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I still saw her name printed on that sticker wrapped around the stainless medical equipment.
“She was warm, loving. She loved Tobias hard and he loved her back just as hard.”
Did I hear an echo of sorrow? Like he wasn’t jealous of that love, but had still been left wanting.
“How did she love you?”
His smile was instant. “That was easy. She taught me to be independent. Sky diving, motocross racing, she even took me to get the shit beaten out of me learning MMA fighting.”
“Sounds gruesome.”
His grin grew wider. “I loved every second of it. More importantly, she taught me about cryptocurrency and how to be a trader.”
“Oh, that’s what that was…the stock exchange I saw you working on yesterday.”
He nodded. “Yeah, sold a heap, bought a heap more. She taught me what to look out for, a small company with solid groundwork and the ability to expand within their means. That’s what I do, I buy and trade.”
So that’s why he didn’t have a job to go to.
“Mom taught me that, all those hours sitting in board meetings and listening to her as she broke companies down and rebuilt them better from the ground up.”
I flinched and jerked my gaze to his. “Board meetings? But I thought…”
He met my gaze and scowled. “You thought what? You thought dad was the one with the money? That he was the one everyone looked up to?”
But all those cards, addressed to Creed. I’d just assumed he was the driving force in their family…it seemed I’d assumed wrong.
“Mom said they met at Harvard and that for her it was love at first sight. Dad, however, took a little convincing. But she’d never met a challenge she didn’t give her all to, so eventually they started dating and became engaged. When she graduated, she graduated with honors. It didn’t take her long to get snatched up by some big corporation, which she stayed with for a while, until she became pregnant with Caleb and went out on her own.”
“She sounds impressive,” I said in awe.
“She was…still is.”
I glanced toward the road. “No wonder Tobias hates us.”
“T is just T. He took her death hard, harder than the rest of us. Don’t take it personally.”
I shot him a look filled with daggers. It was easy for him to say. It wasn’thisbody his brother had violated under the table as our parents announced their engagement. An engagement that was coming to an end…and soon.
What then…
What happens after the wedding, when there was no way I could avoid Tobias, or Nick for that matter? I glanced across the seat to his black jeans and his thick boots and the silver rings he wore on his fingers, then to the hard muscles under his shirt. Muscles I knew he honed daily in the gym on the first floor of the house. I’d seen him come back, striding up the stairs to head to the bathroom, his shirt soaked and stuck to his skin.
Tobias I hadn’t seen. He preferred to leave, tearing out of the driveway early in the morning, to come home hours later and, when he was really pissed, strapped on his sneakers and headed out running. Caleb, too, although he left at night. Every time I tried to catch glances at him from the doorway of my bedroom, I wasn’t fast enough. No, Caleb liked the night, coming home at the first break of day.
I heard him, heard his light steps in the stairwell, heard when he lingered in the hall outside my door and finally left. I heard all of that lying in bed with my breath trapped in my chest and my pulse throbbing between my thighs.
I clenched my knees together and watched the landscape change as we left the city behind and headed for Mitchelton. It wasn’t too far out of the city, but far enough for me to watch Nick as he drove with expert skill. The longer I watched him, the more I saw.
I saw the years of sheer adrenaline recklessness, saw the way he drove hard and fast, how he didn’t give a fuck what anyone else thought of him. I remembered how he'd pounced on me, hauling me over his shoulder the moment I'd stepped outside of school.
As though he read my mind, he muttered. “Still pissed at me for yesterday?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “I am, actually.”
He smiled. “Good. I liked you with a little bite.”
I lashed out, slapping his shoulder. “I’ll give you a bite.”
