At first, Liam wasn’t sure he’d heard anything. He turned off the fan in the bathroom and listened, and there it was—the last notes of the ridiculous musical doorbell his mom had installed. For a second he considered ignoring it, pretending there was no one here…but it was too late for that, childish as it was. Jacinda knew he was here, and once she knew, the rest of town probably would too. Especially since he’d seen Riley Dawson go into number ten—if she talked like she used to, Clarion Call would be second only to the Kelp and King as a source of gossip.
He sighed and dried the last droplets from his body, ran his fingers through his damp hair, then pulled on boxer briefs and cargo shorts. His t-shirts were all in the dryer, which meant going past the front door and down the hall to the laundry. He jogged down the stairs, intending to grab a shirt before answering the door, but as he went through the entranceway the musical bell rang again. Through the frosted glass, he could see a figure that looked like Jacinda…turning to walk away.
Without thinking, he flipped the lock and yanked the door open, and she spun around. Instantly, her eyes went from his face to his chest, and he watched with unexpected satisfaction as her expression changed, before she carefully refocused somewhere around the top of his head.
“Hi.” She cleared her throat, shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Her face was still sunburned on one side, but he could clearly see the other side blush pink, too. Yep, she was off-balance. He let her wait just a moment longer than was polite before he answered.
“Hi.”
“Um, I’m sorry to interrupt.” She glanced at his chest again. “But I wanted to say…I mean, Riley just told me…” She paused, taking a breath. “I’m really, really sorry to hear about Ethan. I had no idea.”
He tensed as the words hit him. Hearing his brother’s name spoken aloud still had the power to throw him off-center. Especially spoken by her. He looked into the blue sky over her shoulder, then back at her face. Maybe it was time to say a few things after all. He stood back, holding the door open. “Come in.”
He could smell her light, sweet fragrance as she passed by, almost close enough to brush against his bare skin.
“Take a seat,” he said. “I’ll just be a second.”
He left her in the big living room and went along to the laundry, grabbed a t-shirt from the dryer—wrinkled, but too bad—and tugged it over his head. Focus, he told himself. This girl is trouble. She was trouble then, but now…multiply it by the factors of her life since, and you’ve got dynamite. Or kryptonite. Just have this conversation and be done with it, and done with her. She surely wouldn’t be staying for long—but if she was, a ticket back to Australia was only the click of a mouse away. There was nothing to keep him here. Coming home was meant to be time to clear out the demons of the past, not get pulled back down by the rip tide that was this girl.
He went back out to the living room, and found her standing in the corner looking down at Ethan’s guitar. His first instinct was to tell her to get the hell away from it. No one had played it since Ethan died—sitting quietly in the house, it was more of a memorial to him than the stone they’d placed on his grave. But when she turned to him, there was something in her eyes that made him hesitate.
“This guitar…” There was a break in her voice.
“I know,” he said gruffly. For a moment they looked at each other, back in time to those carefree summer days. And nights. At this thought, he snapped back into clarity. “So. You were saying?”
She seemed to shake herself into the present too. “If I’d known, I would have said something the other day. I would have said something long ago. I’m so sorry. Ethan was…amazing.”
A storm of reactions flooded through him. The long-held anger at the way she’d left, without a word to anyone, leaving Ethan gutted. Never even acknowledging his death, which had been a drawn-out, long-distance slap in the face to his family. How could he believe that she never knew? And once again, underlying everything else, he felt the unwelcome, unworthy stab of jealousy. He couldn’t face it then, and he sure as hell didn’t want to revisit it now. He couldn’t compete with the amazing Ethan when he was alive, and there was no competing with a dead man. But he’d loved his brother to death…until death. A death he could have prevented, if only he hadn’t let himself get caught up in his own unwanted feelings for his brother’s girlfriend. You don’t get much more screwed up than that.
He realized she was watching him, waiting for his reply. Shit, say something—you’ve thought about it enough times. He fired off the first thing that came into his head.
“If he was so amazing, why did you leave?”
