Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Henry
I t had been an hour since I’d forced myself to walk away from her horrified expression, but she’d occupied my mind the entire time since. I couldn’t get all the things she’d told me on the walk home last night out of my mind.
My friends call me Bee like the buzzy bee, but I’m not really a bee. Bet I could still sting you, though, so you should be careful.
Holy moly, what is that aftershave? It makes me want to bite you.
I won’t bite you. Bees don’t bite.
Wait. I’m not actually a bee, am I?
No. I’m Phoebe. She nodded against my chest, snuggling in even closer. Phoebe Turner.
And you… you’re Henry Too-Good-For-Everyone Cohen.
Snort.
I think I need to sleep now. Everything’s spinning.
Hmm. That aftershave, though.
I hope I’m as light as a bee for you to carry me all the way… my ex-boyfriend used to say I was too… too… sigh.
I only wished she’d finished that thought before sleep had stolen her rambling, slurred voice from me. Though part of me feared her saying her ex used to say something bad about her would only make me angrier than I already felt.
I’d had to turn my back on the pool after our earlier exchange about last night, unable to watch her diving in and out of it with ease and coming up for air with the water dripping from every part of her body, driving me insane.
Andy and Jace joined me at one of the poolside tables not long after I’d walked away from Phoebe, but both were moaning about being on the opposite side of the pool to what they now called ‘their girls’.
The constant flirting with Phoebe’s friends left me with a permanent headache—the reason I’d been rubbing my temples when Andy’s voice brought my attention back to the conversation.
“I think it’s time we had a chat, don’t you, Cohen?”
With my fingers still pressed to my head, I glanced up at Andy on the other side of the table and waited for him to go on. The guy had been in my life for the majority of it; I didn’t need to say anything to know this was going to be one of his infamous lectures.
“Just give it to me straight, okay,” he said. “Are you hot for Phoebe?”
I closed my eyes for a beat, then dropped my hands down into my lap. “Are we really doing this?”
He wrapped a hand around his ice-cold beer, the tension in his knuckles visible. “I think I deserve to know. Although your actions are making it pretty obvious.”
“My actions?” I raised a brow. “You mean making sure she got home safely instead of leaving her wasted in the middle of nowhere for anyone to pick up? I’d have done the same for any of the girls, not just Phoebe, and you know it.”
“That’s not denying you’re into her.”
Jace kept looking at his phone, not wanting to be a part of this or get involved in another one of our fights.
“We’ve been here three days, mate. I’m not into anybody yet.” It was a lie I couldn’t afford not to tell. Not right then.
“Yet? So, you want to be? Despite saying you were bringing us on this trip to try and patch things over.”
“That’s exactly why I brought you here. Even paid for everything to show you how important it was for me to put this thing right between us, too, remember?”
Andy’s eyes hardened, the smallest flinch around the edges, but I’d been living with him for far too long to miss it. “Yeah, I remember. I remember you begging me to come here despite me telling you things were still too raw.”
“Raw for who? You? Or her …?”
The question hung in the air like a bad fucking smell none of us could ignore.
Jace coughed roughly into the back of his hand while Andy stared at me like he wanted to burn my arse to the ground.
I’d been wanting to ask him that question for months, having bitten my tongue against it so many times, the taste of blood in my mouth had become a daily occurrence.
But if he wanted to go there now, fuck it, we’d go.
“Because it seems to me that you’re more heartbroken about this than she is, Andy.”
“Be very fucking careful, Cohen.”
Leaning forward, I rested my forearms on the table between us, holding his gaze. “You know full well I never meant to hurt Lillie—I hope to God she knows it, too—and I know that when you look at me you still want to punch me in the face, even after months of me begging for your forgiveness.”
The muscles in Andy’s jaw worked overtime, and the grip on his beer grew tighter.
“But you need to ask yourself this,” I went on.
“Would you rather I’d stayed with her, even though I didn’t love her the way she needed me to, making both of us live a lie, or would you rather I did what I did in the hopes she can finally go find someone who will love her like she really deserves to be loved? ”
“She’s our sister, Cohen.”
