Chapter 16
Sunday dinners weren’t mandatory in the Jennings family.
Miles could’ve said he’d gotten called in to cover for someone at the station.
But he didn’t make excuses. He did what needed to be done, whether he wanted to or not.
And he didn’t lie.
No matter what Tabitha accused.
He stabbed a crisp green bean with the tines of his fork. Then another. And another. He’d meant every word he’d said to her. He was done thinking about her. It didn’t matter that she’d moved to Mount Laurel, was going to be a part of this community.
She’d never be a part of his life again.
Sitting to Miles’s right, Toby, his dark hair pulled back in a stubby knot, leaned toward him. “You okay?”
Stiffening, Miles sent his heavily tattooed brother a sidelong, narrow look. “Fine.”
Toby raised his eyebrows over his hipster glasses, not the least bit affected by Miles’s glare or snappy tone.
Too bad. Miles was itching for a fight.
And he could usually count on Toby to give him one, despite his younger brother’s easy-going attitude.
“Sure about that?” Toby asked, nodding at Miles’s fork.
Miles glanced down and realized he had his fork gripped in his fist like he was ready to stab someone in the heart. And that it had at least eight mangled beans on it.
He shoved them into his mouth and chewed violently.
He hated green beans.
Toby went back to his conversation with Ian, who sat at one end of the patio table. Though Ian was Silas’s son, he resembled Toby more than his blonde father with his wavy dark hair and glasses.
Urban, who took after their dad the most with his quiet, serious personality, brown hair and eyes, and reddish full beard, sat at the other end of the table. Urban’s best friend, business partner, and now-girlfriend, Willow Kincaid, a pretty blonde with pale, short hair and light blue eyes, sat next to him, discussing one of the upcoming renovations their construction company, JK Homes, was working on.
Next to Willow, Verity was telling Kat her plans for her birthday party next month which were surprisingly lowkey and not the blowout he’d expected her to want. Just dinner at home with family.
Kat, a fucking smoke-show with long, dark hair and a body to make a man’s hands sweat, usually had no problems making excuses for not attending Sunday night dinner. Her favorite being that she wasn’t a Jennings, just the mother of one. But she’d given in tonight because Ian had wanted to stay and she hadn’t seen him all day due to being called into work.
There wasn’t much she wouldn’t do for her kid.
Including her least favorite thing; being around any of the Jennings brothers.
There were worse places either he or Kat could be on a warm summer night than this backyard.
Tiny, white lights twinkled from where they were draped across the crab apple trees, along the pergola and around the top of the fence—no doubt Willow’s doing. She’d helped Urban renovate their parents’ house years ago, including turning the basic backyard into a cozy outdoor living space. They’d replaced the wooden deck with a stamped concrete patio and added an outdoor kitchen separated from the rest of the patio by a tall, brick counter, but kept plenty of space for a long dining table and a larger seating area around a brick firepit.
Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits” played over the Bluetooth speakers mounted on the wall on either side of the large, flat screen TV in the outdoor kitchen. The TV was on but muted, The Drillers game against the Cubs playing.
“Uncle Eli’s up,” Ian said, pointing at the TV.
They all turned to watch Eli, up to bat for the second time after striking out looking in the first inning. This time, he held on for a full count, including three foul balls.
And went down swinging.
“He needs to lay off those high fast balls,” Urban grumbled as Eli jogged back to the dugout, the camera zooming in on their youngest brother’s pissed off expression. “He’s thinking too much. He needs to get out of his head.”“Aunt Vee says he has the yaps,” Ian piped up.
“I said he has the yips,” she corrected. “And that was supposed to be our secret.”
He scratched his cheek. “I forgot.”
“Uncle Eli doesn’t have the… word you said,” Urban said, tone gentle with Ian—unlike the sharp look he gave Verity for teaching their nephew that word in the first place. “So we should all stop saying it.”
Urban had played baseball for Penn State and was on his way to a professional baseball career when their parents’ deaths forced him to quit college—and any hopes he’d had of going pro—and return to Mount Laurel to take care of his brothers and sister.
Verity ate a bite of cornbread. “Athletes,” she said around her mouthful. “So superstitious.”
Urban bristled so hard, even his beard vibrated. “I’m not superstitious.”
Miles, Toby, Verity, and Willow exchanged glances then spoke at the same time.
“Yips.”
And Urban twitched like he’d been electrocuted.
Willow patted his forearm. “Want me to go get your lucky socks? Wearing them might help ward off any bad omens.”
Eyes glittering, one side of his mouth hitched up, Urban leaned over and said something in Willow’s ear that had her blushing from her chest to the top of her forehead.
But then she looked at him from under her eyelashes and murmured, “Yes, please.”
