Chapter 6
?
I’m not geriatric, for cryin’ out loud.
Viktor
I am going to kill my brothers.
Whichever of them is responsible for this dies the second I’m back home. Heck, I might make a special trip of it. A murder trip. What fun that might be. Whenever Crisis heads into town to check on her pufferfish, I’ll step away, too, drive back home, and murder Kyran or Zakery.
I can’t believe I thought I could trust them to help me with this.
Shifting against the rug, with little more than a pillow and the throw blanket that was on the foot of the bed, I seethe, listening to the horses snuff in the stalls bordering this room.
Zakery, being the artistic one and second youngest of us, only helped me with the artwork and graphics for this retreat. He drew the logo, arranged the flier, and put together the visuals for the website. Kyran built the website and handled the rest of it—advertising, hiring staff, all the other technical things, etc. Zakery’s a prankster, but he wouldn’t overstep like this. There’s no way. He’s too used to being good even when the black hole where his soul would be if he had one demands offerings of mischief .
The number our parents did on him left him a little too obedient sometimes…
Kyran, thankfully and yet also un thankfully, didn’t quite get that trauma response.
I bet he’s to blame.
Which means my baby brother dies whenever I see him next.
I should have known better.
I really, really should have known better.
When I asked Kyran if he would help me put this whole writer’s retreat together so I could spend some obligatory off-work time with Crisis in a setting not entirely work related , but still work related enough that she’d agree, he looked me square in the eye and said, Why don’t you just have a conversation with her about your feelings? Like an adult.
I thought I’d already explained why that wasn’t my first inclination.
Because she hates me!
She. Hates. Me.
She plots my demise in her sleep and has Canva murderboards dedicated to my misery. I don’t know why she hates me, but I know what calculation, manipulation, and toxicity look like. She’s good at masking the animosity beneath the innocence of her big brown eyes and cute little nose, but the woman is skilled, slipping venom into her words with explicit underlying intent.
She’s spent the past two years passive aggressively chipping away at my self-esteem with casual comments about my age, my character, my abilities.
I know it.
I see it.
I’m used to it.
I hated it when it came from my parents .
But I adore her.
I. Adore. Her.
She hates me. But I see her. I see the dedication she puts into her work. I see the results she gets. I see how perfectly kind and gentle and loving toward my brothers she is when she doesn’t even know I’m around. She hates me. I don’t know why, but I assume it’s within reason, because Crisis?
Crisis is precious, and sweet, and reasonable—most of the time. Most of the time being any time that doesn’t include me.
My brothers love her almost as much as I do. On her own time, she jumps in to help them whenever possible. She practically planned half of Lukas’s world tour, editing over his PR team’s schedule and making everything about it so much better via Canva Whiteboard witchcraft. She spends time in the gardens with Kaleb, mostly obsessing over his koi pond, but also including him in ways that he seems to have all but stepped back from ever since he came home.
It’s pure insanity the way my feelings have entangled themselves in wanting her when she is in no way kind to me at a genuine level. I don’t know if my twisted history has left me broken beyond sensibility or if I am desperate to taste the gentleness she gives so freely to everyone else. All I know is that I choked on my heartbeat when she knelt on the carpet, looked up at me with those big eyes, and smiled just hours ago.
Knowing she’s feet away from me right now, cozy and content in the big bed all alone, is torture.
Her lavender scent thickens in the room, congealing in my lungs, cloying in my head, and I know I’ll dream of her if I dare to close my eyes, assuming I can even fall asleep on this hard floor .
Geriatric .
She’s so unbelievably rude…
I’m not old . I’m six four .
Back pain started during my first high school growth spurt and hasn’t stopped since.
I am going to hate being alive in the morning, and I’m going to despise my baby brother even more.
When Kyran was born, I was ten, and I held him in my arms, and I swore I’d protect him.
Yet this is the thanks I get for not throwing that tiny wrinkly bundle across the parlor?
What an ingrate.
My eyes close, and I see her .
I see her in her slippers coming up the hall from the main bathroom in the barn. I see her in the shorts and camisole she’s wearing right now, in bed, one bad decision away from me. I see that birthmark of hers on her shoulder. I see the shape of her bare wing bones peeking past the straps of her top.
I see her, and hope she is merciful to me in the morning.
?
Everything hurts, and I’m dying.
But at least my sleep paralysis demon is an angel.
Aching, exhausted, half alive, I lift my hand toward the beautiful face hovering over me, graze the soft cheek, and realize I’m not dreaming anymore when Crisis recoils—disgust blatant, sharp, devastating .
“Mr. Bachelor,” she says, aghast, blinking rapidly.
I groan. Pain. Suffering. Crisis in her pajamas, near me, sexy as all get out. And sickened by my touch.
I grumble, “ Mr. Bachelor could be any of my four brothers.” I try to roll; I fail to get anywhere close to upright. “And it was my father . Please, call me Viktor .”
Hearing my name on your lips will end my life, and put me out of this misery. Do it now. Quickly. I beg of you.
Perching her chin in her hands, she pouts at me. “Do I need to call an ambulance?”
“ No ,” I grumble, attaining something like a seated position. Hunched, I fight through a sore crick for a breath. This. This will not work for multiple days, much less multiple weeks .
Something very near genuine remorse settles momentarily in Crisis’s eyes. “We can share the bed tonight,” she says. “This is going to kill you.”
That . That also will not work.
