Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Summer
I was toasty warm and still tired, but I hummed and burrowed into the cocoon of heat around me. A hard body met mine and a nose burrowed in my hair.
I let out a soft moan. When was the last time I’d woken up so cozy? When I’d woken up feeling so safe?
The wind raged outside, but the restless energy that plagued me during this type of weather was missing. I didn’t need to get up and leave. I wasn’t alone, in the dark, with the sounds of a storm over my head.
A strong arm wrapped around my middle and a large hand scooped under my sweater to splay over my belly.
God, that felt good. Warm skin and calloused fingertips—divine. I wiggled against my wall of comfort.
A very male groan sounded behind me and he stroked downward.
My lips curved upward and the events from last night played through my head. The blizzard and how it had propelled me back in time. My guilt over Jonah and how he’d been hurt. The pleasure of going to sleep hearing his stories. And then a heartbeat of regret before I’d drifted off to sleep.
My eyelids flew open. The glow from the night-light was the only light. It was still dark out, and I wasn’t in the guest room.
Jonah.
His fingers danced around the waistband of my underwear. A hard, impressive erection pressed into my backside through our sweats.
“Jonah,” I whispered, afraid to break the spell, but knowing I had to. I wanted this. I wanted Jonah’s hands on me, and I wanted to explore the pleasure he could give. But . . . I wouldn’t do it until we had a talk.
“Mm.” The rumble went through his chest and into my back. Such a masculine sound. Auditory pleasure. I wanted more of that too.
He worked his fingertips underneath my underwear. Need swamped me, igniting an ache between my thighs he was so close to resolving.
“Jonah,” I whined, hating to put a stop to us.
He hadn’t reached my clit yet, but he was close. “Mm.”
I frowned. Was he awake? “Jonah,” I said louder this time.
His hand twitched.
“Jonah.” I gripped his wrist. This could not happen when he wasn’t fully awake and when he hadn’t heard what I had to tell him.
He stiffened. Yep. He was awake now. His muscles twitched and he jerked his hand away. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
I let out a sigh and rolled back to my side of the bed, which happened to be a longer distance than I’d anticipated. I had been like a heatseeking missile, locking on to Jonah as soon as we were both asleep.
I rolled to my side and straightened my twisted sweatshirt. I’d almost wiggled my sweats down my ass. Thankfully, the covers hid the worst of it.
“Jesus, Summer. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not.”
He snapped his mouth shut. His brows crashed together. “What?”
“I’m not, but we need to talk first.”
“No, of course. I mean . . .” He worked his jaw like he was tasting words and none of them were the right flavor. “You’re getting out of a relationship.”
“Boyd is absurdly easy to get over. It’s not him.”
His expression turned neutral. The creases on his cheek from the pillow made him more approachable, along with the sleep haze clearing from his eyes. But I didn’t care for the way he seemed to be bracing himself for a personal insult.
“It’s not you either. It’s me. And Eli.”
Understanding lit his dark gaze. “You’ve never gotten over him.”
I could’ve howled in frustration. On top of being ashamed of myself, I was flubbing this conversation before I’d even started, and I was fifteen years too late already.
“That’s what I need to talk to you about.
I miss Eli. I really do. He was a good friend and a good person.
But you’ve been blaming yourself for his death when it’s not your fault at all. ”
He scowled and punched at his pillow to prop his head up more.
“You can say that until you’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t make it true.
He didn’t just drink anyone’s alcohol. He didn’t T-bone some stranger.
Both were me. I wasn’t there for him when he was clearly bothered by something.
I was there at the worst possible time.” He held a hand up.
“And don’t say that he might’ve killed or injured someone else. I know all the facts.”
“Not all of them.” My heartbeats turned sluggish, like I was pumping sludge instead of blood. Here I go. What I should’ve confirmed before he ran me out of the hospital room. “I broke up with him. That’s why he was drinking.”
Jonah
I couldn’t have possibly heard right. My dick was still hogging my blood supply and my brain was functioning on an insufficient supply. “Say again?”
“He was angry and hurt. He was mad at you and upset with me.”
The events of that day ran through my head.
I’d seen Eli at breakfast when I’d stopped in to help with ranch chores.
My parents had asked what I was up to. I’d said I was bumming around with Teller.
He had a couple of old bourbon barrels they couldn’t sell and we were going to fuck around in his shop.
That day was my introduction to repurposing barrels.
Eli had been excited. Summer was home for the weekend and he’d had plans with her for the whole day.
She had broken up with him? He must’ve been devastated. A new, fresh guilt welled inside me. I’d known he was hurting, and now I knew why. I hadn’t been there for him.
Was that why he’d been upset with me? And how would Summer have known? “Why would he have felt that way?”
The air grew thick between us. Pain filled her eyes, but the fear in them as well gutted me. She shouldn’t be scared to talk to me, but I was also to blame for that too.
