trailer park, and that’s where and how I grew up.”
Tempest swallowed hard, keeping her hands in her lap when she ached to reach across the table and touch Remy, to give him some kind of physical comfort. But right now, there was too much anger and resentment radiating off him, and she knew he probably wouldn’t welcome her show of empathy.
“Even from a really young age, I remember their marriage being tumultuous,” he went on, clenching and unclenching his fist, his gaze lost somewhere in the past. “My mother, who I never really had a connection with and mostly ignored me, constantly fought with my father. She had no issues telling my dad how much she hated her life with him and that she deserved better than what he could provide. One day, when I was seven, she came home from work and announced that she wanted a divorce. Told my dad that she’d met someone else, who could give her all the things she wanted, that she was pregnant with his kid, and oh, by the way, she didn’t need any baggage going into her new life, so therefore she was signing over all of her custody rights to me to my father. And then she walked out the door and left. As soon as the divorce was final, she married Martin Jenkins, a man at least twenty years older than she was and who owned a chain of high-end restaurants, and severed all ties to me and my father and anything relating to her previous life with us.”
Tempest stared at Remy in disbelief, unable to fathom how a woman could completely turn her back on her own child and abandon him. “You never heard from her after that? Or saw her?”
