Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Everett
Who needs sleep anyway? Stamp that motto on my fucking forehead. When I breathe through my mouth just to survive—I taste her. Specifically, the memory of the first time I made her come.
One minute I’m pacing the hallway, listening to the pipes tick and the storm-that-wasn’t rattling my windows because even the weather is mocking me at this point.
The next, I’m restlessly circling the lobby just off the great room. All because an hour ago, Sierra Barrett—patron saint of passive-aggressive warfare—smiled at me.
Just as sweet as hot cider.
Right before verbally drop-kicking my soul across the lodge in front of all of our friends and my own damn uncle.
She dropped history bombs like she was reading off a grocery list.
As if I don’t already choke on enough of our history every time I walk into this room.
It wasn’t what she said—it was how she looked at me.
First, like she could see right through me, all the way down to the part of me that still hasn’t learned how to get over her.
Then like I was demolishing history.
Yeah? Well maybe I want to demolish some history, Sierra.
I scrub a hand over my face.
Christ. One perfectly measured jab from her and my whole chest feels like she reached in and rearranged my organs to the damn rule of thirds.
This is pathetic.
I’m pathetic.
I drag in a breath, square my shoulders, and tell myself I’m not going to let one woman—one infuriating, impossible, stunning woman—knock me clean on my ass again.
It’s my lodge.
It’s my legacy.
And fucking hell, that is my goddamned bar and great room.
Mine.
The fire burns low, all embers and shadows. Someone left a half-finished puzzle on the coffee table, a mug with lipstick on the rim beside it. The lodge feels half-asleep—quiet, but not empty.
Something pulls me toward the alcove—the same invisible thread that's been yanking me toward Sierra Barrett since I was nineteen and stupid enough to fall for my best friends’ baby sister.
The display case doors hang open, Holly's cleaning project abandoned. My grandmother's ridiculous snowmen gleam in neat rows. A smile tugs at my mouth despite my mood. I’m halfway there to shut the doors when I see her.
Sierra’s curled up on the window seat, tucked into the angle of the wall like she’s trying to disappear into it. Legs folded, hair tumbling over her face, hand resting on her stomach.
Fast asleep.
For a second, I just stand there, breath stuck somewhere behind my ribs.
She looks softer like this. Less like the woman who damn near seared my retinas off last night and more like who I fell for. The one with wild hair I used to tug just to hear her breathe harder.
Her camera rests on the cushion beside her—never far from reach. But it's what's clutched in her hand that wrecks me.
A photograph.
The photograph.
Worn at the edges and creased from handling.
And from here… I can see us.
Me.
Her.
Together.
My breath stumbles.
My pulse spikes.
And every inch of frustration from the night dissolves into something I don’t have a name for. Something raw. Something old. Something I've spent nine years refusing to name.
Because whatever she’s holding onto… she’s been holding a long time and it tells a far different story than the one I’ve been clinging to for more than a decade.
The one she made sure I believed when she ended us.
Sierra with her head thrown back in laughter, throat bared, eyes closed, cheeks flushed. My arm around her waist, my mouth pressed to her neck, both of us oblivious to my grandmother and her sneaky little camera.
The only evidence that ever existed of what we were to each other. The proof I thought she'd destroyed along with whatever we might have become.
She kept it. All these years, she kept it. And suddenly every bitter certainty I've built my walls from starts to crack.
“Roman texted,” I say, my voice rougher than I intend. “They’ll be here early.”
Sierra startles awake, clutching the photo to her chest even before she's fully conscious. When her eyes land on me, they widen with the same panic from just hours earlier when I spotted her with Holly and Chance.
“You still have it.” My fingers itch to take the photograph, to confirm it's real. To confirm that any of it was real.
Scrambling to sit up, her fingers fumble, shoving the photo into her pocket like it will erase the last ten seconds. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing.” I let out a humorless laugh that makes my own ears burn. “Right.”
I step closer, because apparently I like pain.
“What else are you hiding, Sierra?”
“Don't.” She edges away, preferring the cold glass of the window pressed against her back than my getting any closer to her.
Message received.
Too bad I don’t give a shit.
“Don't what, Sierra?” I move closer, crowding her into the corner of the window seat. “Don't remind you how you threw us away? How you made me believe none of it was real?”
“You know why—”
I slam my palms onto the window frame on either side of her, caging her in—the wood creaking in protest.
“No,” I bite out. My heart pounds so hard I feel it in my teeth. “I don’t. You never gave me a reason. You just pushed me away and let me think—” My voice catches, snagging on the raw edge I never quite managed to sand smooth. “Let me think I meant nothing.”
“It was better that way,” she whispers.
It’s a lie.
I hear it.
She hears it.
I hope it hurts.
“Easier,” she adds, like that’s supposed to make it better.
“Easier,” I repeat, sliding my hand up to her neck. Curling my fingers behind her nape, I tilt her face up to mine.
Her eyes glitter in the low light, the same icy blue as the mountain in late January when the weather turns and it’s almost too cold to snow.
Only, with her, there’s nothing cold in them. There never was. They’ve always seared.
She didn't just burn me—she leveled me.
I cover the ruin with grins and easy banter, but the truth is, her fire cauterized just enough to keep me standing. The rest of me still bleeds.
“You want to know what’s easy, Sierra?” I murmur, my eyes tracing over her plump bottom lip. “Demolishing this whole fucking section. Tearing down every memory until there’s nothing left but a clean slate.”
If I can’t have her, then fine—I’ll make sure she’s bleeding too. A matching set. His-and-hers trauma.
Petty? Absolutely. But petty’s easier to live with than heartbreak.
And at least I’ll know it was real.
