Chapter 17
Seventeen
Brayden thought about Maggie and the story she’d told him all day while fishing with his friends, eating dinner and trying to pass the time until ten o’clock.
“You’re not staying in again tonight, are you, dude?” Josh asked while he got ready to go out. The two of them had been roommates in college and always shared a room when they traveled with the guys.
“I’m afraid I am.”
“I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
Brayden laughed. “Yes, you do. Who’s the one who can never go out anymore at home because he’s so married?”
“That’s different! That’s home. This is vacation.”
“What can I say? I’d rather talk to her than go out drinking with you losers.”
“That’s hurtful, Brayden.”
Josh’s efforts to make a hurt face only further amused Brayden.
“Go have a good time. That’s what this is all about, right? Everyone doing what they want.”
“That’s right, and what we all want is to go out and party—with you—like we always do.”
“Remember how it was when you first met Ashley?”
Josh, who’d been using the mirror over the dresser to bring order to his wet blond hair, turned to face Brayden, his tanned face as serious as Brayden had seen it in a long time. “You’re comparing this chick to Ashley?”
Josh and Ashley had been together since college and were crazy about each other, had been from the get-go.
“So what if I am?”
“You just met her a couple of weeks ago?”
Not even that long. “So what?”
“You’re putting her on Ashley’s level? This is more serious than I thought.” He opened the bedroom door and summoned the other four guys, all of whom were dressed in shorts and T-shirts after having showered. “Boys, we have a situation.”
Brayden rolled his eyes and flopped back on his bed like a fish landing on a deck, resigned to his fate.
“What’s up?” Max asked. He still had the body of the linebacker he’d been at UT as well as the dark hair and blue eyes that’d made him the ultimate chick magnet in college.
Josh was more than happy to fill them in on what was happening. “Our boy Brayden just compared this chick he’s been mooning over all week to Ashley.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Taylor’s face went blank with shock. “She’s your Ashley?”
“I didn’t say that. I simply asked Josh if he remembered what it was like when he first met Ashley.”
“This is huge,” Isaac said. Tall, with dark-brown skin and the same muscles he’d had when he too played football at UT, Isaac worked as an accountant these days. “We gotta meet this girl.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Are you ashamed of us, bro?” Max asked.
“Fuck yes. You’re to stay far, far, far away from her.”
“I’m hurt,” Taylor said. He’d been training to be a doctor for so long, he said he’d forgotten what it was like to not be in school of some kind. One more year, and he’d be done.
“You have to have feelings in order to be hurt,” Brayden said. “Now all y’all need to fuck off and get out of here so I can call her.”
“So whipped,” Josh said.
That led to a cacophony of whip-cracking sounds being made by the lot of them.
Thankfully, the siren call of the bars was more appealing to them than continuing to bust Brayden’s balls.
They weren’t done with him. That much was certain.
He’d made a critical error with the question about Ashley.
She was the gold standard, and evoking her name had raised the stakes in his fledgling relationship with Maggie, at least in the feeble minds of his friends.
He waited for twenty minutes after they left to make sure they wouldn’t be back before he FaceTimed Maggie, ten minutes later than scheduled.
She answered on the third ring and seemed out of breath. Her cheeks were rosy, her hair was up, and her eyes, as always, were gorgeous.
“Where’d I get you from?”
“I was in the kitchen, heard my phone ring and realized I’d forgotten it in my room.”
“And here I thought you’d be counting the seconds until I called. After what I’ve just been through for you, that hurts me, Maggie.”
Her brows furrowed with confusion. “What’ve you been through for me?”
“Another ass-kicking from my friends wondering who this chick is that has me skipping the bars so I can stay in and talk to her for hours.”
“Oh. What did you tell them?”
“I said her name is Maggie, and she’s the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever met and has a heart of gold, too.”
“You did not tell them that!”
“No,” he said, chuckling, “but every word of that is true.”
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“I am not the most gorgeous woman you’ve ever met.”
