Summer with a Brother’s Best Friend (Love Beach Collection)

4. Isaac

4

“Is this seat taken?” a smooth, hypnotic voice asks me as I raise my glass to my lips. Goose bumps race over my body as if she’d touched me.

Because I know the girl that voice belongs to.

The woman, actually.

“It’s yours.”

The seat.

My heart.

My body.

Anything.

I wish I were being dramatic, but as I turn to look at my first and, really, only love, I can’t imagine ever being as happy as I was with her.

“Thanks.” She leans in and kisses my cheek, her hand gripping my forearm as she gets settled on the barstool.

“You look great,” I say without thinking, but it’s true because she always looks so damn good.

We’d been twenty when things had ended, and in the last seven years, she’d gone from the litheness of a beach-going college girl to a sun-kissed woman with curves and legs for days. There was no point in trying to get my hard-on under control. I was guaranteed to be like this for as long as Reece was in Love Beach.

“So do you,” she says, giving me an appreciative look, her gaze dropping to my lap before snapping up to my face, a sweet pink coloring her cheeks. I fight the urge to adjust myself because that one quick perusal has me more worked up than any date I’ve been on since she’s been gone.

The bartender places a beer in front of her, and I shake my head to clear the fog because how did I miss her ordering a drink?

“I like this place. I don’t think I’ve ever really been in here,” Reece says, looking around The Cove Bar and Grill, and I nod slowly because we’d never come here, choosing to spend most of our time at the beach or at the Sandy Sipper.

“Yeah, I just needed a little quiet tonight,” I say, turning toward her, the motion shifting her crossed legs between mine.

It would be so easy to pull her into me—into my lap—and kiss her until I’ve erased all the years we’ve been apart.

“Me too.”

“What happened?” I ask, pulling my head out of my ass and back to the present.

She gives me a wry grin and shrugs one shoulder. “I had dinner with my parents.”

My hand grips my glass harder, and her lips quirk up on one side as she tracks the movement before meeting my gaze and giving me a full smile that completely steals my breath.

“Thanks,” she says softly.

“I didn’t say anything.”

Nodding at the glass, she says, “You didn’t have to.” Taking a sip of her beer, she bobs her head from side to side. “I just thought that they’d be proud of me by now, you know?” I open my mouth to speak, but she gives a humorless laugh. “They aren’t. In seven years, nothing has changed. My brother is still the golden child, and my mother—ever doting on her hometown hero son—said that it was okay he missed dinner tonight because his job isn’t as trivial as mine.”

“Want me to kick his ass?” I offer. Even though he’s not the whole problem, he’ll have to do. She laughs, for real this time, but I’m not kidding. Best friend or not, I won’t let Maddox hurt her, and honestly, he’s being a chickenshit. He needs to stand up to their mother and end this weird rivalry she’s created between them. Regardless of whether Maddox thinks it or not, he’s hurt Reece by not speaking up. It’s not like he can fix things by avoiding her the entire time she’s in Love Beach.

Which isn’t nearly long enough.

“No.” Her fingertips trace over the scars on my hand, and I can feel that simple touch everywhere, my heart now hammering in my chest. “I don’t want you to be in the middle.”

Again.

The word hangs between us unspoken, but we’d all made choices that day, albeit for very different reasons.

Reece chose herself, Maddox chose me, and I—being the peacemaker—chose Maddox by default and lost my heart in the process.

My bar is my life, and it had always been my dream to take it over—make it mine—but there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t feel a twinge of regret too. The dream had turned bittersweet, and there was no salvaging it.

Not anymore.

“I know we talked about it,” I say, swallowing hard and then clearing my throat, “but are you sure you want to work for me?”

Reece frowns, her eyebrows pinching together as she stares at me. “You don’t want me to?”

“What? No, of course I do, I just,”—need to make sure I don’t try and bend you over the bar top—“want to make sure that’s what you want.”

“Yeah.” She looks away quickly and then back at me. “It was one of Maddox’s better ideas especially because it’s only temporary. You won’t have to train me too much, and I can vouch for Vienna.”

The word temporary grates on me, but it’s a necessary reminder that not everyone gets what they want in this scenario.

This summer.

Reece will be here just long enough to give me a taste of the life we could have had, and then she’ll be gone and I’ll…what, kick around Love Beach as a bachelor with Maddox forever?

The thought is terrifying and a little sad.

But what can I really do about it?

Does Reece even want a second chance?

The questions are unending, but one thing is clear—something’s gotta give if I plan on surviving this summer with the one that got away.