Chapter 5
Adam
Ichecked my watch amidst the din of the after-work crowd decompressing, wondering when Ethan would show, and speak of the devil, an arm came around my shoulders.
“Got a head start? I would’ve thought security guys would be working harder than a coffee-shop guy.”
Kenny hollered out an “Ehhh!” and raised his hands in celebration of Ethan’s arrival. They’d met before life in Utah, when Ethan had visited me at work in North Carolina, but they’d discovered a real bromance here in Silverton. It helped they were closer in age than any of the rest of us old fogies—most of us who’d come to Saint were retired at twenty years out, which put us squarely in the “late thirties to early forties” category, whereas Kenny had left on a medical discharge at a spry twenty-six, and that was almost a year and a half ago. Ethan was ten full years younger than me, clocking in at twenty-eight.
After a nice little bro-hug, they parted, and Ethan folded into our group. He wasn’t a Saint employee, but he knew everyone around the table and they’d accepted him as one of us for all social purposes. Since he’d been focused on opening his business for the first few months he was here and then working nonstop to keep it open as he’d navigated hiring and management and all the things a small business owner had to juggle, he hadn’t exactly been a social butterfly.
So seeing him accept a beer from Bruce and watching Beast nudge him with an elbow and give him a rather friendly nod… it filled me up. Yes, that was the older-brother syndrome talking, but it did, and I’d take it.
Ethan had coordinated all of this, ultimately. When I’d told him I was thinking about following Wilder and Bruce out here after retirement, he’d asked how I felt about him coming, too. He’d been in the Army for one stint after college, but we’d never managed to be stationed together. Then, he’d gotten out and considered moving to North Carolina, but I’d been in a nonstop cycle of deployments and he’d had a girlfriend. When that had fizzled, he’d gotten the itch to move, and it had lined up well with my decision to call Silverton home for the foreseeable future.
And here we were.
Nothing gave me more joy than seeing him figure out his life. The Army hadn’t been right for him—not like it had been for me. He’d served for three years after getting his degree and that was that. I never would’ve pegged him for a coffee shop owner, but he had so much pride in his place and he’d worked hard for it, so I couldn’t be anything but impressed by him.
“When are you going to ask her out?” Kenny asked in a low tone I only heard because I was standing right next to Ethan.
“Who?” Ethan asked, but his dark eyes went straight over my shoulder to the table of women I’d just been forbidding myself to look back at, then he took a sip of his beer.
Kenny shook his head. “The woman you’ve been pining for since you moved here.”
Ethan choked on his swallow. “I—no. We’re friends. It’s cool.”
I patted his back. “No aspirating your beer.”
He coughed out a “Sorry,” then took another slug before glaring at Kenny.
Kenny raised his hands in innocence. “Just strikes me as a great time. We’ve got great weather for a date. Night in Bloom is coming up. Fourth of July makes a great date night… opportunities abound.”
Ethan and I both gave Kenny an annoyed look that must’ve said enough. He begged off, saying he was going to get some waters, so I focused on Ethan.
He’d been cut deep with his last relationship, and I’d tried to respect his space. But Kenny had a point, and maybe Ethan needed a nudge.
“He’s right, you know.”
Ethan huffed and stared at his beer. “Sure.”
“I’m just saying, she’s a great girl. You guys are already friends. And you’re a good man. You deserve someone…” I searched for the right word. “You deserve someone good like her. Sweet and smart and, you know… emotionally available.”
He sighed long and slow, then glanced at me from under his thick brown lashes a few shades darker than my own.
“You’re forgetting the business partner aspect here. And the fact that I kind of did ask her out last summer and she shifted me right into the friendzone. I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to try to wear a woman down. She said no? Loud and clear, I heard her. There are a lot of beautiful women here in Silverton, so there’s no reason to put pressure on our friendship.”
This was the part that never made sense to me—why he’d taken the rejection in the first place when I wasn’t certain she’d actually said no. But it did get murky with the business setup—what if she’d felt like she had to create such a boundary if they were going into business together? And sure, it made sense then, but it’d been a year, and it seemed she was mostly hands-off. She attended a meeting with him once a month or so, but beyond patronizing Joe like it was her favorite store aside from All Booked Up, she wasn’t in there getting her hands dirty.
“I’m not saying wear her down. I’m just saying—” My fool eyes dragged themselves over to her, where she grinned at her friends, but then her gaze shifted, met mine, and she sobered.
My stomach dropped low and twisted tight, tighter, a rag wrung out in opposing directions. She blinked, then smiled softly and notched her chin up in the way all the Saint guys did.
A rough laugh tripped out, and I returned the gesture, then swallowed hard and wrangled my focus back to the table. My heart clanged around in my chest, and I reached for my beer and guzzled the last few sips in one gulp.
As I set down the glass, Ethan’s eyes were boring holes into the side of my head.
“What?” I asked in my best impression of Beast to date.
He didn’t speak, so I finally glanced up and met his narrowed eyes.
“What were you saying?” he asked, as though the question made perfect sense.
“What do you mean, what was I saying? I wasn’t saying anything.”
He chuckled and shook his head.
“What?” I asked again, irritation at the smug look on his face rising.
“You were literally in the middle of a sentence.”
I eyed the bar, where Kenny was turning back toward us with a pitcher of water and another round of pint glasses on a tray like he worked here.
“And your point?” I sounded more irritable than I felt, though I had the distinct feeling of being caught doing something wrong and it didn’t make sense.
Maybe you shouldn’t be mooning over the girl your brother likes—that’s pretty wrong.Well, damn. True enough.
“Adam, look at me.”
I did as he asked and found him giving me his earnest, serious look, which never failed to get my full attention. This was his this is important face.
“Maybe you should think about?—”
“No. And that’s all there is to say.”
He glared. “That’s not how life works. There’s always more to say.”
“Not about this.”
His jaw ticked, the telltale sign he was formulating his plan of attack and had every intention of continuing the argument.
I set a hand on his shoulder. “Nothing else to say here, okay?”
He held my gaze, studying me and likely looking for another angle, but thankfully, relented. “Fine.”
“We got a Carter-brother standoff?” Kenny asked, sliding pint glasses of ice water toward each of us standing around the two tables.
“Of course not. My big brother is being a stubborn ass, as usual, and I’m choosing to nobly save my next point of argument for a private conversation.” He shot me a crusty look, and I could’ve sworn he was sixteen and not twenty-eight.
I didn’t rise to his bait, and thankfully, Kenny ran away with the conversation, which eventually morphed into stories of bodyguarding and the worst people we’d had to professionally babysit.
I didn’t turn around again the whole night.