She shut her eyes for a second as the arrow struck, the pain obvious on her face, but he didn’t regret it. Well, not much. She should feel bad. It was only a fraction of what they went through in her aftermath.
She went and sat on the sofa, where she’d lain in her bikini the day before yesterday. As the image rose in his memory, he scrubbed it away, but his brain betrayed him by recalling how she’d felt in his arms. The softness of her hair under his chin as he carried her, the warmth of her skin, her full breasts pressed together in her bikini top as he held her close against him. He rubbed his eyes, and looked at her now, making himself remember who she was. The girl who’d come out of nowhere and ruined his brother’s life, and divided his own life in two—before and after. And he remembered who she really was, as confirmed on Google.
“I couldn’t deal with everything. I just had to go home.” She looked at him. “You knew about the baby, right?”
He stayed standing, his arms crossed. “He told me you were pregnant, yeah.”
That was a conversation he’d never forget. It was probably the only time he’d known his brother truly lost, the usual bravado and confidence replaced with something raw and uncertain. He was Ethan Ward, after all—young, smart, and destined for big things. Liam knew he’d been drinking more to smother his nerves about leaving the bay to study music in Sydney, where he’d be a small fish in a big pond for the first time in his life. But the baby bombshell, and Jacinda’s exit, were the aces that brought down his house of cards. Despite the hero worship of his little brother, and the admiration of most of the kids in town, Ethan obviously wasn’t as untouchable as he seemed.
Jacinda sighed. “I asked Nana Mac to talk to your mom after I left, just in case. I didn’t know if Ethan had told her about the baby to start with, but I couldn’t let you all think I’d gone away with his baby. With her grandchild.”
“Well, it was too late. He died thinking that was exactly what you’d done. He never knew you lost it.” He knew each word was a dagger, but he couldn’t stop. “You left him broken.”
She pressed a hand to her temple. “I don’t even know what happened. Are you saying it’s my fault he died?”
He could see her emotion rising, but he didn’t let her off the hook. This was the girl who’d cut and run, without looking back. If he forced everything into the open now, maybe he’d be free of it, free of the memories…and yeah, free of the power she still had over him. It was worse now than it was then, when he was flush with teenage hormones and fraternal competitiveness. Now, he had no excuse. All he could do was drive it away, ruin any possible connection they might have. He forged on.
“Didn’t you notice that he’d been drinking more than usual? Didn’t you think something might be going on?”
“How would I know?” There was an edge to her voice. “I didn’t have anything to compare it with. And anyway, all you guys were obsessed with getting hold of beer.”
Fair point. He’d still been underage that summer, and it had pissed him off to rely on Ethan and his mates to supply them with drinks. He and Connor and Dane were on the cusp of manhood, or so they’d thought—their toes right on the line, ready to play with the grown-ups. They had no idea that they were about to get a lesson in the realities of life.
But that wasn’t the point of this conversation.
“He was going to come and see you. But then we saw you get in the car with Nana Mac, with all your things, and leave.”
He saw a flare of something in her eyes then, as if she was recalculating. Disbelief, maybe, and confusion. “Really?”
He ignored the question, and the turmoil on her face. “You expected more from him than from yourself. You told him something so huge, and expected him to deal with it instantly. He was only a kid. Couldn’t you have given him more time to get his head around it?”
“I was only a kid too.” She stood up. “He was the first guy I ever slept with, and suddenly I had a baby to think about. And then, right when I was trying to get my head around that, without him, I had a miscarriage. Can you imagine what that was like?”
“No. But at least you’re still alive to tell the tale.”
She visibly drew herself together, and steel came into her demeanor.
“I am.”
Even as he realized that he’d done what he set out to do—brought down a wall between them, severing any chance of finding comfort in their shared past—an unexpected regret washed over him.
She regarded him for a moment, composed again. “I’ll see myself out.” But after a few steps, she turned around. “Think whatever you like about me, but I am sorry about Ethan. I’m sorry for your loss.” She paused. “And I’m sorry you blame me.”
When he didn’t say anything, she turned her back and left the room. He heard the front door open, then close quietly behind her. In the silence left behind, he wondered if this was what closure felt like.