Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
STERLING
I t had been plaguing me since I let my pride goad me into telling my brothers not to fire him. I wanted to pretend he hadn’t hurt me that badly, that Forrest sticking around town was no big deal. But it was. It was a very big deal, and it had fucking sucked. If it hurt me, I knew it had to hurt him. So why?
He shifted, turning to face me, pulling his feet in and resting crossed arms on his upraised knees. In the dim light of the attic, I thought I could see all the way to his soul and the open wound inside.
“I wanted to see you.”
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. He’d only seen me a handful of times in the year we’d been apart. It wasn’t enough to stay in Sawyers Bend.
“I wanted to be there if you needed me.”
If I needed him. It was a weird thing to say, but I knew what he meant. A month after I dumped him, I’d almost died in a fire when my sister’s estranged husband had tried to kill her. When I came to, in the hospital, Forrest had been sitting outside my room. He stayed there, almost around the clock, until I was discharged. He didn’t bother me, he didn’t get in the way of the nurses, but he was there. Looking after me. Protecting me.
And more recently, when my sister Quinn’s guide business had been vandalized, Forrest had been there. I worked with Quinn, running the shop and answering the phones while she was leading hiking or fishing trips. Someone looking for evidence proving who had killed my father had destroyed the inside of the shop. At the first glimpse of the destruction, my heart had cracked. And Forrest had been there, bringing coffee and cookies, helping Hawk board up the windows. We hadn’t exchanged a single word, but he’d been there.
“You can’t just hang around Sawyers Bend, waiting to rescue me from my fuckups,” I said.
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “First of all, none of those things were your fuckups. And second, I can go anywhere I want to. You can’t tell me where I can live.”
“And what if I tried? What if I asked you to leave?”
Forrest let out a huff of air. “I don’t know. I love you, Sterling. I think I love you more now than I did when we were together. I know more about you now.”
A bitter gust of a laugh sprung from my chest. “If you know more, I’m surprised it didn’t make you fall out of love.”
He shook his head, his eyes sad. “The irony is that if you’d trusted me enough back then to show me the things I’ve learned since, I would have come clean a lot sooner.”
“Way to make it my fault that you lied,” I muttered.
He sat as straight as he could under the low ceiling. “That’s not what I meant. It’s my fault. I was wrong. But it’s also the truth. I didn’t understand. I saw you that first day at the inn and—” He swallowed, staring at the rough beam above his head. “You dazzled me. You’re so fucking beautiful. Funny and crazy smart. You were dazzling, and I didn’t see. I didn’t see how much my lies would hurt you. I didn’t think I could hurt you at all. And then I was so in love, I couldn’t do a decent risk/reward analysis because I couldn’t tolerate the idea of losing you. And I didn’t know how much you needed the truth.”
He fell silent. So did I. I didn’t have anything to say. I wanted to yell at him, everybody needs the truth , but I knew what he meant. I liked to act like I didn’t have any vulnerabilities, like I didn’t have a soft, mushy center. Sterling Sawyer was solid badass, all the way to my core.
But that was a fucking lie. I’d loved Forrest more than I’d ever loved anyone, except maybe Darcy and Parker and Quinn and Griffen. But I’d never let Forrest in enough to see my truth. To see how much need I held inside me. How much I needed him to love me. How much I needed his devotion, his loyalty. I needed it like water on parched soil. Like the sun after the winter.
I needed everything he had to give me so fucking badly, and I hadn’t let him see it at all. I could give a thousand excuses—it was the way I was raised; we didn’t show vulnerability in our house, not unless we wanted to be punished for it. And that was true. But it was also bullshit. Because I loved him. I loved Forrest. And if I loved him, didn’t he deserve to see all of me? Shouldn’t I have trusted him enough?
But I hadn’t. And then, when he lied, I’d punished him for it as if he’d known everything all along.
I let out a long sigh, pulling my knees up to rest my forehead on them. “God, we fucked this up.”
“Yeah, we did,” Forrest said, and I realized I’d spoken aloud.
My lips parted, and I almost asked, “ Can we start again? ” But I clamped my mouth shut. It was the heat and the dark. I was tired. I needed a nap. I grasped for excuses.
It was too late for us. It had to be too late for us, didn’t it?
