She brightens with a fake smile and moves her focus over my shoulder. “Oh, good. Rob, you’re here.”
Rhett stiffens behind me, and I freeze, refusing to turn around. In this moment, I realize that I’ve fucked up. Everything with Rhett moved too quickly, a blur of orgasms and lingering looks. I forgot about the world around us.
The world around me. And this is definitely something I should have told Rhett before walking into the hospital with him today.
When Rob Valentine strides into view, coiffed hair and collared shirt under some preppy sweater, I wonder what attracted me to him at all. Next to Rhett, he’s just so . . . underwhelming.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” Rhett growls.
Winter’s eyes widen and she rears back. “He is my husband. The question is, what are you doing here?”
“Hi, sweetheart.” Rob pecks Winter on the cheek, obviously unaffected by her rude comment.
Now Rhett is stepping up, pushing an arm in front of me and guiding me behind him, using his body as a shield for me.
“Is this some sort of sick joke?” From behind Rhett’s hulking frame, I see him turn his gaze on Rob, so slowly that it’s almost eerie. A predator sizing up his prey.
I squeeze at his arm. “Can we please walk away now? I need to speak to you in private.” My heart is pounding so hard that I can feel my chest vibrating. I’m always aware of my heart now. The change in rhythm, in intensity—I’ll never not think about it.
And right now, it’s pumping harder than I think it ever has. Because my deepest, darkest secret is dangerously close to seeing the light of day.
“No jokes here, fella.” The way Rob says it is almost like he’d talk to a dog. And Rhett doesn’t miss the insult. He strikes straight out.
“Preying on your teenaged patient wasn’t bad enough? You had to turn around and marry her older sister?”
My stomach lurches into my throat. Fear immobilizes me, freezing me in place.
Everything feels like it’s moving in slow motion. I’m grabbing at Rhett, feeling him moving forward. Kip’s hospital room door is opening.
“Rhett, stop!” He doesn’t hear me. I’m panicking now. This isn’t how any of this was ever supposed to come out. “Rhett.” I shake his arm. “Please stop.”
“What?” Winter’s skin is about the color of her hair. Her face is pale and drawn.
“Ignore the hillbilly, Winter. This is how people like him have fun. Let’s go.” He tries to pull his unmoving wife along with him.
Rob is so smug, so sure of himself, that he doesn’t even see it coming. Men like Rhett aren’t a factor in his reality. Polite and restrained by social correctness when someone they care about has been hurt. It’s all instinct and feeling.
Rhett’s no hillbilly, he’s more like a lion. And Rob is fucking with his pride.
It’s why he doesn’t hear me begging him to stop.
Rhett pushes his shoulders back. “Well, I’m sure glad that people like me don’t get their kicks by breaking professional codes and spending years coercing young women into being a dirty little secret to save their own fucked up hide. People like me say what we mean.” With a dark smile, he raises a finger and points right at Rob’s face. “And you, fella, are the shit stuck to my boot.”
My sister’s mouth is slack. I can see thoughts rushing through her eyes. Everyone is watching. Their gazes itch on my skin, and I wish I could turn and run. Take Rhett with me and hide.
But I can’t. Because Rob makes the stupidest decision he could make in this moment.
He rounds on me, eyes narrowed viciously, his voice pure venom. “You were supposed to keep your mouth shut.”
It’s a shitty thing to say to me, but I don’t care much about Rob. It’s my sister I can’t peel my eyes from. She doesn’t deserve this.
Rhett’s arm shoots out in front of me again, and when his voice comes out, I hardly recognize it. It’s so cold that a chill runs down my spine. “Talk to her like that again and I’ll fucking bury you. And trust me, you won’t be missed.”
Rob waves a dismissive hand at him. “Down boy.”
That’s the wrong thing to say, because before I have a chance to beg Rhett to back down, he’s pulled his arm back and is delivering a blow to Rob’s shitty smug face.
