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I make her hold my gaze until the door is fully closed.
No more running. For her and definitely not for us.
I make my way downstairs to find the guys in the living room, beers in hand. Cain holds a cold one up to me as I sink into an armchair closest to the window. Rains have died down to a light drizzle, but you can still see the lightning over the water.
Linc is in a chair on the other side of the room facing the low embers of the fire.
“She okay?”
I scoff. “You heard. This house is like one big echo.”
“And?”
“Hell no she’s not okay. She’s hurting and three brutes just crashed her little solo party, bringing up bad memories for her.”
Cain and Linc exchange concerned looks with Cain grumbling something I don’t pick up.
“Let’s not forget that being a naked solo party,” Linc adds, taking a hit off his beer.
Cain leans back and props his beer on his knee. “Anyone else notice how methodical everything was in the kitchen? From the cleaning supplies to how she alphabetized the wine in the fridge. That’s not our wild and free-loving life at its fullest Mercy. It’s like aliens abducted her and replaced her with a robot or something. Hell, I don’t know,” he mumbles dragging his hand across the stubble on his chin. “I do know that girl upstairs isn’t her.”
I shake my head. “You shoulda seen the way her clothes were color-coded upstairs,” I say suddenly exhausted just thinking about the amount of work that had to have gone into something like that.
“We left her alone for too damn long. We should have come back sooner.”
I had a feeling Cain would bring that up. It’s been coming out of his mouth in various forms for the last month.
I glare at him. “You know damn well we couldn’t,” I counter. “From the way she shoved me out of her room, I’m not too sure we should be here now.” That admission sobers me, and I mentally correct my thinking. “But her stubbornness isn’t anything new.”
With a loud screech that could wake the dead, Linc lugged his chair around to face us both. “No. At least that hasn’t changed.” He pauses. “No one told you to keep signing up for tour after tour, man; you did that shit on purpose.”
I shrug. “And? You were no better. I didn’t tell you to follow me.”
“You never did, brother. Besides neither of us was about to leave you on your own to get killed.”
“I sure the fuck wasn’t going to be the one to come home and tell her you were dead.” Cain’s expression sobers. “It was bad enough we had to come home when Jake died. Thank fuck we didn’t have to be the ones to carry that news home.”
“It tore me up to leave her the way we did. After the funeral, I mean.”
Cain and I both turn to give Linc a look.
I grunt. “It tore us all up, man. But do I need to say it again? We’re here now. We have some things to correct and make right. Jake, none of us know how he’d react to this, but we have to believe he’d like to know his sister is loved and cared for.”
We all three clink beers.
“So now what? Are we really ready for this? She’s not exactly happy we’re here.”
“We let her sleep tonight and then tomorrow we show her the truth. Telling her we missed her isn’t going to be good enough. I just tried that. She’s too closed off to her emotions to believe a word we say.”
“Now that we have her, we can’t let her get away. I’ll personally tie her to the bed until she believes us.” Cain sucks down the last of his beer and heads to the kitchen for another, leaving his words to hang over us.
I chuckle darkly. “Keep telling yourself that, buddy. For some reason I don’t think she’llletyou do anything.”
The light to her room goes dark, and I realize there are only two other beds and one of us will have to take the floor or the lumpy sofa.
Tonight.
Because tomorrow night no one will be sleeping.