“Look,” Verity said, waving her fork between them, “while I’m thrilled you took my excellent advice and finally realized you’re meant for each other, I think I speak for everyone here when I say whatever you two plan on doing, I hope it does not involve his lucky socks in any way shape or form, because those things are disgusting.”
Willow grinned at her, though she still looked hot and flustered. “No socks involved. Promise.”
“That’s something at least. But I’ve had my fill of watching one of my brothers in the throes of an extreme case of sexual tension for the day, so if you could stop with those longing looks and all that innuendo, that’d be great.”
Now they all looked at Miles.
Like he’d said before.
His sister had a big mouth.
He chomped on a piece of chicken. Toby had cheffed up what for most people would just be chicken and potatoes by placing the split chickens under bricks wrapped in foil and roasting them alongside whole baby potatoes tossed in olive oil and rosemary, and two pans of homemade cornbread, in the outdoor wood burning.
Everyone had oohed and aahed and were on their second helpings. Except Willow who was on her third.
To Miles, everything tasted like dirt.
Except the beans. They just tasted like shit.
“That’s it,” Verity muttered, tossing her napkin down on her empty plate. “I can’t take it. I cannot, in good conscience, ignore the elephant in this room any longer.”
Ian, bent over trying to get Bella to help him finish his green beans, looked up and frowned. “There’s a elephant here?”
“An elephant,” Kat corrected. “And it’s just an expression. It means there’s a secret but it’s a secret everyone knows, but no one wants to talk about.”
“Like Uncle Eli’s yips?”
“He doesn’t have that,” Urban said quickly, straightening in his seat, as if to block any bad luck from reaching Eli through the TV.
Verity huffed out a breath. His sister hated having attention pulled away from her. “Can we stop talking about Eli’s yips—”
Urban’s left eye twitched. “Stop saying—”
“—and start talking about Miles going through a major mid-life crisis?”
Now it was Miles’s eye that twitched. He pressed a finger against it. “I’m fine. And I’m only thirty.”
“Premature midlife crisis then, which is way worse because you don’t even have the imminent fear of death to blame for it. And you’re hardly fine. You’ve barely said a word since you got here—”
“Just enjoying my dinner,” he gritted out, stabbing a potato.
“—and you haven’t tried charming a single smile out of Kat.”
“Which I’ve appreciated,” Kat assured him in her husky voice.
Obviously, she hadn’t missed his scintillating conversation and humorous tales of being a small-town police officer.
Then again, she wasn’t a fan of Miles or his charm.
Which was complete bullshit. He was charming as hell.
“Nor have you flirted with Willow,” Verity went on, relentless in her pursuit of whatever the hell point she was trying to make, “which is so unlike you, especially since it combines two of your favorite things; flirting and ticking off Urban.”
“Flirting isn’t one of my favorite things.”
The adults all stared at him again with varying degrees of amusement—Ian was too busy not so subtly sliding his green beans, one by one, onto the floor, to call bullshit on his response.
Verity rolled her eyes. “Please. You love flirting. It’s like some sort of Pavlovian response to seeing a woman. Any woman. Regardless of age, sexual orientation, or relationship status.”
Way to make him sound like an asshole.
“I appreciate and respect women,” he said tightly, offended that she thought so little of him. “I love getting to know them. And I don’t think it’s wrong of me to give them attention, to do my best to make them feel special and beautiful and interesting. Because they are.”
“He’s not wrong,” Willow said. “That type of attention, if coming from the right person for the right reason, can be flattering.”
“Yes,” Kat said in a sly, dry tone. “How lucky for womankind to have him give his time and attention so unselfishly. All to make us feel good about ourselves.”
Urban gave her a slight, affirming nod, as if he couldn’t agree more with her sarcasm or her sentiment. “Unless he’s really doing it for himself,” he said, continuing this new game where they talked about him as if he wasn’t sitting right the fuck there. “To make himself feel better about something in his life. Something he’s missing.”
Miles’s chest constricted. He stared down at his plate, took quiet, careful breaths, trying to make each one long enough, deep enough to ward off the buzzing building in his head.
Was that what they all thought? That he flirted with women in some pathetic attempt to get attention? To make himself feel special? That he slept with them because there was something lacking in his life?
“It’s worse than I thought,” Verity said with a shake of her head. “Though not surprising given what I witnessed today, not to mention what I recently learned. I can’t believe you,” she said to him, “of all people, the upholder of truth, justice, and the American way, are going to sit at this sacred dinner table and lie to your own flesh and blood. What type of example does that set for Ian and me with our young, impressionable minds?”
His hands were trembling, and he slid them onto his lap. Curled his tingling fingers into his palms. “Spit out whatever it is you think you know. If only so the rest of us can move on with our lives.”
So he could make that excuse after all and get the hell out of there.
