“Fine. He’s a horrible bastard. He loves you, wants to marry you, cares about your son and wants to take you both to live in his big, shiny house in a city that has a real mall close enough so you don’t have to stop for lunch halfway there.”
“Go away.” She didn’t want to hear it. “He should have told me he loves me and wants to marry me, not Dean. It made me mad and now he’s gone and I want to feel sorry for myself. If you’re going to be the voice of reason, go home.”
“If I go home, I’m taking the snack cakes with me.”
Lauren looked at the pile on the table. She’d barely put a dent in it. “Fine, you can stay, but you can only refer to him as that jerk.”
“I’ll try.” Hailey picked up the television remote and turned the set on. “Now, we’re going to find something really hideous to watch. I’m going to spend the night and we’re going to eat snack cakes until we puke and feel so tired and shitty tomorrow you don’t even care about that jerk anymore.”
“You’re a true friend, Hailey.”
“Always here for you, babe.”
*
Twenty-four hours, Ryan thought. Twenty-four hours since he’d walked out of Lauren’s life and he still felt like shit.
He should have gone home. He’d still feel like shit, but at least he wouldn’t have a damn audience. But when he got home last night, he’d cracked a beer. Anger, heartbreak and alcohol weren’t the way to start a four-and-a-half-hour drive. And today he’d kept hoping some way to fix things would magically occur to him, or that she’d call.
Nothing. All he had was his chair on the porch, a beer that had gone warm and flat some time ago and a younger brother who’d probably been sicced on him by Rose. He knew she was struggling to give him space, but Rose was Rose. If he’d truly wanted to be left alone, he should have skipped the beer and hit the highway.
“Are you really going to just sit there and stare at the trees all day?” he asked Josh, who was parked in a nearby chair.
“I’m just being here if you need me.”
“Bullshit. Rosie told you to come talk to me and you don’t have the first fucking clue what to say.”
“That, too.”
Ryan sighed and wished he’d downed the beer when he opened it. He’d taken it out of the fridge, but after opening it, decided he didn’t really want it. Now he did. “Tell her I’m fine.”
“Yeah, but you’re not.”
“And none of us have ever fibbed to Rosie. Sure.”
Josh sat up straighter in his chair. “It’s not all about Rosie. I’m your brother, stupid, and you’re hurting. I care and I’m going to sit here until I think of something to say that might help, goddammit.”
After about five minutes, Ryan looked over at him. “Anything yet?”
“Nope.”
They went back to staring down the driveway.
“Everything that pops into my head would only make you feel worse,” Josh said a few minutes later. “But I’m trying.”
“Like what, not that I think it’s possible for me to feel worse.”
“I watched you guys together. Made me a little jealous, to be honest, because it really looked like the real deal.”
“Guess not.”
“I may not be as very, very old and somewhat wise as you, but even I know couples fight. If two people really never fight, then secretly neither of them give a shit enough to bother.”
“Someday, when you grow up and maybe find a girl who likes you, you’ll find out that going to ask a woman to marry you and having her throw you out of her house is different from a fight.”
“She loves you.”
And that was the real kick in the balls. He was pretty sure she did. “Not enough.”
“I get why you talked to Dean first, but I can also see why it pissed her off.”
Ryan shook his head. “She made my place in her life perfectly clear and it’s not as part of her family.”
“Jesus, no wonder Rosie bakes so much. This support shit is hard.”
“Good. Go bake some cookies and leave me alone.”
Before Josh could move—assuming he was going to go inside, rather than stay and annoy him some more—a vehicle pulled into the driveway. Ryan groaned. It was Paige’s car, but as it drew closer, he could see Mitch was driving it. When he’d parked and gotten out, Ryan could tell by the look on his face his older brother knew the whole story.
“Hey,” he said, taking a seat in another porch chair. “Had some free time, so I thought I’d stop by.”
“Where’s Paige? Is she with Lauren?” As shitty as he felt about the whole mess, he really hoped she’d reached out to her friends. He didn’t like to imagine her hurting and upset, alone in the house.
“No. Lauren thought Paige might try to defend you because she’s your sister-in-law and she was in the mood for somebody one hundred percent in her corner. Hailey’s been with her since last night. Didn’t even open the library today, which is going over as well as you can imagine.”
“So she and Hailey are sitting around talking about what an asshole I am.”