“Did they find them?”
He shook his head and turned to face me. “Nah, they got away with it. The hospital did a rape kit on Sam but neither of them could really give much detail about what the attackers looked like. It was really dark out there, so there wasn’t much to go on.”
“I am so, so sorry.” I got up and went to him, wrapping my arms around his waist. “I had no idea. Those poor girls.”
“Yeah. If I would’ve just answered the damn phone, that wouldn’t have happened. It’s my fault.”
The pain in his voice, all of the emotions I had seen in his eyes earlier now breaking through in his tone, about broke me. I had no idea he was carrying around so much pain, so much guilt. My beautiful, in control, as-sweet-as-he-was-sexy guy was nearly as broken as I was.
“The hell it is,” I said, refusing to allow him to blame himself. He brushed my hair back and held me tight against him. “It was not your fault. How can you blame yourself?”
He snorted but didn’t say a word, just held me close for a long time. I finally pulled my head back and looked him in the eye.
“It wasn’t your fault. There’s no way you could have known what was going to happen.”
The sparkle in his eyes was gone, the greens cloudy, murky, dull. I’d never seen him like that and it shook me to the core. I wanted to erase his pain, to make him smile. To figure out how to show him the truth.
He smiled sadly. “I shouldn’t have been a dick and should’ve answered the phone. After the weekend before, I should have—”
“They weren’t your children, Max! It was your little sister and her friend, not your responsibility! And I can see why you were annoyed with them, especially after the weekend before. Cut yourself some slack.”
“I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
My mind swam with ways to convince him it wasn’t his fault. “What happened was a tragedy, but who knows if you would’ve been there in time anyway?”
“Easy for you to say,” he mumbled. “You didn’t sit in the waiting room, watching your mom cry her eyes out. Watching your dad try to keep his shit together, knowing what could’ve happened to his daughter. You didn’t see the looks in Bri and Sam’s eyes when I went back into their rooms for the first time.”
His jaw clenched as he worked it back and forth. “You don’t know what it felt like to think I was throwing back beers without a care in the world while my little sister needed me, really needed me, and I was chasing tail with Cane. What does that make me, Kar?”
“It makes you a human being that was in a bad situation. It makes you a man whose little sister and her friend made a bad decision. It. Wasn’t. Your. Fault.”
He spun around to face me, looking at me like I didn’t get it, a look of disbelief written across his face.
“Max, listen to me. You can’t blame yourself for this.”
He watched me for a minute, his jaw pulsing. “That night messed up so much. You had the physical stuff—the bruises and . . . stuff.” He swallowed roughly. “And Mom and Dad went crazy, into total over-protection mode. Brielle went wild, got into some trouble. I just sat back and watched my whole family start to crash and . . .” He hung his head.
I reached out and grabbed his arm. “What happened was awful, but everyone seems to be okay now, right?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Bri got through dental school and seems alright. But Sam . . . She doesn’t have anyone to help her. Her mom is pretty much non-existent. Sam says she’s not around much and I know she doesn’t help her. I just feel like I should. Do ya know what I mean?”
The vacant look in his eye began to float away, hope filtering its way in. “If it’s gonna bother you, I get it and I won’t bring it up again. But I’d like to do this for her.”
I understood why it meant so much to Max, why he was always going out of his way to help Sam. The thing that had annoyed me was really his way of trying to make up what he deemed to be his failure towards her.
Even after hearing all of that, I still didn’t trust Samantha. But, I trusted him. And he needed this. “If you want to hire her, go for it, babe.”
A small smile spread across his lips. “I appreciate this.” He squeezed me again before letting me go.
“Yeah, well, just make sure she keeps that red lipstick off of you and everything will be fine,” I joked, trying to get some levity back in the conversation.
Max laughed. “No worries there. Now get ready for some exercise.”
KARI
The turn-off for Pinnacle Peak flew by an hour later and I gave Max a look. “Um, you missed your exit.”
“Nah,” was all he said, humming along to Tim McGraw on the radio. He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel and seemed lost in his own thoughts, effectively ignoring me for the most part.