“Yeah, you are, and you love horses, too. Win-win, baby.”
“Brayden…”
“Finish the story, Maggie. I’ve been dying to hear the rest all day.”
“Where did we leave off?”
“You know exactly where we left off. Your mom woke up, Andi moved out, she’s pregnant with twins, your dad is freaking, and your mom remembered what’d happened to her.”
Maggie smiled at his rapid-fire review. “Right, so when my mom had that dream that brought back all those memories, she asked the nurses to call my dad. After he told her about Andi and the babies, she hadn’t asked for him in weeks, even though he continued to go by the hospital to check on her and see if she needed anything. ”
“The poor guy was trapped in a nightmare.”
“He kept saying how thankful he was that my mom had recovered, no matter what complications it caused for him and Andi. He was glad she was back, that we had our mother again. He never once said anything other than that, at least not to us.”
“Do you think he meant it? That he was glad she’d come back?”
“Yes, I do believe he meant it. But it was a challenge for all of us to bring someone back into our lives who’d been absent for such a long time.”
“I’m sure it was.”
“You think, oh, my mom is back, and thank God for that, but do I have to ask her if I can go to Sophie’s house like I used to, or do I still ask my dad that, or which end is up, you know?”
“Yeah, that’s a little wild.”
“It was, and I was anxious about what would become of Andi and Eric and the babies. By then, I loved them as much as I loved my mom, and I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“That’s totally understandable.”
“It was all very confusing. I didn’t hear the details of all this until years later, but when my mom told my dad what she’d remembered, they decided together to call the cops and report it.”
“Good for her.”
“They found out that the guy who attacked her had been convicted of almost the exact same crime in California, and it was his third offense. Since he was already in prison and would be staying there for a very long time, they decided not to file new charges. Shortly after that, my mom asked Andi to come see her in the hospital.”
“No way.”
“Yes! I couldn’t believe it when I heard about it, but she wanted to meet the woman her husband had fallen in love with.”
“Oh my God. Did Andi go?”
“She did.”
“Wow. What happened?”
“From what I was told much later, they had a very nice conversation after which my mom asked to see my dad. She told him that she wanted what she’d had before, but after meeting Andi and hearing about her and how they were as a couple from us, she knew that she could never again have that, because he was in love with someone else.
She said she was letting him go because she didn’t want to have to always wonder if he’d rather be somewhere else. ”
“Holy crap, Maggie. Your mom is amazing.”
“She really is. They’d been married more than twenty years, all of them good years, but she was so wise to see that everything had changed, and there was no going back to who they’d been before all this happened.”
“It takes some kind of courage to be able to see that and do what’s best for everyone else.”
“I was too young to realize that at the time, but I’ve come to see what an enormous thing she did for my dad and our family.”
“So he must’ve gone right to Andi.”
“Not quite. He took the time to get divorced and went to her on the two-year anniversary of the day they met after he planned a wedding at the hotel that brought them together. She was told so many lies by everyone to keep it a secret from her. After all, she was the hotel manager and lived on the property. But he pulled it off. I’ll never forget what she said. ”
“I’m dying to hear. This is better than any movie I’ve ever seen.”
Maggie grinned at him, and he wanted to freeze that moment so he’d have that picture of her forever. “She said, ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’”
“Oh damn!”
“Kate was working at the hotel that summer, performing at the outdoor bar, and she’d told Andi what my mom had done weeks earlier.”
“And then he never came for her! What she must’ve thought.”
“I know, right?”
“What did your dad say to that?”
“He said, ‘I wasn’t coming until I could offer you everything.’”
“I’m dead.” He placed a hand over his heart and fell back on the bed. “Your dad is the most romantic guy who ever lived.”
“Ew, that’s gross.”
“Maggie, that line is epic.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Totally epic. He’s the dude who ruins it for the rest of us mere mortals.”
Maggie laughed. “I cannot think of my dad as a romantic or I’ll vomit.”
