Chapter Three
Gray
The glares Griff and Jamie are throwing at each other are borderline cage-match prefight level. Much like when the opponents get up on the stage to mean-mug each other, tossing insults and fake fisticuffs each other’s way. If I don’t step in now, I don’t know what will happen next.
In the year I’ve known Griff, he’s been a calm and collected guy. I’ve never seen him lose his cool, but five minutes with Jamie Elaine Sanderson and his head looks ready to explode.
Now, Jamie, on the other hand, has the temper of a rattlesnake. She may be my little sister, but she’s never been a weak or timid kind of girl. Growing up, she’d always been my warrior, my protector, the one who stood up for me when the bullies on the playground started to circle around the scrawny, short kid. Jamie is eleven months younger than me. We’re Irish twins, me born in January and her in December, so we had always been tight.
That closeness ended in a flash thirteen months ago, when shit hit the fan and my life fell apart. I never saw the betrayal coming. But now that the waves have settled back down for me and I’ve finally built a life here for myself, having her here in Kettle Valley, Wisconsin, reminds me why I left everyone I loved, and who I thought loved me, behind. This bullshit isn’t worth it.
“Guys.” They continue to glare at each other like neither of them hear me. I stand up and set a hand on both their arms. “Stop. Please.” They both turn their heads toward me, but it’s only one pair of eyes I lock on to . . . Griff’s.
In the year since I moved here, other than a handshake on the day I was hired at his company, I’ve never touched him. We may work in the same office, talk every day, and be on the same job sites, but we’ve never been closer than a foot from one another. We’ve been in close proximity to each other, it’s hard not to be when your offices share a common wall, but the reason I avoid touching him is exactly what’s happening to me right now. The skin where my hand is touching his forearm—his strong yet soft, warm, muscular forearm—is on fire. The tingles racing up my fingers, through my palm, and up my own arm, I felt that same feeling the day I accepted the job. Along with that tingle came the rush that made me keep my distance. One touch is all it took to know he could make me fall, and I couldn’t let that happen. My heart was already cracked, and I couldn’t let him in without risking the new start I was hoping to build for myself.
Needing a fresh start away from my treacherous family, I packed my life in my SUV and headed north. I spent a week camped out in a hotel in the Wisconsin Dells, scouring job sites, looking for anything that would get me away from Chicago. I applied for the lead architect position at Millner Log Homes on a Thursday, got an email response on Friday, and had an interview lined up for the following Monday. The universe had finally been working in my favor. It was the first ‘adult’ thing I’d done completely on my own in the twenty-nine years I’d been on this spinning rock.
Where I went to college? Picked by my parents, who were both alumni.
My first apartment? The building was owned by my older brother.
My first job out of college? The architecture firm was owned by my fiancé’s father.
But this, this fresh start, this move I made after I found my sister in bed with my fiancé—my supposedly gay fiancé, who I was in the middle of planning a wedding with—it threw my whole world into a tailspin. I needed out. I needed something that was just mine. I needed . . . well, I needed more. And that led me here, to a new state, a new town, new friends, a new job, and new boss. Speaking of which . . .
I snap out of my inner-pity party and realize what got my attention. My hand on Griff’s right forearm is now being covered by his left hand. He’s touching me, and the fiery tingles are even more powerful than that first handshake.
“Gray, hun, are you okay? What’s wrong?” He genuinely looks concerned. The twin lines between his eyebrows are deep and furrowed. His deep ocean blue eyes are squinted but one hundred percent focused on me. “Where’d you go just now?”
“I’m okay,” I respond, shaking the cobwebs of the past off my present. Taking a risk, I slide my hand down Griff’s arm and take hold of his hand. He immediately flips his wrist and intertwines our fingers together, squeezing my hand tight.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Yup,” I reply with a strong nod before turning to Jamie. “I was trying to be nice, God knows why, and would’ve given you a place to sleep before kicking you to the curb in the morning, but after this bullshit, I’m done. You need to go . . . now.”
“But where am I supposed to go?” She looks lost, and by all definition, she is. Jamie couldn’t find her way around a grocery store without a map, so being alone in a small town, one with no major hotel chain or a yellow taxi to flag down to get to one, she’s shit out of luck. She burned my last bridge, and I want her gone.
“Why don’t you call Julian and ask him for a ride? Last time I saw you, it looked like he was your favorite new pony.” I grab my phone, take a couple steps to the right, and pull a still very angry Griff along with me.
“I’m only forty-two, by the way,” Griff shouts over his shoulder at Jamie before mumbling to himself. “No way in hell do I look sixty.”
Taking one last look at my sister, I toss one last parting jab her way. “What happens to you is no longer my problem.” And out the front door we go.
As soon as the door closes behind us, I take in one deep breath and push all the bullshit of my past out as I exhale.
And that’s when I hear his laugh.