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“I don’t even know who she is!”
“She’s your fiancée,” he shot back.
“Except, she isn’t.”
“Chase,” Harper breathed, her horrified stare going to the girl next to me. With a determined huff, Harper stormed around to my other side, her voice dropping low. “I can’t imagine why she’s still in here, taking everything you’re saying, other than because she loves you and knows you’re confused. But my heart is breaking for her—youarebreakingher heart.”
Again, that flicker of pain in my chest.
That twitch of my fingers before I could control it.
But all of it was overwhelmed by how I felt blindsided by everything Harper and Brandon were trying to make me believe. By how I wasstartingto and how it was wrecking me.
“Chase, I love you,” Harper went on. “But it isn’t in a way you’re expecting me to. You’re family to me. Nothing more.”
“You can’t say that and mean it.”
“But I can,” she said gently, then released a long sigh. “Years ago, when a frustratingly stubborn stranger literallytossedme in his bed and forced me to sleep there because he thought he was protecting me from his housemates, I might’ve gone so far as to say a reluctant crush formed.”
My heart raced as I remembered that night.
The first moment I’d ever seen her. This wild contradiction of a girl who’d made me want to wrap her up and protect her and had me falling for her in the span of a breath.
But Harper’s mouth just twitched in amusement when she looked over her shoulder at where Brandon stood and added, “For about a week.”
“Because you met Brandon,” I said in understanding, not that it meant anything. I still remembered her warring feelings after their meeting. Remembered the way she would look at me as if she hated that she was falling in love with metoo.
She slanted her head in acknowledgment. “It was over for me then. But even if I hadn’t met him, thatveryreluctant crush had been something I’d imagined and romanticized over a weekwhere I hadn’t seen you. Because the next time I did, you were just Bree’s brother.” She lifted a hand before letting it fall to the bed.
“You were funny and irritating and slightly nauseating because you really didn’t know how to keep it in your pants. Sorry, Scarlet,” Harper muttered, briefly glancing to the side. “And you were super protective of me when it came to my relationship with Brandon, but in an annoying older brother kind of way.”
Brandon grunted in agreement as my head shook.
“No. No, we fought constantly,” I argued, looking at Brandon. “Wephysicallyfought over her. All the guys in the house were involved because they were always pulling us off each other.”
A hushed breath eased from him. “Never once fought you unless it was for training at the gym.”
What the hell was happening?
How could they look and sound so confident when I could distinctly feel every pain and pleasure of the past year with Harper?
Or—fuck, however long ago it was.
How could I know in my gut what was real and still have this feeling like my world was being shifted? Like I was falling because I didn’t know which way was up.
“Harper, I—”
“You’re going to get these last couple of years back,” she said softly, assuredly. “And this memory your mind created will fade. Hopefully.” She playfully rolled her eyes, making my chest ache. “Then I’ll just be Harper again. Your friend and the girl you view as a sister, and this will become asuperawkward story.”
“You’re everything,” I maintained.
She made a face as if she hated having to hurt me, then shook her head.
When her lips parted, I whispered, “You’re myPrincess. You’reeverything.”
Confusion stole across her face when I held out my arm to show her the piece that had the word ‘Princess’ hidden within it, but her stare just darted between the tattoos and me a few times before she hesitantly asked, “Chase, do you know what you’re showing me?”
“Something I should have a long time ago.”
