The last thing Brady wanted to do after a long day that had started with him waking up on the wrong side of the bed was do another job, but the call had come from Finn. And Finn was calling on behalf of Tess, who Brady wouldn’t have been able to say no to even if Finn hadn’t been one of his best friends.
It always amused him when he pulled into Tess’s driveway because the house he’d grown up in probably would have fit in half of her downstairs level. It was the kind of historic home that would have been on Blackberry Bay postcards if it wasn’t in need of a paint job.
The big old house had an incredible view of the bay, but it was too big for Tess since her son was long since grown and her husband had died. It had actually been too big before then, Brady thought, but it had been in the family a long time or something like that.
Now it had the shabby, overgrown look of a property that took too much labor and too much money to keep up, and Tess was too proud to ask for financial help from her family. She also refused to consider selling it. Finn and his parents tried to help as much as they could, of course, but what it really needed was a complete remodeling from the inside out.
The property was worth the investment. The location was perfect. The house and the outbuildings had good, strong bones. And it was one of the older homes in Blackberry Bay, so nobody liked seeing it get run-down. But being worth the investment only mattered if she had that money to invest, and she most definitely didn’t.
Finn met him at the front door, an apologetic look on his face. “I’m sorry to call you out here on short notice, but the outlets in her dining room aren’t working and that’s where she does her crafts, so she’s got three extension cords running in there to power an LED lamp and I’m pretty sure she found those cords in a box marked ‘1969.’”
Brady winced. “I told her no extension cords last year. Why didn’t she call me when the outlets stopped working?”
“You know how she is. She doesn’t want to bother people.” Finn shrugged. “And I kind of get it. I mean, every time she has to ask my dad for help, he or my mom will bring up the fact she should sell this place because she’ll get enough to buy a cute little condo somewhere with a nice nest egg left over. She’s not going to sell it so she doesn’t want to hear the lectures.”
“But I’m not family. Calling an electrician is a pretty standard thing for a responsible and capable homeowner to do.”
Finn tilted his head, giving him a yeah, right look. And Brady had that coming, since he wasn’t family, but also wasn’t just a random electrician she’d found on the internet, either. Tess wasn’t stupid and she had a lot of friends in town, so she had to be aware that Nash Electric did her work for an extremely discounted rate. And he charged her the nominal amount he did only because she refused to let him work for free, even when it was a small thing outside of his regular hours.
“She’s got company, so at least she won’t be looking over your shoulder or trying to help,” Finn said as they walked down the narrow hallway toward the back of the house, which was one of the drawbacks of the massive old houses. They tended to have very small rooms with a lot of hallways.
After passing through the doorway into the kitchen, Brady stopped as abruptly as if he’d walked into a glass wall.
Reyna was sitting at the table with Tess and Meredith, and all three women looked up when he walked in.
His chest tightened and the only reason he was sure he was still taking breaths was the fact he hadn’t passed out yet. Their gazes locked and all he could do was stare into her pretty blue eyes and wish seeing her didn’t hurt so much.
“Brady!” Tess pushed her chair back with a sound that tore his eyes away from Reyna, but it didn’t matter if he was actually looking at her or not. All of his focus was on the fact they were both here in the same space. But he tried to force his attention to the woman hugging him. “Did Finn call you? I told him not to bother you.”
“It would bother me a lot more if you burn this house down around your ears,” he told her, letting a little more admonishment seep into his tone than he usually did. She needed to take his warnings about piggybacking ancient extension cords a lot more seriously, but he wasn’t at all surprised when she made a scoffing sound and slapped his shoulder.
“Go fuss over the extension cords with my grandson, then,” Tess said, shooing them toward the dining room.
Neither of the other women had spoken since he walked into the kitchen, and a glance at Meredith told him she probably had no intention of speaking to him at the moment. That was understandable, since she was Reyna’s best friend and probably the first to hear they’d broken things off. There was definitely an underlying tension in the room.
But that didn’t stop him from looking at Reyna again. She looked healthy, if not happy, and his gaze lingered on the swell of her stomach and the way her hand rested lightly on it. He wanted to go to her and kiss her and rest his hand on top of hers, but he couldn’t do that anymore.
“Hi, Brady,” she said in a fake, casual way that cut him to the quick.
“Hi, Reyna. Meredith, it’s good to see you.” That didn’t feel mutual at all, so he gave the women an awkward wave and followed Finn into the dining room.
