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The more Gage reiterated his point with such undeniable confidence, the more Liza wondered how he could be so damn sure.
It was true that Matt had never given any indication he was interested in giving up his bachelor status—no long-term relationships, no broken engagements—so Liza wasn’t sure why she would question Gage’s conviction.
Then she considered that maybe she wasn’t questioning the words so much as she was bothered by them.
Why didn’t Matt want to get married? What the hell had happened to make him so opposed to the institution?
She didn’t know much about Matt and Gage’s parents’ relationship. Actually, she didn’t know a damn thing about it, other than they had both died when their sons were young, in their early twenties. Conor, the youngest brother, might have still been in his teens.
The easy thing would be to blame Matt’s aversion to marriage on his mom and dad, assuming they had a fucked-up relationship.
But then she looked at Gage and Penny and saw the way he’d embraced his marriage to her. If that had been the case, obviously Gage hadn’t taken away the same lesson.
So perhaps he didn’t want to get married for some other reason.
And that was when Liza recalled something at the gala.
She’d caught a glimpse of emotion in Matt’s eyes, something resigned, something lonely. Originally, she had seen it and thought she’d met her kindred spirit because she was no stranger to those emotions.
But when she thought about it now, the only word she could come up with was…
Broken.
Chapter Three
“It sounds like a great deal, Conor. One that will make you a lot of money.” Matt sat with his arm resting along the back of the couch in his brother’s office in Enigma.
His youngest brother, Conor, was sitting in his desk chair, his feet propped up on the surface, crossed at the ankle. He nodded, the edges of his lips curving up in what Matt assumed was supposed to pass for a smile.
Ordinarily, Matt didn’t notice his brother’s expressions, but he’d spent the last hour with Conor, the two of them discussing what was going to be a very lucrative project for his brother, one that Matt could see he was looking forward to, and yet, Conor hadn’t smiled. Not once.
It wasn’t that his brother was miserable. Like Gage, Conor had a good sense of humor and a cutting wit. Matt had been a witness to it over Christmas Eve dinner, his two brothers joking around with each other, teasing in that way only brothers could get away with.
Matt had watched from the sidelines because he hadn’t been included in that bubble of fun. He didn’t think he’d been purposely excluded, rather they probably assumed he wouldn’t join in. After all, he never did. With him, his brothers were all work and no play, those relationship parameters set when Matt had still been in his teens.
He’d been fascinated by their behavior because the playfulness between Conor and Gage was relatively new. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say it was something old that had vanished for nearly a decade only to reappear recently.
For ten years, following the deaths of their parents, Matt and his brothers had retreated to separate bunkers like enemy generals in a standoff. The close relationship they’d shared as young boys was so far in the past, Matt struggled sometimes to convince himself it ever existed. Because when he looked back at those years when they’d been kids, waging epic Nerf gun battles, building countless models out of Legos, and racing up and down the driveway in front of their house on their bikes, he felt as if he was watching his own memories like a TV show, from an outsider’s perspective rather than someone who’d experienced them.
That closeness went away when their parents died.
No. Matt reconsidered that.
It had gone away much earlier than that, the distance between them growing when Matt’s father decided that his oldest son—at thirteen—needed to stop acting like a “fucking kid” and start learning the family business. Being yanked away from his brothers—who’d been his best friends up until then—was hard for Matt, and he’d been resistant initially. But much like the Borg, resistance was futile when it came to Dante Russo. He was determined to bring Matt to heel and, much as it chafed to think about nowadays, Dad had been successful in molding him into the man he wanted Matt to be, a mirror image of himself.
The emotional distance between him and his brothers had remained in place for way too long, despite the fact they’d taken over Russo Enterprises after Dad’s death. All they’d managed to maintain was a professional relationship, sprinkled with what his brothers probably considered “family obligations,” like the holidays, occasional happy hours, and birthday dinners.
However, things between them began to change after Gage fell in love with Penny. His brother had tried hard to deny his feelings for her, Gage’s fear of losing her so strong that he pretended what he felt wasn’t love.
It had killed Matt to see his brother so lost, so sad, so he’d staged an intervention, dragging Conor along.
Matt wondered now if he’d realized where the conversation would lead them that day if he would have initiated it at all. Because it became clear Gage’s resistance to Penny had everything to do with their mother’s suicide.
For the first time ever, they’d opened that door, talked about her, about their grief, and it had helped Gage, helped his brother face his fears and admit he was in love with Penny.
In the past year, Matt had watched as the brother he hadn’t even realized he’d lost re-emerged.
The same couldn’t be said for Matt.