“I . . .”
“Why, Summer?” I said, her name a whiplash. My patience was thinning. I’d gone from waking up in a state of bliss I’d never known to having a boulder poised over my head, ready to drop. “Why would he hate me over your breakup?”
“I . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut.
The anxiety inside me built like thunderstorm clouds.
She’d known Eli the best. She’d come to my hospital room for a reason and put her hand so comfortingly on mine.
Fifteen goddamn years ago. “Tell me. What did I do that made my brother hate me enough to drink my liquor and speed down the mountain? Why didn’t you tell anyone? Do my parents know?”
Her eyes were still closed tight. “No,” she whispered. “I couldn’t do that to them.”
I relaxed only slightly. I respected her for sparing them more heartache. Losing Eli had changed them. Irrevocably.
Her swallow was loud. “I broke up with him. I was at college and he took a year off and I thought we’d grown apart, and he thought .
. .” This was the part I was going to hate.
I sensed it. Summer always said what was on her mind, but she’d kept this to herself for a decade and a half. “He suspected I had a thing for you.”
Shock propelled me to a sitting position. A twinge fired in my hip and shoulder, but I ignored the pain. “What? You told him you didn’t, right?”
Her conflicted gaze stayed on me.
“You told him you didn’t,” I said through clenched teeth.
A quiet sob left her. “I never lied to Eli.”
I rolled out of bed and stood so fast it was a miracle my leg didn’t give out.
My chest was heaving. I’d driven myself out of my mind because I hadn’t been there for Eli, but to think that he’d hated me too?
That he’d been jealous and resentful? And worse—that a small part of me was lighting up inside, ready to celebrate that perfect Summer Kerrigan had been into me.
“What the fuck, Summer? What the fuck? You broke his heart over me?”
“Over the fact that I wasn’t in love with Eli like he was with me.” She’d stood up too. Her Copper Summit sweater taunted me. The girl and the alcohol that had driven Eli to the end. “Leaving for college made our differences obvious, and I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.”
“Why didn’t you say that then?”
“I did. He accused me of lying.” Anguish twisted her face. “Then he asked me about you. No matter what, I didn’t like him the way he liked me, but . . . I never lied to him. He’d know. So I told him it was a silly crush, that it meant nothing.”
I recoiled and my hip complained. A silly crush? “You dated Eli in high school. What the hell were you doing noticing me?”
“Eli and I were genuine friends. You were older. I was just a little girl to you, and I wanted to date someone who treated me well.” She pushed her hands through her hair.
To think I’d wanted to know how the strands felt fisted in my hands while I pushed into her.
“It was a mistake, and I thought I’d go back to college and forget about the hurt I’d caused him and .
. . and forget about you. Then the accident happened. ”
For fucking years, she’d let me believe . . . “And when you came to me in the hospital that day? Were you going to declare your undying love?”
“I’d thought you should know I’d been the reason he was drinking,” she whispered. “That I had broken up with him. But you were in so much pain, and you already hated me just for caring about you. I could tell it made you feel guilty. So I left. Then the more time that went by, the harder it got.”
“So you left. That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
She hugged her arms around herself. “What do you mean?”
“You left my hospital room. You fucking left Bourbon Canyon. You left your goddamn wedding. Or do you only leave when I get involved?”
“That isn’t fair.”
“It’s accurate.”
“Look, Jonah—”
“How do you not let the guilt eat you alive? How do you go to the city and date shitty guys and work in your fancy distillery without getting chewed up by guilt like me?”
Her bottom lip quivered, and her eyes watered. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Tell the goddamn truth!”
She flinched.
I shoved a hand through my hair. My skin crawled, hot with emotion and prickly with rage and loss and . . . regret. “Get out.”
She shrank in on herself, her arms cradled around her like she was her only source of support.
She’d moved on without flinching.
I’d been so angry for so damn long. Nothing had made sense. Why my brother who never drank had overindulged. Why he hadn’t talked to me first. Why he’d been so tormented in the first place.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
The shine of her tears was more than I could take. I turned away. No matter how betrayed and furious I was, I couldn’t withstand a crying Summer. “For once, do what I fucking ask you to and get out.”
I heard her footsteps and her sniffles fade.
I waited for the steps to creak as she went upstairs but there was nothing.
Then I heard movement by the front door.
I didn’t know what prompted me, but I hobbled out of the bedroom.
The irony that I could keep my balance because of her massage wasn’t lost on me.
I rounded into the hallway. She had her coat and boots on and her hand was on the doorknob.
“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled.
She froze and looked over her shoulder. Her skin was paler in the light from the windows. “You said to leave.”
“Not in a fucking blizzard! I meant leave my room.”
Her mouth formed an O. Even as I raged, my attention was on her ripe lips and her tousled hair, messy from being in my bed.
Goddammit. My brother had died over this.
I stomped back into my bedroom and slammed the door.