Chapter 38 Bram
brAM
I was nervous as fuck. More nervous than I’d ever been in my life.
I tried to tell myself I was being stupid while I opened the door to the Hummer for Maeve, but the inner pep talk did nothing to ease the tightness in my chest.
The truth was, I had every reason to be nervous.
I’d fucked it with Maeve — hard and more than once — and there was no guarantee she’d ever forgive me.
In fact, if some asshole had treated Cassie the way I’d treated Maeve, I would have ordered her never to forgive him, then cut off the guy’s balls, stuffed them in his mouth, and buried him on the mountain just to be safe.
But here I was, wanting Maeve to forgive me more than I’d ever wanted anything, except maybe that night in the kitchen when I’d thought I might stop breathing if I didn’t fuck her.
She lifted her legs into the Hummer, giving me a flash of her milky thighs under her coat, and my dick turned hard as granite. Remy wasn’t the only one who wanted to tear the silver dress from her body.
But that would be a mistake, one that would doom me with Maeve for good.
Plus, I wasn’t sure my balls could take another one of her knees.
I walked around to the driver’s side and forced myself to breathe.
She didn’t say a word on the way up the mountain, which would have been fine except for the fact that the tension between us was thick enough to need a butcher knife.
No pun intended.
I was pretty sure it wasn’t just I-hate-you tension, but also I-want-to-rail-you-so-bad-it-hurts tension, but maybe that was just me.
She didn’t ask where we were going, but when we pulled up the long drive to the Mountaintop Inn she sat up a little straighter. “Is this the Mountaintop?”
I nodded.
“I’ve never been here,” she said.
“Me neither.” Fine dining wasn’t really my thing. “I hope it’s good.”
“The current chef studied at the CAA in Switzerland. I’m sure it’s amazing.”
She sounded excited and that made me excited too, which was as strange a feeling as everything else roiling my gut.
Excited wasn’t really my thing either.
The valet took the Hummer and we started up the walkway, past a series of lanterns flickering with candlelight, and into a candlelit foyer.
The building was an old stone mansion on the historic register. A polished stone banister led to rooms on the second and third floors and I tried not to think about how easy it would be to take Maeve upstairs, peel off the silver dress, claim her body for my own.
I’d already made the mistake of putting my hunger for her before everything else. She deserved better, and I reminded myself not to fuck up again.
Like the rest of the place, the room was candlelit and decorated for Christmas, two large trees sparkling with white lights in the corners of the room. The lights reflected off the windows, making it seem like the whole place was draped in stars.
We were seated at a table near a wall of windows overlooking the gardens. They were on the wane with the coming winter, but there was something eerily pretty about it anyway.
Maeve looked around the room. “Everything looks so beautiful. I keep forgetting it’s almost Christmas.”
“Me too,” I said, although the truth was I never really thought much about the holidays.
Remy usually went home, Poe spent it with his grandparents, and I usually stopped at Cassie’s to exchange gifts and have lunch or dinner, depending on whether or not she was at her best friend Daisy’s big old house at the top of Blackwell Falls’ namesake waterfall.
We looked over the menu and I asked Maeve for suggestions, since she was the resident food expert. She seemed genuinely excited to try the food and a warm flush of pleasure rolled through me at the thought that I’d done something to make her happy, even this small thing.
I ordered a bottle of wine with the food, not because I was into wine but because it seemed like the civilized thing to do. The server returned with the bottle and filled our glasses, and I waited for him to leave to raise mine in a toast.
Maeve raised hers too, and I couldn’t say I blamed her for the worry on her face. I wouldn’t trust me to make a good toast either.
“To pissed-off girls with swift reflexes.”
Laughter transformed her face and my heart did this weird thing where it kind of skipped in my chest. I’d seen her laugh with Poe and Remy, but never with me.
“To the men who take their medicine on the chin,” she said.
We clinked glasses and all my gentlemanly intentions went out the window as I watched her drink from the red wine in her glass. I’d seen those lips wrapped around Remy’s dick, had watched Poe’s tongue dip between them to taste her mouth.
Now I wanted to lick the wine from her lips myself. Taste her for myself.
I cursed myself for not kissing her when I’d had the chance.
