He flies off the couch and steps away, squeezing the back of his neck with both hands before spinning back to face me. “Like where you were last night? Like why you weren’t in our bed at five a.m., and who you were with? That secret?”
“I was at Jake’s. You know, the place you told me you were spending your night?” Folding my arms, I meet his steely gaze. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Why the fuck were you . . .” He drops his arms to his sides, and his red-rimmed eyes go wide. “Were you with Levi?”
The heartache in his expression makes my stomach drop through the floor. I want to be a robot again. Programmed, mechanical, going through the motions. But I’m falling apart. One piece at a time. I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around them, trying to hold my broken pieces together. “Tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine,” I whisper, barely able to speak the words around the lump in my throat.
“You want me to leave? I’ll leave. I can’t do this right now anyway.”
“Do what?”
“I can’t deal with your drama, Ellie. Your need for constant attention.”
Betrayal and anger slice through me. I cling to the anger. “Constant attention? Are you kidding me? You’ve barely acknowledged my existence lately.”
He scans the bags with his belongings and shakes his head. “I’ll be back for my shit later.” He doesn’t even look at me before he stomps away and slams the door behind him.
I coil myself into a tighter ball, trying so hard to hold on, to keep it together. But it’s useless. Like squeezing a fistful of sand and watching it slide out between your fingers and fly away on the wind.
Levi
“What’s going on?” Shay asks, her voice sharp.
I blink up at her from my coffee and cover a yawn.
“That’s, like, the twentieth time you’ve yawned in the last ten minutes. What kept you up so late?”
On the other side of the kitchen peninsula, my oldest brother, Brayden, grunts. “Questions that have X-rated answers for two hundred, Alex?”
Ethan chuckles, then adds, “No, more like questions that shouldn’t be asked in front of my six-year-old daughter.”
Lilly props her hands on her hips and lifts her chin. “I’m almost seven!”
Shay rolls her eyes. “You two shut up,” she says, pointing at Brayden and Ethan. “This is different.” She turns back to me. “Am I wrong? Is this all because you’re tired from some wild night out?”
“Hardly. I closed the bar for Jake so he could go home with his beautiful fiancée.” I wink at Ava, who’s standing with Jake on the other side of the kitchen. “Pretty obvious who got the better side of that deal.”
Ava blushes prettily. She’s been an honorary Jackson for most of our lives, so she’s used to me teasing her, but she still embarrasses easily when it comes to talk of her and Jake. In a way, they’ve been a couple forever—best friends since they were kids and never apart for long—but in another way, they’re brand new. They can’t keep their hands off each other.
Jake wraps his arm around his fiancée’s shoulders and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Can’t argue with you there.”
Shay looks at her watch. “Okay, so you closed down the bar and then didn’t bother sleeping in the subsequent eight hours?”
“Shay’s on the case, Levi,” Carter says. “Better spill your secrets.”
“I crashed at Jake’s place,” I tell her. “Just didn’t sleep well.”
“Did I see Ellie leaving the bar this morning?” Brayden asks, piling eggs onto his plate. “What was she doing there so early?”
Every pair of eyes turns to me now, except for Lilly’s—she’s too enamored with the ooey-gooey cinnamon roll on her plate to bother digging for Uncle Levi’s secrets. I know it’s going to look all kinds of bad if I deny the truth, so I shrug. “Ellie needed a place to crash, so she stayed at Jake’s.”
“With you,” Carter says.
Shay’s eyes go wide, and she holds up a hand. “I was wrong. It is that kind of tired. Okay, okay, no more details needed.”
Brayden’s oblivious, but Jake studies me carefully. “Ellie needed a place to crash?” He looks at Ava, who bites her bottom lip. Who knows what they’re secretly communicating? But I don’t really care.
“She woke up in the middle of the night, and Colton wasn’t home.” I shrug, making light of it. “She went out looking for him. She was upset.”
Ava perks up at the mention of her brother’s name. “What’d he do this time? Christ, that boy needs a keeper.”
“Not your circus, not your monkey,” Jake gently reminds her.
I set my jaw. I should keep my mouth shut, but I don’t fucking care. I’m so pissed at Colton for doing this to her. “She found him with Molly. It screwed her up.”
Shay frowns. “So what? They’re close.”
“In Molly’s hotel room,” I add. “After two a.m.”
All eyes go to Brayden, who’s stiffened at the mention of Molly’s name.
We all like Molly. She’s been a great asset to the family business. We’re going to open a tasting room and banquet facility in Jackson Harbor, and she’s moving home for the first time in years to run it for us. We know she’ll make it a success. We all like Molly and appreciate what she does for our business.
But Brayden’s appreciation for Colton’s stepsister extends beyond the realm of the professional and into the realm of unrequited infatuation. One night in New York, they drank too much, and one thing led to another. The night did something to Brayden.
“Did you see them together?” Brayden asks, keeping his eyes on his plate.
“No, but I believe Ellie. She’s not one to fabricate shit like that.”
“It’s not what she thinks,” Ava says.
I arch a brow. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Did you miss the after two a.m. part?” Shay asks.
“Or the in her hotel room part?” Carter mutters.
“Ava,” Shay says, “you’re sweet to assume the best, but your brother is no saint.”
Ava looks at Jake again, and he shakes his head. They hold each other’s gaze for a long time, having some sort of silent argument before he closes his eyes and shrugs in defeat. She turns to me. “We should talk, Levi. Go outside with me for a minute?”
“Sure.”
She takes my arm and drags me out. It’s scorching today. It’s barely past ten and the sun is blazing. The air is thick with humidity, and I immediately miss the sweet chill of the air conditioning. “Don’t jump to conclusions,” Ava says.
“What does it matter what conclusions I jump to? I’m not part of their relationship.”
She shakes her head. “I can just see you and Colton going at each other over this, but you don’t have the full story.”
“Of course I don’t, Ava. Nobody has the full story. That’s the way shit like this works. But the fact of the matter is he was with Molly last night. When Ellie texted to ask where he was, he said he was crashing at Jake’s.”
She winces. “I know the lying is a problem,” she says softly. “You know Colton’s never been a fan of the truth if a lie was easier.”
“And it’s an even bigger problem in the context of Ellie seeing Molly in Colton’s arms.”
“Were they making out or just hugging?”
I throw up my hands. “What the fuck do I know? Does it really matter?”
“Yes, it matters. Molly has a kid, you know.”
“I’m well aware of that.” That little bomb was dropped a few months back when Molly started working for our company and enrolled her son, Noah, into our health insurance plan. The fact that she was a single mother wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that prior to that she’d kept her son a secret from everyone in this town. Including her stepsiblings.
“Have you seen him?”
“Colton?”
“No.” She smacks my arm, as if I’m being deliberately obtuse. “Have you seen Molly’s son?”
I frown. I’m not sure I like where she’s going with this. “I haven’t.”