“Rhett!” I shout right as blood spurts from Rob’s nose, and the hospital around us buzzes to life. Nurses rush in, Rob bellows something about suing, and Winter stares at her husband like she’s never seen him before. I feel the crack in my chest for her. She looks young. She looks lost.
I wish I could hug her.
As strained as our relationship is, she’s still my big sister. And I’ll never stop wishing for more with her.
My hands cover my mouth as I take in the scene before me, and when I turn to the right, I see my dad’s open door, him sitting in his bed with pale skin and a grim expression on his face.
I press at my temples as I look up into Rhett’s warm eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says as if he’s just realizing the surrounding mayhem. “Fuck. I’m so sorry, Summer. I just . . . fuck. No one talks to you like that. No one. Not ever.”
With a fat wad of gauze pressed to his nose, Rob butts in. “I’m going to take you for all you’re worth.”
I turn, holding a hand up, my patience fried. “Rob, fuck off. Go get your nose fixed and keep it where it belongs. Which is not in my business. You go after Rhett, and I’ll start talking. So just shut up, okay?”
He shakes his head at me, like he can’t believe the polite, pliant girl he’s been stringing along for years just said that to him. And it’s Winter who pulls him away. It’s Winter who won’t meet my eyes.
I turn my back on him, facing Rhett. “You need to leave.”
“What?” He looks genuinely confused.
“Seriously, Rhett?” I whisper-shout. “This is a fucking mess. My dad is in the hospital, and you just dropped my biggest, most complicated secret in a very, very spectacular fashion. You need to leave. I’ll talk to you later. I don’t need you here doing the whole possessive thing right now.”
Rhett blinks, a bit of color emerging under his stubble. After a deep sigh, he finally says, “Okay, fine.” He steps in close, tipping my chin up, thumb taking one swipe just beneath my lower lip. “But I want to make one thing clear. I am not possessive. I am protective. And I’ll never stop protecting you. I’d hit that fucker again in a heartbeat if it meant keeping him from talking to you that way.”
I nod, a little overwhelmed by what he’s just said, but too frazzled to do anything more. “Okay,” is all I respond with.
I’m too flustered to work out my thoughts and feelings in this moment, and I fear what I’ll find there. All I know is that I need to go be with my dad and clear my head.
Rhett leans in and presses a kiss to my forehead, the stubble rasping against my skin making my hair stand on end. He spins on his heel and strides out through the swinging doors. All the eyes in the room follow him.
Mine included.
28
Summer
Rhett: I am so fucking sorry.
“If I hadn’t already had a heart attack today, that might have given me one.”
I tip my head back against the back of the uncomfortable armchair angled in the corner of my dad’s room and let my eyes flutter shut. “That isn’t funny.”
“Are heart problems contagious? Because I think you infected me.”
I shake my head, lips quirking up at the corners. He’s never let me live down asking that when I was young. I was worried about him getting too close or spending too much time around me, just in case my congenital heart defect was somehow contagious. “Still not funny.”
“Do you think Rob’s nose is broken?”
I sigh heavily. “I don’t know. I’m not the doctor in this family.”
“Does hoping it is make me a dick?”
I bark out a sad laugh now. Kip and I have this father-daughter relationship that borders on a friendship, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. “You were already a dick.”
“Yeah. That’s true,” he muses from the bed beside me. I peek an eye open at him. His dark hair is a little more mussed than usual, possibly even sporting a few more silver streaks than I remember. My dad looks . . . older. In a way I hadn’t noticed until recently. I guess that happens when you creep up on your sixties.
But his mortality strikes me hard right now, laid up in a hospital bed, not looking like the suit wearing, tongue-wagging, shit disturber in a glossy office that he usually does.
My eyes sting as I study him. I roll my lips together to keep them from wobbling, to keep the shaky breaths inside.
When he looks over at me, I clamp my eyes shut. Squeezing them tight and willing away the tears building behind my lids.