The Family You Make (Sunrise Cove #1)

She sucked in a breath. She was never going to get used to that.

Levi gave her a small, tight smile. “But clearly you haven’t gotten there yet.”

“I haven’t let myself go there,” she corrected. Paused. “I do know you’re important to me, Levi. Very important.”

“As important as your job? As important as your love of going far and wide without any tether longer than the length of your next contract?”

“Work doesn’t factor into this.”

“The hell it doesn’t. Work gives you an excuse to leave.”

For a heart-stopping moment, she was eight years old again, too much trouble to keep, to fight for, to want. She’d fixed that, though, by always leaving first. “That’s not fair.”

“No? You’re the one who, in the same sentence about your grandpa’s cancer, also talked about leaving Tahoe. How convenient for you to have a built-in escape route. But things change, Jane, and you could change with them. Because no one’s asking you to leave this time. You don’t have to take another contract. You could stay here and enjoy the time you have left with your grandpa.”

She stared at him, trying to fight the rising panic she couldn’t explain. Maybe because he made it all sound so simple when it was anything but. Wasn’t it? “I’ve never lied to you. You’ve always known I was going to leave.”

He looked . . . disappointed. Hurt. “You’re running away again, this time from people who really care about you, because you’re too afraid of getting hurt to even try and build a real relationship.”

Is that what she was doing? Finding reasons to take off before she could be asked to leave? Holy shit. Abruptly, she sat down on the couch, ashamed and furious with herself. She didn’t know how to respond.

Levi sat on the coffee table facing her.

Still not touching her . . .

The silence stretched where she didn’t say anything, could hardly even think over the blood pounding in her ears and the panic squeezing her throat. Panic, because this was it. She was going to lose her grandpa and Levi in one fell swoop because of the ever-present desperate need to run from anything that made her feel too much.

“Jane, what do you want me to do here?”

“I want you to do whatever you want,” she said dully.

He nodded and stood. “All right.” He was clearly waiting for her to do something. Walk out, she realized, so she stood too, and without another word, did just that, without looking back. That was the trick, she reminded herself. Never look back.

But for the first time, she wanted to.





Chapter 28


Levi heard the front door shut and felt it reverberate in his gut. Well, you screwed that up pretty good, didn’t you.

He ran his hands through his hair and then asked himself why he wasn’t going after the best thing to ever happen to him. To hell with that, and he strode down the stairs and to the front door.

Jane’s car was gone.

Okay, so onto the gut-wrenching portion of the evening, apparently. He turned in a slow circle in the living room, wondering how in the world he was such an idiot when it came to women. And why had he ever made that stupid promise to not fall for her? He stopped when he realized the double doors leading to the kitchen were closed.

They were never closed.

He pushed them open and his entire family leapt away from the doors, trying to look busy. His mom was suddenly doing dishes, his dad reading his newspaper—upside down, which wasn’t a dead giveaway at all—and his sister was searching through a drawer looking for . . . he had no idea. He doubted she knew either. Only his niece was left standing suspiciously close to the wall next to the kitchen door.

The eavesdropping wall.

She gave him a guileless smile. “Hi! We had our ears to the wall listening to you and Jane upstairs. Grandma was using a glass cuz she said it carries sound better.”

Levi cut his eyes to his mom, who had the good grace to grimace. “Kids,” she said. “They say the darnedest things.”

“Why is Jane mad at you?” Peyton asked him. “Did you do something bad? Cuz you gotta ’pologize when you do something bad.”

Ignoring the three guilty-looking adults in the room, Levi crouched before Peyton. “First, never change, okay?” He tugged her ponytail. “You’re perfect. And second, sometimes adults disagree, and that’s okay.” He rose to his feet and shook his head at the rest of his family. “You couldn’t give me ten minutes of privacy?”

His dad snorted. “Son, you blew that whole thing up in under five.”

Tess nodded her agreement. “I don’t even think one of your PowerPoints could have saved you.”

“I’ve got this,” he said with a certainty he didn’t feel.

Tess looked at her parents. “Please note that, in fact, he does not ‘got this.’”

Levi shook his head and turned to his mom. “And you? The leader of the pack, the nosy instigator, you don’t have a smartass comment for me too?”

“Ask is a bad word,” Peyton said.

“Peyton’s right,” his mom said, nose in the air. “And anyway, the answer is no. I don’t have any comment for you because I’m not talking to you. You felt the need to make up a girlfriend. And then lied to me about it.”

Levi tossed up his hands and walked out of the kitchen, no particular destination in mind as he was already in hell. And oh, goody, Mateo was walking in the front door. The guy took one look at Levi and his smile faded. “What happened?”

“He just destroyed his relationship with Jane,” his mom said over Levi’s shoulder, having followed him from the kitchen.

“Not quite true,” Tess said, coming in behind his mom. “Jane dumped him.”

“Actually, what Jane said was that he could do whatever he wanted,” his mom said.

Mateo shook his head. “Ah, man, when a woman says that, you do not do whatever you want. You stand still. You don’t blink, you don’t even breathe, you just play dead.”

“Awesome,” Levi said. “That was super helpful, thanks.”

His mom looked at Mateo. “Can you tell your best friend he’s an idiot?”

“I think he already knows,” Mateo said.