“Quit saying that shit. It sounds inbred as fuck.”
“But—”
“She’s your sister, mate. Yours . I’ll never be able to repay you and your family for taking me in all those years ago, and you’ll always be a fucking brother to me, but Lillie has always been your sister, not mine.”
“How does that even work in your head?”
“Because I’ve known you my whole fucking life, and that shit runs deep. Even if your parents hadn’t taken me in after mine died, you’d have been my brother through life. Lillie is…”
“What?”
“Someone who came with you. Someone I couldn’t escape. She chased me, remember?”
“Yeah, and I warned you. I warned you not to go there with her. I told you this would blow our whole fucking family apart.”
I dropped my chin to my chest and let my remorse take over for a change. It was the one emotion I always had to have control of, especially since my parents’ deaths, but maybe I needed to feel it now. Maybe I needed to let the regret in.
The memories of the entire thing washed over me at once.
The way Lillie used to look at me in her home—the home both her and Andy’s parents had welcomed me into the very day my parents died after leaving me with all the money in the world that I’d never know what to do with, but not a single person to turn to who had the same blood as me running through their veins.
I remembered the guilt of not feeling the same way about Lillie as she felt about me, not wanting to hurt her, so foolishly going along with it in the hopes that her attraction for me would fizzle out once she got to know the real Henry Cohen.
The moody arsehole. The inattentive boyfriend.
The idiot who clearly didn’t feel the same way.
Only the lie got too big for me to carry.
It snowballed, creating a monster I couldn’t get rid of. Not without potentially ruining everything and everyone’s lives in the process.
But after months and months and months of pretence, Lillie had asked me what we thought we’d name our future children, and the walls of the entire lie caved in around me.
Nina and James Hyde had taken me in, and I’d betrayed them by taking their daughter to bed—by making all of them believe the two of us had a future together because I didn’t want to disappoint them and tell the truth that, while I loved Lillie in my own way, I didn’t crave her the way a man should crave the woman they were with.
I’d been with her out of some sense of duty, not desire, and I fucking hated it.
I’d been trapped in pretence, and now the truth was out, I’d trapped myself in a never-ending cycle of begging for forgiveness from the very people who had warned me not to let it happen.
I had no one else to blame but myself.
I looked up at Andy again. “What do you want from me?”
“I want for you to show my sister some goddamn respect and not jump into bed with the first pair of legs that fly open for you while we’re out here.
” Andy stared at me without blinking, and I thought about arguing back some more, but I owed this guy my life—literally—and if me staying away from other women brought him the peace he needed, I couldn’t find it in myself to deny him.
“You want me to stay away from Phoebe.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard, right? You said it yourself: you’ve only been here three days. You’re not hot for anybody yet.”
With no response to give, I swallowed down my shame.
“Kinda hard on him, though, man, when we’re around Bails and Rhea all the time, trying to get into their beds,” Jace chimed in. “Three of them, three of us. Ya know?”
It shocked the shit out of me to hear Jace say anything at all, let alone in my defence, but I somehow kept my face straight while Andy kept his attention on me, always studying.
“That’s the thing about forgiveness, isn’t it?,” Andy said coolly. “It’s not meant to be easy to achieve. It takes a lot of hard work to show a person you mean what you say after you’ve broken their trust already.”
Without another word, he drained the rest of his beer, stood up, and walked away, heading straight over to the sun loungers of the girls as if to add further torture to his parting words.
I followed his movements as he sat beside Bailey and threw his arm around her shoulder, pulling her to him with little effort, and I focused on my brother and all the shit we still had to sort out together. He had my attention…
Until a flash of blonde and turquoise climbing out of the pool caught my eye, pushing the loose strands of wet, blonde hair away from her face before she readjusted the edges of her bikini bottoms, forcing my eyes to trail down over her toned, silky-smooth legs and imagine my fingers being the ones to work the fabric of her bikini off her wet skin.
I was fucked, and I knew it.
So did Andy.
So did Jace.
The only one who had no idea about any of it now was Phoebe.