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She lifted one shoulder and returned to pulling the petals free one at a time, but this time remained silent. Once it was empty she tossed the stem near the edge of the pond. “You act like I’m not the baby of the family too.”
Dean snorted and plopped down beside her. “You aren’t. You’re an only child.”
Jillian rolled her eyes and twisted her head to look at him. “Let me remind you of Bradford. You know the tall, strawberry blond guy in the ginormous family portrait hanging in our formal room?”
An involuntary grin at Jillian’s proper and refined tongue saying something like “ginormous” spread across his face and he gave himself a small pat on the back for opening her up to something a lot more fun than stuffy dinner parties he still couldn’t figure out how she survived. “Yeah, technically you have a brother, but he’s never around. He’s been in that hoity-toity boarding school for as long as I’ve known you.”
He scuffed his sneaker on the surface of the rock. “He doesn’t live to pick on you and push you around like my brothers.”
Jillian grabbed his chin and an uncharacteristic fierce expression colored her face. “I tell you all the time, but you need to actually listen.” The corner of her eye sparkled in the spring sun. “You have an amazing family. Sure, your brothers are assholes sometimes, but all siblings are. You are sometimes too. But they love you. They’d do anything for you.”
The truth of her words cemented in his gut. Yeah, the four boys brawled more than their mother wanted, but after a few rounds, whatever had been between them disappeared and they’d go back to being each other’s closest friends. Especially Connor. Being so close in age and the last two of the tribe had created a special bond between the brothers similar to the one shared between Wyatt and Tanner as the two oldest.
The glittering drop that had been threatening to spill over ran down her cheek. “And I would give anything for my parents to love me the way yours do. The only one who does is Grandpa and he…”
Silence was far more concerning than whatever words she hadn’t spoken. He gripped her upper arms. “What, Jillybean?”
She lifted one shoulder and sniffled. “Daddy says he’ll be fine, but he’s been in the hospital a long time and I keep hearing my mother mentioning his heart to friends, but she stops talking as soon as I get close enough to find out what she means.”
Dean wiggled on the stone slab as he watched a few errant tears trail down her cheeks.
He wished he were Tanner. His oldest brother had a way of always knowing what to say or do. It was annoying.
He wished he were Wyatt. He might not say the right things, but Wyatt always managed to make people smile. It was frustrating because it was nearly impossible to stay mad at him.
He wished he were Connor. Though only eighteen months separated them in age, they were practically as different as night and day. The older boy had a weird way of calming anyone he was around…especially girls. It was a trait that worked in all the brothers’ favor when Connor managed to smooth over whatever someone had done to irritate their mom.
Instead Dean caught one of the discarded petals from the rock. “So who loves you?”
Her dark green eyes clouded in confusion. “What in the world are you talking about?”
The question was punctuated with a much softer sniffle that encouraged Dean to press on, hoping for distraction if he couldn’t manage to comfort her. “I counted when you finished. You ended with ‘he loves me.’”
Her freckles blended into the red coloring her cheeks as she dipped her head and turned away. “It’s…it’s nobody.”
She hopped off the stone, brushed dirt he certainly couldn’t see from her clothes, and lifted one hand. “I’ll, um, see you later.”
With that she raced off toward her house and quickly melted from a retreating figure to a speedy blur he could barely make out in the distance.
Dean pressed his lips together and shook his head, huffing through his nose. He dug around in the grass and dirt nearby until he found half a dozen smooth stones and expertly whipped them into the pond, smiling as the first skipped seven times across the water.
“Girls,” he mumbled to the next rock he turned in his hand, “I will never understand a single one of ’em.”
***
Jillian
Fourteen Years Earlier
For the tenth time that morning Jillian wished Dean went to the same school as her. The upper class, private school with the annoyingly uncomfortable uniform would be far more tolerable if he were there to crack an irreverent joke or goad her into using the kind of language that would shock her mother,even if the swear words were all ones she’d heard Helena Monroe utter more than once when frazzled from a planning meeting or irate with one of the “friends” she air kissed at every function.
Jillian snorted. With friends like the ones her mother had—and the kind Helena herself was—she didn’t need enemies.
She neatly filed her notebook in her locker between two thick textbooks and pulled out the ones she needed for her final two classes of the afternoon. Just as she looked up to close the door, she caught a glimpse of ash blond hair and her stomach involuntarily flipped.
Tristan Randolph.
He managed to make the khaki pants and navy blazer of the school uniform look like something out of a teen heartthrob magazine. He stood half a head above the other boys that circled around him, leeching off his popularity and status.
