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My body shook as I tried focusing on anything other than the way her expression and words and tears were breaking my heart.
I’d been looking for any kind of emotion since Cassidy had stirred up a frantic need inside me before leaving. I’d searched for it in so many women. This girl...for a dozen reasons, she shouldn’t have been the one to start evoking all these feelings. And yet, she was.
My best friends’ little sister. My neighbor. The girl next door. Everything cliche´ and everything I had overlooked for years because of who she was.
I wanted to pull her into my arms and brush away the tears streaming down her face. I wanted to tell her she had all this backward—she owned me.
But I couldn’t keep doing this to her.
I had fears she couldn’t understand and a haunting past I wasn’t willing to taint her world with. And not only would her brothers never allow it—especially after tonight—but they were right. I would ruin her and our future family, and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself when that happened.
I’ll destroy her. I’ll ruin her, I repeatedly chanted. I could never be the type of man she needs.
“I know you, and I know you want to be with me, so why are you doing this to us?” she begged, grabbing my arm when I turned to leave. “Is it my brothers? Did they find out?”
Swallowing past the tightness in my throat, I scoffed. Scoffing was good. It made me sound like that much more of an asshole. “You don’t know anything about me. The fact that you somehow made yourself believe there was an us is proof of that. There isn’t.”
Might as well have slapped her with the way she reared back from my cold words. “How can you say that?”
“Because we fucked, Maci—that’s it,” I said as I continued toward my door, unable to stop from looking at her beautiful, pained face when I went on. “It isn’t my fault you let yourself believe we were something. It isn’t my goddamn fault you don’t know how to keep your feelings and your needs separate.”
“You’re lying. You—” A strangled sob left her. She gripped at her chest, her eyes wild as she seemingly searched for an answer or a way to stop this from happening. But then they were back on me, pleading with me and tearing my soul apart. “Please don’t do this.”
“Goodbye, Maci.”
“Connor,” she cried out when I slipped into my apartment and charged across the living room.
Throwing the can of beer at the wall, I suppressed an agonized roar as I stormed into my bedroom and fought the urge to destroy everything in sight.
Anything to ease this pain.
But then I heard her sobs, and like a masochistic addict, I stumbled over to the wall that connected our bedrooms. For the rest of the night, I stood with my forehead and palms pressed against its surface, listening to her break. And for the first time since I was last beaten at seven years old, I cried.
MACI
“Up, up, up,” Amber yelled as she charged into the room we were sharing at the cabin. “Come on, get up!”
I glanced at her when she jumped onto my bed before focusing on the ceiling again and suppressing a sigh. “I think I’m going to call it for the night. I’m exhausted from traveling up here.”
“Bullshit,” she shot back, quick to call me out. “You’re moping and being all depressed because Connor turned out to be a dick.”
A breath wrenched from me at the sound of his name. Rubbing at my aching chest, I conceded, “Okay, but it’s only been a day. So, let me be upset about this for a while.”
“Nope...no. Not gonna happen. As your best friend, it is my duty to make sure you have an awesome fucking vacation, get laid by some random, hot ski instructor, and get back to being happy because it’s almost Christmas.”
The corner of my mouth twitched into the beginnings of a smile. “Ski instructor? Really now...”
“Yep. Anything to take your mind off that asshole.”
A disbelieving hum sounded in my throat. “I’m good. But you should go for—” The words broke off on a gasp when Amber suddenly grabbed my ankles and began dragging me off the bed. “Holy shit,” I wheezed when my back hit the floor with a hard thud. “You fucking bitch—oh my God!”
“I’m your bitch, and it’s why you love me,” she said with a satisfied smirk. “So, let’s slut it up, hit a few bars, and—”
We both looked toward the bedroom door when one of my brothers yelled my name in a way that had me going still and feeling so, so cold.
“Why do I feel like I’m about to be in trouble?” I whispered when Amber helped me to my feet.
“Maci, get the fuck up here,” one of the boys yelled seconds before someone started hurrying down the stairs.