“You really do look beautiful.” I said it because it was true, and because when Cassie had given me advice about the date with Maeve — if that was what I wanted to call it, and I did because it was less embarrassing than calling it an apology tour — she’d told me to stop thinking so hard, to just tell Maeve how I really felt, what I was really thinking.
Of course, Cassie didn’t know that at least half the time what I was really thinking when it came to Maeve was that I wanted to fuck her until she screamed because Cassie was my sister and that would be weird.
So I was trying to focus on the other half of the time, when I thought about how pretty Maeve was and shit.
She smiled. “Thanks. And thanks for the clothes, although I really didn’t need three dresses, two pairs of shoes, and two bags.”
“My little sister said it would be presumptuous to assume to know what you’d like.”
“You have a little sister?”
“Why do you sound so surprised?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I guess I just never considered it.”
“Fair. I guess I don’t talk about her much.”
“How come?” Maeve asked.
I thought about it. “I’ve gotten used to keeping Cassie from the rest of my life for her own protection.”
“Wait…” Maeve’s forehead crinkled. “Is… is your sister Cassie from Cassie’s Cuppa?”
I nodded. “I thought you knew.”
“I went to private school. You probably already know that from the background check you did on me.” I was relieved there was no bitterness in her voice. The background had been necessary.
I nodded.
“I didn’t realize how out of touch it made me until recently. Like I didn’t even really understand the scope of the missing girls around town, not because I didn’t care but because I was kind of insulated without even realizing it. Does your sister have red hair?”
“Yeah, got it from my mom. I got my dad’s dark hair. Why?”
She looked at her lap and smiled, then shook her head.
“What?”
“I thought Cassie was someone you were dating,” she said. “When I saw you at the coffee shop, I mean. I thought…”
“You thought I was ignoring you because I was with another girl?”
She nodded.
“It doesn’t make it okay because Cassie’s my sister.” I realized how true it was as I said it. There was no excuse for the way I’d treated Maeve.
“I know. It’s just… different,” she said. “Are you close?”
“Very, but I try to keep her away from my business. That’s why I bought her the shop.”
She looked surprised. “You bought her the coffee shop?”
I nodded. “It’s in her name. She lives in the apartment on the second floor.”
“You must care about her a lot.”
“I do.”
“What about your parents?” she asked. “Are you close with them too?”
It seemed impossible that Maeve didn’t know what had happened to my parents, but then again, not so impossible after all. I’d ignored her the first time she’d come to stay at the loft, had made it clear I didn’t want to get to know her.
She would have had to be a glutton for punishment to ask me personal questions.
I hesitated. There were a million reasons I didn’t like to talk about my parents. But Cassie told me you couldn’t be close to someone — really close — unless you let people in, and you couldn’t let people in if you refused to tell them anything about yourself.
And I wanted to be close — really close — to Maeve.
“Our parents died in a car accident when I was nineteen.”
She looked shocked. “I’m… I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“How could you?”
She shook her head and looked at her lap. “I should have asked.”
“I wouldn’t have answered,” I said. “Not before now.”
She looked up and met my gaze and I almost fell into her eyes. I’d never been to Alaska, but I’d seen the color of the sea — icy blue — in pictures. That was what Maeve’s eyes looked like and I was more than okay with falling through the ice and drowning in them.
“Why?”
I knew she wasn’t just asking why I wouldn’t have answered her questions. She was asking why I’d ignored her. Why I’d been such a dick.
Why I wouldn’t kiss her that time in the kitchen.
“I taught myself not to want things.”
She bit her lip and nodded like it made sense even though I was pretty sure no one else in the world would find an ounce of sense in it.
But that was the thing about Maeve: she saw me. I’d never minded that other people looked right through me. It had made me feel powerful, even invincible, until Maeve had stared into my soul.
She didn’t look away. She fucking saw me, and fuck me if I didn’t want to be seen by her.
Now I wanted to lean across the table and kiss her, take her full lower lip between my own teeth and tug as I slipped my tongue inside the wet heat of her mouth.
“What about now?” she asked. “Are you still trying not to want things?”
“No.” I held her gaze. “Now I can’t deny that I want something. And I’m ready to learn how to deal with that.”