“You can’t—”
“Watch me.”
The kiss, when it hits, isn’t sweet. It isn’t careful.
It’s a collision.
My mouth crashes into hers, swallowing whatever argument she was about to lob at me. Years of want, rage, grief—every feeling I’ve tried to bury in work and distance and bad decisions—roar to the surface all at once.
Her lips part on a shocked sound and I take advantage, deepening the kiss, backing her into the corner until there’s nowhere for her to go but into me.
My fingers fist in her hair, tilting her head, angling her mouth so I can devour her properly. I’ve kept this part of me on a leash for nine goddamn years. One taste and the leash snaps.
The rational part of my brain—the one that spent almost a decade pretending he didn't need this—has a lot to say about how catastrophically stupid this is.
Don’t fall for it, man. You know what she’ll do. She’ll hollow you out.
Inner me needs to shut his fucking mouth because this… Jesus Christ, this is what I’ve been searching for in every woman I’ve been with since her.
This is what I’ve never come close to finding since.
She tastes the same. Warm and sweet and a little like the cider she was nursing earlier. Familiar in a way that digs in, right in the center of my chest, and claws down.
Her hands curl in the front of my shirt.
She could push me away.
She doesn’t.
She pulls me closer.
When she gasps into my mouth, I swallow the sound, desperate for every piece of her I can claim.
“Tell me you don’t feel it,” I growl against her lips, dragging my mouth down to her throat, finding the spot that always made her shiver. I scrape my teeth along that sensitive patch of skin and she arches into me.
That’s more like it.
“Tell me again how easy it is to forget.”
My greedy hands slide under her sweater, mapping long-lost familiar territory.
The soft curve of her waist.
The delicate ridges of her ribs.
The heat of her skin burns into my palms as my hands remember paths my brain pretends it erased.
“I hate you,” she whispers, even as her fingers dig into my shoulders.
A dark laugh rumbles out of me against her skin. “No, you don’t.” I nip her jaw, catch her soft intake of breath. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You never did.”
My thigh wedges between hers, and I can't stop the groan that escapes when she rocks against me.
All the careful distance I’ve built between us evaporates. There’s just her and me and this fucking window seat and every bad decision I’m one second away from making again.
She looks up at me, eyes bright with unshed tears. “Your grandmother’s the only one who saw us.” The words slip out, barely above a whisper. “Saw everything. The only one who understood sometimes love isn’t enough.”
“Bullshit.” I kiss her again, harder this time. Like I can punish her with it for the way she broke my heart. “Love is always enough. You were just too scared to believe it.”
“Your friendship with my brothers—”
“Was never worth losing you.” My hands slip higher, thumbs grazing the undersides of her breasts. The touch a warning—a promise for where they’ll go next.
She shudders, her breath stuttering from between kiss-swollen lips.
When her nipples pebble against my palms, something hot and vicious punches through my chest.
Forehead to hers, gasping breaths mingling between us, I stare at her mouth because looking into those eyes is just too much. “I would have fought for us, Sierra. But you wouldn't fight for me.”
“Yo, Everett—”
Fuck.
Roman’s voice carries from the hallway outside the great room. Of course her brothers show up now, in the middle of the night, all careless cheer and zero timing.
I tear myself away from Sierra, my chest heaving, my cock a throbbing problem pressed against my zipper.
One. Two. Three gasps of air later and the door swings open. Roman strides in, Caleb and Nolan on his heels, tracking in mud and laughter.
Shaking his head at something Caleb says, Roman’s turns, his gaze swinging right to the opening of the great room and lands on us.
Sierra’s pressed into the corner of the window seat, flushed, lips swollen. I’m standing too close, breathing too hard, looking too guilty.
“Whoa,” Caleb says quietly. “Did we interrupt… something?”
“Nothing,” Sierra blurts, her voice too bright.
Ass on fire, she pushes past me, weaves around an easy chair, almost bites it clearing the sofa, before slamming her hip into an end table.
Smooth.
“We were just talking—planning really. Modernization meets preservation and all that.”
My hands curl into fists and my eyes sink shut.
More than a decade may have passed, but we’ve lived this pattern hundred of times before.
My tongue in her mouth, hers in mine, our hands exploring every bit of skin we could get our hands on. Just to have to break apart when we hear someone coming—usually her brothers.
She hides, and I have to choke back the confession.
I hated it then.
I resent the fuck out of it now.
And still I can’t bring myself to make the unilateral decision I know needs to be made and spit out the truth.
“Relax. If anything happened, I’d be smiling.”
Sierra squeaks—tiny, strangled, the same sound she makes at the first drag of my tongue when I disappear between her thighs.
It’s a good fucking sound.
Three sets of Barrett eyes swing to me.
Of course they do.
“That’s not what I meant.” Not even close, but it’s exactly what I did. I’m just not smiling because—cockblockers.
She’s lucky I’m having mercy on her after the way she pummeled me in front of the entire bar tonight.
But she’s teetering on the edge of a full-blown panic attack—something I’ve witnessed a time or two—and I prefer being the reason for her lack of oxygen, thanks.
Roman slips his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “Then what did you mean?”
“Give me some credit.” I shrug with the ease of a man who has absolutely nothing to hide. “I don’t do secrets badly enough to get caught like this.”
Their eyes narrow.
Sierra makes another strangled sound—the kind that tells me she's remembering exactly how good I am at secrets.
Don't crack now. You're the one who wanted this secret. Own it.
“Bourbon?” I don’t wait for an answer. I cross to the bar, pull down four tumblers, and start pouring with deliberate, unbothered precision.
Because feigned confidence is great—but whiskey’s better.