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I don’t know how the hell I got this lucky to have someone like Bree love me, but I vow to spend the rest of our lives making it up to her.
“Hey, man, can we talk?”
Brody closes the fridge and slowly turns around, glaring my way.
“Oh, now you want to talk?” he says, popping the top off his beer. “I think that ship sailed the moment you chose to walk away instead of talking to me.”
It’s late, and even though it’s a weekday, Bree and the kids spent the night. We had a conversation with the kids about what happened, and I apologized to Miles and Evie for making their mom cry. She explained to them about the coffeehouse, how she has to find a new one, and that I was upsetting her because I was trying to fix it. I’m not sure if they completely understand what happened, but Miles seemed to forgive me by the end of the night.
Brody, on the other hand, hasn’t said a single word to me all night.
“I know I fucked up…”
“You know you fucked up?” he mocks. “Fuck that! You don’t know shit.” He stalks toward me and gets in my face. “You’re lucky Bree is a fucking angel and willing to forgive you, but I’m not.” He slams his beer on the counter next to me. “An entire lifetime of friendship and instead of talking to me, you shut me out.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice!” he barks. “You chose to walk away. You chose to say the shit you said. You broke her heart, and I had to try to pick up the shattered fucking pieces. You weren’t there, watching her cry for days. Helpless!” He pounds his chest with his fist. “I thought I was gonna lose her too. Do you know what it feels like to think you’re going to lose the two people who mean the most to you?” I open my mouth to say something—what, I’m not sure—but he speaks first. “And don’t you dare say you know because you made that decision. You did that! And Bree might be forgiving, but I’ll be damned if you ever do that shit to her again.”
He grabs me by the shirt and slams me against the wall. I brace myself, ready for him to hit me, and I wouldn’t blame him, but before he does, Bree runs into the kitchen and pushes him away from me.
“Enough,” she hisses. “Enough.”
“No, fuck that!” Brody barks. “He should be hurting, just like we were.” Tears prick his eyes, and he looks away from me and at her as she takes his face in her hands. “He fucking hurt you, and just like that, you let him back in. I can’t go through that again.” He shakes his head. “I can’t see you crying like that again. He’s either got to be all in or out. You almost canceled the wedding. You were crying for days.”
He glances at me. “While you were accepting your decision, did you know that she refused to? She was running around like a detective, refusing to give up hope. Swearing she was going to get you back. You gave up before even trying, and she never fucking gave up.”
“Brody, please,” Bree says, forcing him to look at her. “None of us are perfect. All we can do is love each other and live for today and hope for tomorrow. I love that you’re protecting me, but all I want is for us to learn from this and put it behind us.”
She reaches over and takes my hand, pulling me toward Brody so we’re standing next to each other. “I just want to love you both and be loved by you. Everything else be damned.”
She reaches up on her tiptoes and kisses Brody, then turns and kisses me. “Now,” she says, a sexy smirk quirking up in the corner of her lips. “It’s been way too long since I’ve felt either of you inside me. So I say we take advantage of the kids sleeping and get reacquainted with each other…on a personal level.”
And because neither of us can—or want to—say no to that offer, we follow her to Brody’s room, where we spend damn near the entire night making up for the lost time.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
AUBREE
WEDDING DAY
“You look beautiful,” Lacey says, fluffing my dress. “Are you nervous?”
I glance at myself in the mirror, dressed in a strapless, satin, sparkly floor-length wedding gown that shows off all of my curves. My hair is down in waves, with a beautiful rhinestone tiara on the crown of my head that Lacey loaned me as something borrowed and something blue. Laying across my neck is a beautiful necklace the guys gave me yesterday as my something new. It has an elegant white gold cupcake in the center to symbolize my love of baking and how I met them. And on my wrist is a delicate bracelet that was my grandma’s as my something old.