“So they got married?”
“They got married, and Andi went into labor during the reception. My identical twin brothers, John and Rob, were born an hour later at the hotel. They discovered later that she’d been in labor for two days, but it was all in her back, so she didn’t realize it was labor until it was too late to get to a hospital. ”
“Best story ever. Thank you for sharing that with me.”
“You’re welcome, but there’s more. I have to tell you about my mom going to Vermont to help with renovations to her brother’s ski house and falling for the contractor who’s now my wonderful stepfather, Aidan, and how Kate came to Nashville and fell for Reid and how Aidan’s amazing O’Malley family became part of our family. ”
“I can’t wait to hear all of it. You have the best stories.”
“I guess they’re pretty good. When you’re living it, sometimes it doesn’t seem so great, but in hindsight, I can see how someone else would find it pretty cool.”
“You went through a lot in the midst of the best story ever.”
“We did. My mom’s accident and three years without her… Those were hard times, even if we got a lot of new people to love out of it. I can’t imagine my life without Andi, her mom, Eric, John, Rob, Aidan, their sons Max and Nick and Aidan’s amazing family.”
“It’s good that you can see it that way.”
“My glass is way more than half full, for sure. That’s one of my Grammy O’Malley’s favorite sayings. She’s been nearly incapacitated by arthritis, but her glass is always more than half full.”
“I’d love to meet the stars of this amazing story someday.”
“You would? Really?”
“Yes, Maggie, I would. Are you going to put me out of my misery and agree to go out with me?”
“You’re in Key West basking in the sun. You’re not in misery.”
“I’m in total hell waiting to hear if you’re going to shoot me down because you’re worried about us working together or some other manufactured reason.”
“That’s not a manufactured reason! It’s a real concern.”
“That I told you won’t be an issue. If we go out and it turns bad, I’ll leave. I know Matthews House is your gig, not mine.”
“The therapeutic riding program is important to me.”
“To me as well.”
“I’m also worried about the thing you won’t talk about.”
“I told you that’s nothing to be concerned with. It happened a lifetime ago. It doesn’t matter.”
“Still… You want me to go out with you, but you won’t tell me why you were in juvie.”
“If I didn’t work with you, you never would’ve known about that.”
“If you didn’t work with me, I never would’ve met you.”
“I think we would’ve met anyway.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Some things just feel fated, you know?”
“You think this feels fated?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t even know what to say to that.”
He’d flustered her, and as he watched her face portray an astonishing range of emotions, Brayden discovered he liked her flustered, especially when he was the one causing it.
“I know that sounds like a line of bullshit, but all I can tell you is I’ve thought of you constantly since I last saw you, and I can’t wait to get home.
I’ve never once said that when I was here.
Usually, I’m dreading going home because I know it’ll be a year until we get back here again. ”
Maggie rolled her bottom lip between her teeth, which was incredibly sexy. Her stunning blue eyes were bigger and bluer than they’d ever been. He was getting to her, and getting had never felt so good. “Say something. You’re leaving me out on the limb all alone over here.”
“I don’t know what to do about you.”
“I can give you some pointers if that would help.”
She let out an adorable snort of laughter. “Stop.”
“Don’t wanna.”
“When do you get home?”
“Sunday.”
“We’ll talk then.”
“You’re not cutting me off until then, are you?”
“You should enjoy the time with your friends.”
“I am enjoying the time with my friends. But I’m enjoying the time with you even more.” He laughed at her perplexed expression. “You’re very cute when you’re flustered.”
“I am not cute—and I’m not flustered.”
“Oh, sweetheart, yes, you’re both. You’re beyond cute, and I’ve developed a very serious crush on you.”
“You shouldn’t do that. I’m your boss.”
“Which is totally fine with me. You’re the boss at work. I’ll be the boss the rest of the time. You’ll see. It’ll work out great.”
“Slow your roll, cowboy. I haven’t even agreed to go out with you.”
“I think you will, though.”