She leaned forward. “Hmm… well, what I think I know is that many decades ago when you went to college—”
“I’m. Thirty.”
“—you had a secret, year-long relationship with a certain blonde bombshell—”
“Bombshell, huh?” Willow asked.
Verity nodded then used her hand to mime her brain exploding. “Totally.”
“I’m not surprised,” Willow said, gesturing at him with her wine glass. “Look at him.”
Slumping back, he crossed his arms. Dug his fingers into his biceps. “I’m more than just a pretty face.”
No one rushed to agree with him.
“And it wasn’t a secret,” he added.
“Uh, I didn’t know about it until today,” Verity said.
“Me, either,” Urban said, his gaze on Miles thoughtful, like he was trying to figure out what was going on with him.
Like he was trying to figure out what he had to do to make sure Miles got through whatever it was unscathed.
Then, one by one, they all turned their gazes from him to Toby.
Toby shrugged. It took a lot more than their sister’s antics to rile him up. “When I went to visit culinary school, he mentioned he was seeing someone, but I didn’t meet her. And I didn’t know she was currently in Mount Laurel.”
Willow cleared her throat. “I knew. Sort of,” she added quickly at Verity’s affronted expression. “Hayden may have mentioned a few weeks ago that a beautiful blonde… uh… Tamara…?”
“Tabitha,” he ground out.
“Tabitha,” Willow repeated. “That Tabitha stopped in at the bar a few weeks ago and suggested she and Miles used to be in a relationship.”
“And you didn’t say anything?” Verity asked.
“I didn’t believe it.”
“Okay. That makes sense. I had a hard time believing it, too. Until Tabitha told me, straight out that she and Miles had, at one point in time, been a thing. Which, can I just add, how hurtful it was to hear you had a year-long relationship with a woman none of us” —she gestured around the table— “knew about. A woman who coincidentally just moved to Mount Laurel and with whom you had a completely intense and, let’s be honest, PG-13 rated moment with on the sidewalk in front of me, God, and anyone else who just so happened to be passing by.”
“How PG-13?” Kat asked. Verity leaned over and whispered something in Kat’s ear that had her eyebrows raising slowly. “Really?” Kat murmured. “Right there on the sidewalk?” She smirked at Miles. “Guess you’re not a boy scout after all.”
“Okay, now I have to know,” Willow said.
Again, Verity did the leaning and whispering thing, this time with Willow whose eyes got wider and wider.
What the hell was she telling them?
Then he remembered towering over Tabitha on the street. How he’d wrapped his hand around her throat. Had nudged her head back.
How he’d thought about sliding his cock into her mouth.
Fuck.
“And now, I can’t ever unsee it,” Verity whispered of her newly acquired, brother-induced mental anguish. “It’s like, trapped in my brain.”
Willow put her arm around Verity’s shoulder and gave her a side hug. “Give it time. Eventually, the horror will fade.”
Verity snorted. “More like one of my brothers will do or say something else to replace that trauma with something even worse.”
“It’s hard to be you,” Urban said, giving Kat’s earlier dry tone a run for its money.
“I know, right?”
“Once you’ve sufficiently recovered from your trauma,” Kat said to Verity, “maybe you could fill us in on what this woman is like?”
Miles narrowed his eyes at Kat. “Her name’s Tabitha. And why do you want to know?”
“Just curious about my new neighbor,” she said evenly, as if her question was born of simple, innocent curiosity.
He didn’t buy it.
There was nothing simple or innocent about her.
“Miss Tabitha’s nice,” Ian said, proving that no matter how often you thought kids weren’t paying you the least bit of attention, if they were within ear shot, they were picking up at least a few details. Usually the ones you didn’t want them to know. “She bought us pizza and wings for lunch. And she taught me how to play a new card game called Spit. But you don’t spit for real,” he assured his mom. “That’s just the name.”
“Good to know,” Kat said.
“I mean, I was only around her a few hours,” Verity said with a thoughtful frown, “and I wasn’t a fan of hers, at all, the first time I met her. And now that I know she and Miles had been together before, her behavior that morning is even more confusing. She can be nice, but she wasn’t the first time we met. And she can be sunny and cheerful, but also quiet and watchful. I get the feeling she’s really uncomfortable around people she doesn’t know.”
“In other words,” Willow said with a smile, “she’s human.”
“Yeah. I guess. She ate lunch with me and Ian, taught him that card game but somehow avoided, evaded, or outright ignored any question I asked her about herself. And she wouldn’t give me any details about her relationship with Miles other than that they’d been together when they were younger, it didn’t work out, and they went their separate ways.”
“Maybe she’s just shy?” Willow asked.
“She’s not.”
It took a moment for Miles to realize those words had come from his mouth.
