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Chapter17
LANDON
Another double-dog dare.
His pulse hammered. His mouth grew dry.
Unable to stop himself, he cupped her face in his hands.
Was she trembling?
No, that was him.
Adrenaline pumped through his veins, and he concentrated on her chameleon eyes.
If she wanted the ugly truth, he’d serve it up on a platter.
“Everything you’ve said about me is true,” he rasped, willing his voice not to shake. “I can’t transfer my ideas to paper, and composing is out of the question. I have a hell of a time reading, and when I try to decipher sheet music, it might as well be a pinball machine with hundreds of black balls skittering on the page. I was never diagnosed with a learning disability or being a neuro…”
“Neurodivergent learner,” she supplied.
He nodded and stroked her cheek with his thumb, then something surprising happened. While the rush of shame hadn’t receded, it also hadn’t pulled him under—not when Harper was a breath away.
He concentrated on her face and let the bullshit in his periphery go blurry. “My parents died of carbon monoxide poisoning when I was eleven and Leighton was ten. We lived not far from your place on the other side of the Baxter Park neighborhood. They’d left us with my grandmother to have an anniversary weekend away in the mountains.” He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “The cabin they’d rented had just had a new roof installed. Something got sealed that shouldn’t have. They went to bed and never woke up. It’s strange to even think of what life was like with my parents. It feels almost like somebody else’s life.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered and pressed her hands to his chest.
Her touch soothed his battered heart. “After that, we lived with my grandmother until she passed away, and then we got thrown into the foster care system. We had a rough couple of years. School was hell. We moved around quite a bit, and the teachers chalked up my poor test scores to bouncing around from placement to placement. I figured out ways to get by, and just like you guessed, Leighton helped me with my homework.”
Harper held his gaze. There was no pity in her eyes, only concern. “How old were you when Bess and Tomás took you in?”
“Fourteen. I’d pretty much mastered the art of how to barely pass classes. But the misery of school wasn’t so bad because I’d found something I loved.”
“Music?” she offered.
“Yeah, Tomás and Bess had a ton of old instruments. They encouraged us to experiment and explore. That’s when Leighton and I discovered we could play by ear. I gravitated to the guitar. She liked the piano. Trey lived on the next property over with his aunt. He played bass. We became fast friends, formed Heartthrob Warfare, and the rest is history.”
“You didn’t mind your best friend falling for your sister?”
“I couldn’t have picked a better man for her than Trey. He adored her. She could have told him she wanted a rock off the moon, and he’d have gone searching for a spaceship. And he loved being a dad.” Emotion cracked his voice. It had been ages since he’d allowed himself to remember the happy times.
“Can I ask you another question? It’s kind of off-topic.”
“Sure.”
“Why did you call yourselves Heartthrob Warfare? I always wondered. It’s such a unique name.”
He smiled, remembering the day they’d adopted the name. “Scrabble,” he replied and gestured with his chin toward the box on the kitchen table.
She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Scrabble?”
“Leighton and Trey liked to play when we needed a break from the music. I hated Scrabble, for obvious reasons, but Leighton was a whiz. One day,heartthrobandwarfaremade it on the board, and Leighton decided that would be our name.”
“She sounds bossy and domineering.”
He chuckled. “You could say that.”
“That’s my kind of gal,” Harper added with a pinch of snark.
