Chapter 40
FORTY
brINLEY
I was prodded from sleep by giggles and a little hand smacking against my face.
Okay, not prodded.
Knocked.
“Bwinwey. You got eyes?”
One of my lids was being peeled back, and my one-sided sight was filled with a cherub face that was peering into my eyeball like he might be able to see into my brain.
I released a sleepy laugh, forcing myself to blink all the way open.
Kai was on his knees at my side.
Shocker, the spot where Silas had slept was empty.
A deluge of memories came flooding back.
Silas’s mouth on me, his head between my thighs.
No fear.
No terror.
No shame.
I only wanted more.
More than anything, I was sure I’d feel regret for sharing what I had. Sure I’d want to go running from his property, which was only asking for more humiliation since there was no doubt he’d only come dragging me back.
But there was none.
No embarrassment or disgrace.
Kai knocked me out of the trance by patting both my cheeks.
“You ’wake?”
I cleared the roughness from my throat. “Yeah, baby, I’m awake.”
“My Bwinwey?” He bobbed that sweet head.
My chest again felt like it would cave.
Mush.
Shaking the drowsiness off, I forced myself up to sitting.
He scrambled right onto my lap, chubby arms locked around my neck as he bounced on his knees.
“I eat?” He nodded.
It was so emphatic, there was no question he considered this an emergency.
I curled my arms around him and stood, my heart pressing fiercely against my ribs as I rocked him back and forth.
“I think we should probably change this pee-pee diaper first,” I teased around the fervor that had taken me hostage.
A riot of giggles erupted from him. “I not got pee-pee.”
“Are you sure?” I spun him around.
Another outbreak of giggles. A song of joy that banged the walls, ricocheting back to penetrate a spot inside me that I didn’t know existed.
I kept swaying and swinging him as I carried him from Silas’s room and into his.
The upper floor was quiet, no one around, the clear life of the house apparent in the faint drone of the television and distant voices that rose up from below.
I inclined my ear.
Was Silas down there? Did I want him to be? I wasn’t sure I could face him, not when there was a heavy chance that what I was feeling would be painted all over my expression.
No way to conceal it.
Rays of morning light poured in through Kai’s window, a spray of motes dancing merrily and lighting up the adorable decorations.
Illustrated trucks and tractors and trains were stuck to the walls, and the bedding in his crib matched.
A giant ‘Kai’ was painted over his changing table and a smaller swirl of ‘You are loved’ was beneath it.
Affection gripped and pulsed, and the emotion welled as I carried him to his changing table.
Realizing what Silas, Elena, and Meems were trying to portray to him. Knowing that they wanted him to feel safe every time he entered this room.
I settled him onto the cushion, and he giggled some more, the terror from last night long gone in the light of the day.
Every cell in my body rose in defense of him. Wanting to show him that.
Love.
My spirit clogged because I was sure I wouldn’t ever want to stop.
I peeled back the tabs of his diaper, and he scratched the nail of his little index finger over the words that had been written for him.
“Wove?” he sang, half melody, half question.
No doubt, he’d been read the statement over and over as the rest of his family had stood in this exact same spot with him.
“That’s right, Kai.” My voice was thready and thin. “You are loved. So much.”
“Kai wove!” He beamed at me.
My broken heart flailed, and the words wheezed out of me.
“And I love Kai. So much.”
My hands shook as I finished changing him into a fresh diaper.
I pumped sanitizer onto my hands, rubbed them together, then he was back in my arms.
He peered up at me. “Meems got yummy?”
I choked over a laugh. “I bet she does.”
I carried him downstairs. The morning news droned from the television, the volume set nearly to mute.
I assumed it was used as background noise.
Habit, maybe.
They hardly needed it.
Not when Elena’s laughter resonated from the kitchen.
Ricocheting from the tiles and rebounding in the type of joy that I thought would have been crushed by what had happened to her.
But it was real and alive. Filled with hope and belief even when someone had tried to stamp it out.
And maybe it was all because of them that I felt a flicker of that hope bluster up inside me.
Maybe I really would leave this place remembering who I once wanted to be. Maybe they were forcing me to see something so much greater than the demons that fought to keep me chained.
Because as I padded out on bare feet onto the cool floors, I felt freer than I had in a long time.
No doubt set on a collision course that was going to destroy a piece of me, but maybe the pieces I’d reclaim would be worth the pain.
Or maybe I was just really good at telling myself lies.