“I didn’t know Reyna was here,” Finn said in a hushed voice once they were alone. “I only beat you here by a few minutes and I saw Meredith’s car, but I got distracted by a nail starting to pop up out of the floor in the hallway and hadn’t been in the kitchen yet.”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t really fine, but there was nothing he could do about it now. “It’s not like we’re going to go the rest of our lives without seeing each other again. We’re going to have a child together. Forever.”
“Good point. Oh, and the Chevelle, too.”
Brady hadn’t even thought about the car. With his heart being broken and his entire world crashing down around him, the Chevelle hadn’t crossed his mind. “I don’t care about the car. It’ll get done eventually. Now, which outlets aren’t working?”
Once Finn had pointed out the problem, Brady was left alone to work, and he liked it that way. From the sounds of it, the women had moved to the front sitting room, which was good because going down into the cellar required going through the kitchen. Making multiple trips would have meant walking past Reyna more often than he thought he could stand.
All he could do was keep his head down and get his work done, and eventually the pain would fade. Maybe not completely because he couldn’t foresee a day he wouldn’t love Reyna, but it would dull over time into a chronic ache he could live with. He hoped it would, anyway. They were going to be seeing each other on a regular basis for the rest of their lives—or at least until their child was an adult—and if it continued to hurt as much as walking into Tess’s kitchen and seeing Reyna’s face had, he was doomed.
* * *
Reyna hadn’t expected to see Brady today, and even though she was drinking the decaf coffee Tess had made for her and was pretending to listen to her and Meredith’s conversation about the Price-Maguire bunch’s plans for school vacation, her attention was fully on tracking his movements through the house.
She’d been relieved when Tess had suggested they move from the kitchen to the sitting room to get out of Brady’s way. Seeing him had made her heart ache in a way she hadn’t been prepared for. She missed him. She missed his face and his laugh and his touch. She missed how much pleasure he got out of cooking for her—and she missed the food, too—and the way he liked to be touching her in some casual way. Sometimes his hand over hers, or his leg pressed against her leg.
Tess’s house was old and she could hear the creaking in the floorboards sometimes. Or the squeak of the cellar door hinges, followed by his footsteps on the ancient wooden stairs.
“I should go check on those boys,” Tess said, getting to her feet.
“I’m sure the two grown men, one of whom is a professional, can handle it,” Meredith said, but Tess just scoffed at her and kept walking. “Poor Brady.”
Just hearing his name said aloud sent a fresh wave of sadness through Reyna, and this time her friend wasn’t distracted by Tess, so she didn’t miss it. “Do you want to leave, Reyna?”
She did want to leave. She also didn’t want to, because she could hear the low murmur of Brady’s voice and she’d missed it so much.
Meredith got out of her seat and walked over to join Reyna on the love seat so she could lean close. “I can see how hard it is for you to be here. We can just go before he finishes and then you won’t have to see him again.”
“But I want to see him,” Reyna whispered. “I miss him.”
“Maybe this isn’t the place, though. I still don’t understand exactly why you guys broke up, but I don’t think having Tess in the middle of it is going to help either of you.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Take my keys and go wait in the car. I’ll go tell Tess something came up and then we’ll get out of here.”
She didn’t have the emotional strength to tell Tess goodbye and thank her for the coffee because that would mean talking to Brady again, so she took the keys. But sitting in the car meant having Brady’s truck directly in her line of sight, and by the time Meredith slid into the driver’s seat, tears were spilling over onto her cheeks.
“Where do you want to go?” Meredith asked once they were heading back into the heart of the town. “Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”
“Can you drop me off at my mom’s?”
“Sure. Isn’t she at the bakery right now, though?”
“Yeah, but she’ll be home soon and it’ll give me some time to relax.”
Of course, her relaxation was heading into the old garage. After a detour through the house to use the bathroom, she pulled on a pair of coveralls. She wasn’t going to be able to zip them for very much longer, she thought as she ran her hand over the baby.
When she stepped inside and turned the overheads on, she felt a fluttering and shifting in her belly and smiled. She liked to think the baby could feel the comfort the sights and smells of this place brought to its mommy.
She ran her hand over the curve of the Chevelle’s rear quarter panel as she walked around the car. When she’d first taken on the project, she’d been thinking about her dad. Jimmy Bishop would have jumped at the chance to be a part of putting her back on the road and Reyna had felt the thrill of that challenge. But now it just made her think of Brady.
Someday she’d see him cruising down the main street in this car, maybe with a car seat in the back seat. And maybe with some other woman riding shotgun.
An hour later, she watched her mom’s car pull into the drive. It was another beautiful spring day, so she’d put the overhead door up. It was a manual door, unlike the doors at the new garage, so it had been a task, but worth it to have fresh air circulating around her.