Shit.
“Really?” Verity drawled. “Do tell.”
“She’s not shy,” he said again, straightening and flexing his fingers on his thighs. Trying to get them to stop tingling. Hoping they didn’t cramp up. “She’s careful.”
It was one of the first things he noticed about her. The wariness in her eyes. The vulnerability.
“She’s sunny and cheerful,” he continued, flexing and curling his fingers again and again, “when it suits her and her purpose. When she needs to distract someone from asking too many questions or keep them at arm’s length. She’s quiet because she’s guarded. And she’s watchful because the only way for her to feel safe is to size up the people around her. And then become who they want her to be.”
He was with me because I was pretty and malleable and convenient.
Realizing the only sound was Hozier’s “Movement” playing over the speakers, he looked up. Caught Urban and Toby sharing a loaded look. Saw the concern in Willow’s gaze. The speculation in Kat’s.
“Guess that secret, year-long relationship you had with her gave you some deep insight,” Verity said.
“Like I said. It wasn’t a secret. It just wasn’t important enough to tell anyone about.”
That, too, was a lie.
Maybe the biggest one he’d told he’d ever told his family.
But not the only one he’d told them.
“I think what is important,” Urban said, “is why she’s here. Not what she’s like.”
“She has a name,” Miles said tightly, for some reason not liking his brother reducing her to some nameless, faceless specter from Miles’s past, despite Miles trying to think of her in exactly that way for so many years now. “As you damn well know.”
Urban inclined his head, a concession Miles’s point. “Why is Tabitha here?”
“She got a job here,” Miles said.
“What does she do?” Willow asked.
“She’s a social worker.”
More looks, this time spread around the table. More silence, thick and heavy with insinuation.
Miles didn’t mind.
It was better than them all yammering at him.
Or worse, giving their opinions on his life.
“Uh, are you sure you’re a detective?” Verity asked. No surprise she was the one to break that lovely silence or that she’d be the first one to bust his balls. “Because all the clues are right in front of you, big as life and clear as day. And they’re pointing to one, and only one, conclusion.”
She went quiet, waiting, he knew, for him to ask what that conclusion was.
And he’d eat a second helping of green beans and the ones Ian dropped on the ground before he did.
Verity huffed out a breath. “She’s here because she wants you back!”
His breathing became more labored and that lump in his throat pulsed. Grew thorns.
“No,” he said, but the word came out strangled, like it had been torn to shreds by that lump. “It’s a coincidence.”
Or just shitty luck.
But he couldn’t believe it was planned. Refused to think, even for a moment, that she was in his hometown on some mission to win him back. That she wanted a second chance.
The tingling in his fingers grew stronger. He realized his leg was bouncing. Forced it to keep still.
Struggled to breathe normally.
His phone buzzed and he reared back so quickly to dig it out of his pocket, he almost tipped over his chair. He was on his feet before he even glanced at the screen.
It was a reminder of his dental appointment tomorrow.
It was also his way out before he lost his shit.
He pocketed his phone. “I have to go.”
“Everything all right?” Willow asked.
He nodded. Pushed in his chair. “Just have to run to the station,” he lied, keeping his excuse generic and not something any of them could easily discover with a few questions, a quick scan of The Mount Laurel Gazette or the online gossip site Helen McMurtry ran for shits and giggles.
“See you,” he said, then took off before they could question him further.
Before he had a complete and utter fucking breakdown in front of them.
By the time he got to his car, his breathing was short and shallow. He was hyper vigilant as he backed out of the driveway. Completely focused as he slowly drove one block, then another, and another, the windows down, the A.C. blasting, his upper body hunched over the wheel.
He should go home, but he wasn’t going to make it. It was too risky, driving in this condition. Too dangerous.
He took a right onto Fiske Road and made it the two blocks to the back parking lot of the high school. Pulled into a spot at the rear where he knew the school’s surveillance cameras didn’t reach.
Tipping his head back, he shut his eyes. Concentrated on pulling air into his lungs for the count of four. Held it for the count of four. Exhaled for the count of four. Held it for the count of four.
Again.
And again.
But it wasn’t the box breathing that eventually eased the tightness in his chest. It wasn’t the frigid air blasting out of the vents that had his overly heated body cooling. Wasn’t the stillness and silence around him that had his racing heart slowing.
It was Tabitha. The memory of her that night at his house guiding him into taking longer, deeper breaths. Holding his hands, her grip warm and steady and so fucking certain, as if she never doubted he’d get through it.
It was her voice that replaced the buzzing sound in his head. That drowned out all the doubts and fears. All the fucking terrifying worries.
I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Whatever you need, I’m right here.
I’m here.
I’m here.
I’m here.
Her words that he clung to even though he knew they were a lie.