Glee lit Elena’s face when she saw us walk in. She was sitting on the far counter, facing us, her legs swinging as they dangled over the side.
Her dark brown hair piled on her head and her pretty face void of makeup.
“Well, good morning.” Suggestion oozed out of her mouth.
She said it at the exact same time as Meems was mumbling, “Speak of the devil,” into the dough that she was mixing in a big metal bowl.
I hooked Kai onto my hip. “Are you all admitting that you were talking about me behind my back?”
I cocked my head like I was really pissed off by the idea. Too bad it was punctured with lightness.
It seemed it was catching when it came to them.
As if what happened between Silas and me last night hadn’t been the most exceptional thing I’d ever experienced.
“Behind your back? No way. Everything we have to say, we say to your face. You will find no backstabbing around here.” Elena grinned.
Yeah. The only thing you found around here were secrets and skeletons tucked under rugs and hidden in closets.
“And what is it you have to say?” I challenged, pure sass.
Giggling, Kai pointed an innocent, accusatory finger. “Say!”
Meems arched a brow. “I think your attire says plenty enough.”
She let her gaze wander down my body, a burden of proof. And it was just then I was realizing I stood there in nothing but Silas’s T-shirt.
Barefoot and itching as the fabric swam around me.
It hit me at the middle of the thighs, quite a bit longer than half the skirts and dresses I normally wore.
Their faces promised I’d never donned anything so scandalous.
Redness rushed my cheeks.
I never took myself as being shy, but I felt like covering under their scrutiny.
“Oh, well, I ran out of pajamas. You know, I didn’t get to bring that many of my things here, so I just grabbed the first thing I could find.”
I’d run out of something, all right. My sanity.
Meems’s brows lifted higher. “And the pile of laundry I left folded for you on top of Silas’s dresser yesterday wouldn’t do?”
She might as well have been delivering a closing argument. The jury convinced.
Guilty.
Of course, that jury only consisted of one.
Elena, whose expression filled with triumph. “Did you get naked with my brother?”
I choked over the knot of surprise that clotted off my throat. Leave it to Elena to go straight for the jugular.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I spluttered, hanging onto Kai like he was a wall I could hide behind.
“Oh, come on, Brinley. Silas literally carried you out of the clubhouse last night. Tossed you right over his shoulder. Caveman style. It was clearly a man setting out to make his claim.”
Heat crawled up my neck.
Tendrils that wrapped around to constrict.
“No, no, you have it all wrong. He said you and I were breaking the rules, going to the clubhouse last night. When he told me to come back here and I refused, he carried me. Can you believe the audacity? That man is nothing but a brute.”
There, my own closing statement.
Maybe I’d swayed her judgement.
“And he left me there?” she opposed.
Right, there was that.
I glowered at her though there was zero heat behind it, my own dare twisting my voice with a distinct insinuation. “You had Trevan to watch over you.”
“He never even looked my way,” she countered.
“Liar.”
She glared back. “You got naked with my brother. You might as well fess it up because I see it written all over you.”
This girl had no filter or boundaries.
“I did not sleep with him.”
“Kai sweep Siwas and Bwinwey.” The sweet boy patted his chest.
A huff of befuddlement and awkward amusement shot from my mouth.
Elena cracked up then basically whined, “Come on, admit it, Brinley. You’re supposed to tell your best friend everything.”
“We didn’t sleep together,” I reiterated, my voice croaking as I lowered it with emphasis. I don’t know why I was so choked up about it.
Apparently, orgasms given by men who looked like gods and had wicked fingers made you emotional.
That vibrator definitely didn’t hold up.
Elena looked crestfallen. “But something happened,” she insisted. “The man looked like he’d embarked on his life’s mission.”
I wavered.
She must have taken it as confirmation because she jumped off the counter and shouted, “Ah-ha!”
A celebration of victory.
Like she was the one who won the medal when it was undeniably Silas who deserved a gold star.
“I knew it.”
“It wasn’t like that.” I shuffled on my feet.
Meems’s grayed brow ticked higher, so close to becoming one with her hairline. “And what exactly was it like? Because it appeared to me with the way Silas went running out of the house first thing this mornin’, he was every bit as terrified over whatever it was as you.”
My throat felt too tight, nerves firing and getting into a tangle that I wouldn’t be able to undo.
“He’s just seeing to it that I’m cared for while I’m here.”
“Oh, I bet he’s taking care of you,” she drew out.
“No different than I’m sure he does with all the other girls falling all over him around here.”
It was purely a defense.