The slam of a car door struck our ears. Slowly, Forrest uncoiled his long frame and shuffled to the small window at the end of the attic.
“They’re leaving,” he said.
“What do we do?” I asked when he came back.
“We go down and keep searching the boathouse. Maybe my father wrote something on one of the beams.”
“Maybe,” I said. “It’s worth a look, I guess.” I wasn’t ready to accept that the boathouse was a dead end. We hadn’t had a chance to search thoroughly before we fled to the attic. Maybe the next clue was waiting for us on the side of a beam or hidden underneath one of the benches. My heart started to pound in anticipation once more. “We have to find it.”
After a peek through the hole in the attic floor, Forrest called, “All clear,” and we climbed down the wooden ladder.
Forrest surveyed the inside of the boathouse. “Grab that step stool and check the beams on that side,” he ordered. “I’m going to check out those built-in benches by the door. I think I remember that my father built them. The life jackets hung above them.”
I watched him get on his back to examine the underside of the benches before I climbed up on the step stool to examine the beams running the width of the boathouse. They were old, weathered, draped in cobwebs in the corners, unadorned except by nature. Alan hadn’t left his clue on the beams.
From the other side of the pontoon boat, I heard a low groan. I jumped off the step stool and made my way to Forrest. “What did you find?”
“Good news and bad news.”
“Yeah? Give me the good news first,” I said. I was usually a bad-news-first kind of girl, but I needed some good right now.
“The good news is I think this is where my father hid the clue,” Forrest said. “The bad news is it’s not here anymore.”
I got down beside him, looked beneath the bench, and saw what he meant. Someone, likely his father, had built a wooden box into the underside of the seat. Maybe it once had a locked door. Maybe it had been self-contained. But now, half of it was missing, and the splintered wood where two of the sides had been pulled apart was dulled with age.
Whoever had removed Alan Buckley’s clue from the box had done it a long time ago.
“What now?” I asked.
Forrest rolled to his feet and turned. Reaching out a hand, he pulled me up. When I stood, he didn’t let go. His fingers wrapped loosely around mine, and he squeezed. “I think now we go home, regroup, and figure out our next move.”
“Our next move?” I was ready to decipher a code, not investigate a mystery. I was also finding the pressure of his fingers on mine distracting, and I had to stay focused.
“We need to trace property ownership,” he said. “Whoever owns this place now may not be the same person who bought it from my mom. Maybe it was the prior owners who found the clue. Maybe my mom found it. We need to do some searching, ask some questions. But first, we need to get out of here. We’re trespassing, in case you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget,” I said. “I just wanted to find that clue.”
“I know.” He squeezed my fingers again. “We’ll find it.”
I swiped a glance around the boathouse. My heart felt tethered here. I didn’t want to leave without what we came for. It wasn’t here, and the boathouse was only a shell. But it didn’t feel empty. It felt filled with memories.
“Do you remember being here with your dad and your mom?” I asked.
His fingers threaded with mine. “Yeah. My dad had an old Woody, one of those wooden speedboats that look like they’re from the twenties. We’d come out on the weekends and drive around the lake.” He cleared his throat, his eyes seeing through the pontoon boat into the past. “My mom loved it. They were always happy here. He taught me to fish.”
Forrest gave a slow look around, then turned for the door.
I glanced through the window to see the SUV missing from the driveway, the front porch of the cottage, and the lawn empty. “I don’t see anyone out there.”
Forrest looked down at the handle he’d broken. “Hold on.” Pulling his wallet from his back pocket, he fished out a bill and set it on the bench beside the door. At my look of surprise, he said, “I’m not a complete asshole. I broke their lock. The least I can do is leave money to cover the damage.”
He wasn’t a complete asshole. I was beginning to think he wasn’t an asshole at all.
Watch yourself, Sterling , I lectured myself. Of course, he’s not a complete asshole. You wouldn’t have fallen for him in the first place if that’s all he was. It doesn’t make him a nice guy. Doesn’t make him worth the risk.
I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt me like that again. Especially not the man who’d done it the first time.
Forrest pushed the door open. I followed him out, blinking in the bright sun. My eyes focused, and I jerked to a halt in front of the man I’d seen earlier getting out of the gray sedan.
“Well…what do we have here?” he asked, his sharp eyes locked on Forrest’s face. “Trespassers?”
Uh-oh. Busted.