“You’re home early,” Reyna said, setting down the wire brush she was using to clean a part.
“It was a slow day.”
“How much time between Meredith dropping me off and calling you?”
Her mom chuckled. “A few minutes because she didn’t call. She stopped at the bakery so she could tell me she was worried about you and get a cupcake.”
“She’s always been a smart one. But I’m fine, Mom.”
When her mom crossed the threshold and walked toward her, Reyna raised an eyebrow. Jenelle Bishop never went into the old garage. She rarely entered the new one, and only if she had to. But Reyna couldn’t remember ever seeing her actually inside this one. She either yelled from the back step or stood at the doorway.
But her mom got close enough to hold Reyna’s face in her hands so she couldn’t look away. “You’ve been wiping tears off your face with greasy hands and you look like you’re about to deploy on a secret military mission in the jungle. You are not fine.”
That was all it took. The tears started again and, when her mom’s arms wrapped around her, she gave in to the grief that had been strangling her since she and Brady ended their relationship.
“I don’t understand why you two split up,” her mom said once the worst had passed. “Honestly, nobody does. I had hoped because Meredith and you are so close and sometimes you tell your friends things you won’t tell your mother, that she’d have some insight, but everybody seems to be at a loss.”
“There’s nothing I would tell anybody that I wouldn’t tell you, Mom. The reason everybody’s at a loss is that nobody knows the whole truth.”
Her mom’s brow furrowed. “What whole truth?”
“You can’t tell anybody else. Not even Meredith.” When her mom gave her a look, she smiled. She hadn’t needed to say that. “Brady and I were only pretending to date.”
Jenelle actually barked out a laugh. “That was pretending?”
“I’ve wanted a baby so much for so long. And you know, Dad got sick and everybody in this town knows I have the worst luck with men. When Lucas and I blew up on the Jumbotron, I knew I was looking at probably years before I could be a mom. So I asked Brady to have a baby with me.”
“Oh, Reyna. We could have come up with the money somehow. For artificial insemination, I mean.”
“No, we really couldn’t. We do okay. We don’t do that okay. And we know Brady. We know the Nash family.”
“Okay. Why pretend to be a couple, though?”
“You know how this town is. Me having a baby was going to be gossip no matter what, but I wanted it to be the most boring gossip ever.”
Jenelle laughed. “You are just like your father, I swear. You want something, you get it.”
“We had always planned to break up before the baby was born.” She rubbed her hand over her stomach.
“Ah.” Her mom nodded, her mouth curved into a knowing smile. “Since neither of you are award-winning actors, I’m going to guess your plan went off the rails because you are both obviously in love.”
“I can’t even tell you when it stopped being fake because I don’t even know. He’s just…” She couldn’t come up with words to encompass her feelings for Brady, so she just waved her hand in the air. “But that wasn’t the plan. I told him I wanted a baby and I wouldn’t ask anything else of him. He wanted a baby, too, though, so we’ll share this little one. But as co-parents, not as a couple.”
“Why now?”
“Meredith and Sydney were talking about the baby shower and the nursery or whatever, and they were surprised I wasn’t planning to move into Brady’s house because it’s big and gorgeous and it would make sense. And I realized we’d reached the point where people would start asking questions we couldn’t really answer as a couple. Then he got pushy about my plans for the garage and maternity leave and I pushed him away.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I pushed hard.”
Her mom pulled her in for another hug. “Maybe it’s for the best. You love him. I believe in my heart he loves you. If you’re meant to be together—and you are—then you’ll come to each other out of love and not because it was planned or because of this baby or any other reason. Just love for each other.”
Reyna wanted to believe that. She wanted to believe there was still a chance that she and Brady could be together—that his feelings for her were as real as hers for him—but the thought of reaching out to him was so terrifying, her hands were shaking.
“For now, let’s go in the house. You need to wash your face and then we’re going to start making a list of things we need to get done before my grandbaby’s born. We’re going to focus on the joy today because that’s what you and this baby need.”
“We also need something salty and crunchy,” Reyna said, wiping her cheeks with the coveralls’ sleeve, which probably did nothing to clean her face.
“I was going to make mashed potatoes with tonight’s dinner, but maybe we’ll make homemade chips instead.”
They pulled the overhead door down and Jenelle waited while Reyna turned off the lights and locked up. Then she tucked her arm through her daughter’s as they walked across the yard.
“The important thing is that you’re going to be okay,” she said. “You have me and this baby and good friends who care about you.”
“I know, Mom.”
But she wanted Brady, too.