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“After you,” Cole said, with a flourish of his hand.
I moved ahead of him, feeling his gaze fan me from skull to heels. We stepped onto the wide balcony overlooking the courtyard. Up ahead, the vast skyline silhouetted the river separating us from the city with an oil-like sheen.
Cole closed the French doors behind us and strode toward me as if he didn’t have plans to stop. I shivered, placing the blame on the frigid fall air and the need for my coat, and not the man in front of me.
“You’re cold.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted. “You could’ve said no.”
“And why would I do that?” he asked.
“You know why,” I bit out, irritated by the way my voice thickened from his proximity. I shuffled over to the stone railing, giving him my back. “It’s been years. Why now? Why show up now?”
“I took Daniel’s invitation as a sign—”
“As an excuse, you mean. An excuse to show up and throw my life off its fucking axis.”
“I see New York has roughened you,” he said in answer to my vulgarity. I didn’t find him one bit entertaining, and the glower I aimed over my shoulder said as much. He sighed, coming to stand next to me, both of us staring past the bristling treetops and into the twinkling night sky. The cold breeze pile-drove his cologne into my nostrils. Against my will, I breathed in deeply.
“I was on my way here anyway,” he said.
The move.How much of the blame for that could be shouldered by coincidence, I wondered, and how much of it was part of a calculated play to get to me. It’d been a little over two years—the news anchor had said—since Franklin took the company public, before handing over the majority stake to Cole, then stepping away. Could Cole have been planning this move since then? Before then? Biding his time? A company of that magnitude didn’t spontaneously decide to move across the country overnight.
“And I missed my brother,” he admitted, his tone held a vulnerability his stoicism would never betray.
“Stepbrothers,” I corrected. “And we were never just that, Cole.” We had been more. We had been sinful. And the high voltage of electricity sizzling through my veins warned me we were all those things still. Time and space would never change that. “But we aren’t even that anymore. Any familial link we had died with my mother.”
A hint of sadness flickered in the depths of his eyes at the mention of her, and then it settled into something more steady, more permanent as he said—as if only now realizing it, or only now wanting to face it. “You’re married.”
“Yes,” I said, following his gaze to my hand. Daniel had asked after our fight last year, and in the heat of the moment, I’d agreed, giving him the security he needed. The truth was, if it wasn’t Daniel getting the scraps of me, it would’ve been someone else, because my heart wasn’t whole. I’d left the other half of it back in Seattle, and now it was here, right in front of me, staring into me as if nothing could keep us apart. Not even my vows.
“Why are you really here, Cole?” I spoke to him with more care than I had moments ago. Maybe because he’d dropped the aloof façade, reminding me I wasn’t the only one hurt by the events of the past. Reminding me that what had happened wasn’t his fault. “Is this your attempt at repeating history?”
“I gave you what you wanted. I let you go, and I stayed away. I didn’t try to find or make contact with you. But I miss our friendship. Our brotherhood. I miss you,” he whispered. “And not in the way you think.”
Why did the latter hurt to hear? He’d reentered my life less than ten minutes ago, and already the old poison resting dormant in me began to unfurl, yawning to life. Already I was forgetting I was a taken man. My wedding band, suddenly feeling like a ball and chain, bit into my skin as a reminder. I needed Cole gone.
“What?” I asked after a chanced side-glance revealed his thoughtful inspection of me.
“I’m not used to seeing you in a suit.” He gazed skyward as a stiff breeze rattled his perfectly styled hair. “Selene’s probably gaping down on you in shock. She couldn’t get you into anything but a ratty t-shirt and jeans. Not even bribery worked.”
“Because I can’t be bought.” The mention of my mother thawed some of my internal ice. I hadn’t spoken of her out loud in years. Not since she’d died. I fought the urge to reminisce with him, fought against wanting to let him in, even an inch. But how could I not? She was his as much as she was mine. And Cole was the only person in the world whoknew. The only one who understood.
“She loved it when you called her mom,” I said, unable to resist revisiting her memory, the words slithering past my guards. I could give him this, give myself this moment of reflection, and then be done with him. “You don’t have to stop.”
My mother and Franklin had married when I was eight and Cole ten. We’d both suffered the loss of a parent early on. He had been a closed-off kid, and my mother tried to get through to him for a long while without pressure or success. And then one day over breakfast, he’d said,“Can you pass the pancakes, Mom?”No one had made a big deal about it, and she’d hidden her tears well.
“Doesn’t feel right anymore. Not after…” He stopped there, and I was grateful for it. Unlike Cole, I’d always addressed his father by name. Franklin was a good man, an even better stepfather to me—in his own way. I was unlucky enough to have known my real father long before entering the Kincaid household, and for me the word held a negative connotation of neglect and abuse, so I never used it. Franklin was emotionally mature enough to not take offense, and he’d cultivated a strong bond with me anyway. Real pain lingered behind losing him, but I mourned the loss of Cole the most.
“Daniel insisted,” I said, tugging at the tuxedo cuffs self-consciously, taking us back to the reason my mother’s name had been brought up in the first place.
Cole huffed. “I bet he thinks it makes you look more expensive.”
I stiffened. “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you saying without the finery I’m cheap? Nothing?” I demanded, facing off with him.
“You’re priceless, Jasper,” he said, seemingly perplexed as to how I didn’t already know it. “It was a bad joke, made to imply something about him, never you.”
I swallowed thickly and centered my thoughts around protecting my husband’s character instead of counting the years since I’d truly felt worth anything. “Daniel’s a good man, and I don’t appreciate you showing up after all this time and insinuating differently. You don’t know him.”