My eyes close, willing a stray gunshot to locate me through the small windows above the short headboard of the bed. “I’ll talk to someone. It’s not…proper…to share a bed with you, Crisis.” Lifting my attention, I find her jutted lip. It’s good I can’t move, because every sore muscle is desperate to frame her round cheeks in my hands and kiss her.
“Proper,” she echoes. “You’re thirty-five, not eighty-five, Mr. Bachelor. Proper is a pretense made up by our elders to control the youngin’s. Your geriatric state does not allow for proper , even if your body is over eighty, your mind should maintain something closer to youth. I think. This place is booked solid; they said as much at introduction yesterday. This is something you want to do. So, either I go back home to my little fish, or we share the bed. I’m sure we can ask for or buy some extra pillows to create a purity wall for your feeble, ancient sensibilities.” She puffs a sigh and sinks down against the tops of her knees. “You’re hurting yourself over something stupid. Please stop it. ”
“Something…” My eye twitches as I look at this woman. This beautiful, beautiful woman. In a thin black camisole, baring her soft pale skin. “I’m a man , Crisis.”
Her mouth drops. Sarcasm thick in her voice, she says, “ No . You don’t say?”
“Crisis,” I mutter.
“You’re not a dangerous man, Mr. Bachelor.”
“ Viktor . It’s been two years. Can’t you call me by my first name? You call my brothers by theirs.”
“You’re my boss. They aren’t. Also, like you said, you’d all be Mr. Bachelor.”
Something within my body pops. Loudly.
Crisis shrinks. “I feel terrible,” she whispers, sounding…genuine.
The part that gets me the most is that she shouldn’t feel terrible. This isn’t her fault. It’s Kyran’s. And she isn’t even wrong. The place is booked solid. My options were either to lose the opportunity of us both staying here without work hours binding our proximity, or sleep on the floor.
Therefore, I’m going to kill Kyran in one way or another. If not in real life, in one of my books will have to suffice. The one time I rely on my younger brothers for something, and this happens. My childhood really should have taught me that family could not be trusted. I guess I never quite learned the lesson where it concerned the people I love most in the world.
Beyond our bedroom door, casual chatter strikes up, other guests heading toward the continental breakfast being served at the ranch house right about now.
Food sounds great.
If I can ever walk again.
I really don’t want Crisis to go home. The last thing I want is to stay here, at a regular writer’s retreat, without her. She knows me well enough to have already said this isn’t something I’d do . And it really, really isn’t. All the extra activities planned are nothing but a distraction and a waste of time if she’s not here, with me. I don’t have kids. I’m not making three dollars a month. I didn’t need to scrounge up the money in order to flee my family for a chance to be around like-minded individuals and actually get some work done .
I have a personal assistant who manages every aspect of my life so I have time to work. And so then I just… do . I sit down, with my carefully-curated-to-the-market outline, and I put words in the right order, making sure my actions and dialogue balance correctly while my sentence patterns have variety.
It’s a science.
A dull, dull, agonizingly boring science.
The only thing I have ever, in twenty-three novels, enjoyed writing is more like a collection of fantasies than a book. My don’t do that with your assistant journal feels like therapy. It’s healing in ways I can’t begin to explain.
Everything else, I have tolerated.
Because that’s the job.
And no writing retreat needs to babysit me into it.
Crisis scowls while I sit on the floor in front of her, crooked.
Then she moves.
Pained, my gaze follows her as she seats herself behind me. Her hands flatten against my muscles—siphoning heat through the thin fabric of my cotton t-shirt—and a panicked chill rattles through my bones. Those perfect small hands of hers move, and I collapse in on myself.
“Crisis, what ar—” I cuss when her elbow hits me, and her nails bite into my shoulder.
My spine cracks as she straightens it .
The sore muscles in my neck constrict as breath hisses from my lips. Her fingers settle and grind into the tendons of my shoulders.
“ Ow, ow, ow .” I gasp for air as my vision spots.
“Quit being a baby,” she says, kneading into a knot as though her vendetta against me rests solely upon it. “I’ll research a stretch routine that will help over breakfast. I get stiff necks a lot from sitting for so long, so Crimson had a physical therapist send me a few exercises that help. I’ll forward them to you.”
The heel of her hand presses into my muscles as her ruthless attacks unwind my body. My eyes squeeze shut.
“This is why you should listen to me,” she whispers, as the pain ebbs into something far worse—utter seduction. Her fingers run up through the long strands of my hair as she carries a massage from my shoulders, to my neck, to my head. “I knew this would happen.”
There she goes again, attacking my self-esteem, suggesting herself as the authority in my life, acting like I’m unreliable.
My eyes close.
It’s probably really sad for her that I can’t find it in myself to care. Compared to what my parents said and did, her efforts are adorable, harmless to such a point that she’s actually experiencing remorse at believing she’s physically harmed me with her schemes.
My head angles slightly to the left as I utter a swear.
“How far can you turn your head now?” she murmurs.
I test the waters of my mobility, mutter, “Enough to maybe get up.”
She pats my shoulder and distances herself, standing in front of me and offering her hand. “Need help?”
I look at her hand, which was just touching me…doing miraculous things to my muscles, threading into my hair… Then I remember how she flinched when I touched her cheek.
Swallowing hard, I grip the bed post instead and creak as I rise. “Shut up,” I mutter before she can say a word. I swallow again. “That was the bed.”
Wetting her lips, Crisis tucks her hands behind her back. “You’re delusional. Maybe I should call that ambulance.”
“Let’s just get breakfast.” I sag, defeated. “And some pillows for a…purity wall.”