“How many more boxes?” Ren asked as he added two more to the pile against the wall in the living room.
“A couple. Why?”
“These aren’t just filled with journals,” she explained while rummaging through one. “There are keepsakes from when you and Marcus were little, personal papers, pictures, school reports, other stuff.”
“Okay, so we need to go through everything before we start reading the journals then.” He turned to head back out for the last load.
“Wait. You want me to help with that? Don’t you want to decide what to keep and what to throw out?”
There were a dozen boxes of various sizes lined up against the wall. On his own it would take him days, but with Ren’s help they could gather things into piles by priority and work their way through in one or less. “Let me grab the last two boxes, then we’ll start piles and decide what we should look at first.”
“It would be quicker to decide what to keep and not while we sort. If we sort then go through each pile, that’s dealing with everything twice. Double handling is not an efficient way to do any job.”
“Okay. We decide as we go. We’ll need a throw, a keep, and a journal pile. We should keep those separate, right?”
Ren waved a hand toward the door. “Go get the rest, I’ll grab a garbage bag for the stuff you want to get rid of, and once we empty a couple of boxes, we can store anything you want to keep in categories in separate boxes instead of having it all tossed in together like it is now. You might want to frame some of these pictures for the walls too so we should keep those separate from the other keepsakes your mother has in here.”
Brady glanced around the room. The only thing filling the place was a worn couch and one chair; both items had been here when he was a kid. Everything else was stripped bare. Bare walls, bare mantle over the fireplace, bare shelves on the empty bookcase beneath the window.
He didn’t recall his mother ever putting pictures up here. She’d filled Hank’s house with them but here, in the mountain home she’d run from, she’d never displayed any. There had to be a reason for that.
Everything he’d learned in recent months pointed out he didn’t know his mother as well as he thought he had. She had secrets. Secrets she’d taken to the grave if she hadn’t written them down in one of the many journals scattered throughout these boxes.
It was a daunting task, going though all her things. He’d gotten rid of her clothes—and Hank’s—before selling the farm, and Hank’s estate paperwork had been dealt with by his lawyer. Hank hadn’t had any family, which explained why he’d left the farm to Brady and his mom, so the decision on what to do with Hank’s personal papers had fallen to them.
He’d kept the man’s birth and death certificates as well as the original deed to the farm. Anything that dealt with the business of the farm went to the new owners. It had taken months to go through everything after Hank’s death. Brady hoped these boxes didn’t take him as long.
His mother had been of no use without Hank, and Brady hadn’t really known what to do with most things so had relied on advice from Hank’s lawyer. Luckily the lawyer had also been a friend and he’d been more than happy to lend a hand outside of his legal obligation, but that was more confirming Brady’s decisions than helping him make them.
Now Brady had Ren. He might not have her the way he wanted to, but he had her. By his side to walk down this path that left him feeling gutted before they’d even started.
“Thank you.” He leaned over and brushed his lips on top of her head. “I don’t think I’d have the nerve to do this yet if you weren’t helping.”
“Why? It’s just boxes of papers and photos from your mother’s life.”
“Actually, I think what we’ve got here is the family closet.”
“Meaning?”
“There are skeletons in here I’m not sure I want to dig up.”
“If you want answers, we’re going to find them buried with those bones.”
Brady sighed. “I know. I just can’t help wondering if it would be better to not know. I have a bad feeling what we find here is going to be far worse than anything we already know about.”
“It might be.” Ren pushed to her feet and stepped into him, wrapping her arms around his waist as she rested her cheek on his shoulder. “But, Brady, you’re not the only one affected by what we find. We need to know if your father really did have something to do with the Wilders’ deaths and why your mother thought she had to leave the mountain in the middle of the night without a word to anyone before or after.”
“And why Marcus stayed.” Slipping his arms around her, he pulled her closer, lowered his head to rest his cheek on her hair. “I’ll never forgive him for breaking her heart.”
“I’m not sure we’ll ever find the answer to why he stayed other than Marcus idolized your father. I saw it after you were gone. He was also terrified of him. Everyone was. And when Malcolm showed up after we all thought he was dead, Rowen said he looked unhinged to her. As though he’d lost touch with reality. From what Gordie discovered he’d been doing, I have to agree with Rowen; his actions definitely say he’d gone insane.”
“Marcus?”
“No. Malcolm. But then with everything Marcus did in recent months, he appeared to have gone crazy too.”
“We need to talk to the sheriff. I’m supposed to talk to him about Marcus anyway, so I guess we’ll ask about the Wilders’ accident and my dad at the same time.”
Ren pulled back and looked up at him. They were close in height but she still needed to tilt her head back a little to make eye contact. “You want me to go with you to see Dale?”
“Yes, of course, you volunteered to help, remember?”
“I volunteered to help read journals which somehow turned into sorting through boxes of personal effects and now talking to the sheriff. I’ve got a life you know. I can’t just drop everything to be at your beck and call, Brady.”
“I’m not asking you to do that. It won’t be for a few days. We’ll have to wait until this storm front moves on. In the meantime we’ll go through my mom’s things and see what we can find.”
“I need to leave soon, and if we get the snow they’re predicting, I won’t be able to come back for a few days.”
“Stay.”
“What?” She jerked in his arms, tried to pull free, but he held on.
“If we get snowed in, you won’t be opening the Den, right, because no one will be out and about. Stay here, help me use the time we’ll be trapped indoors to go through everything.”
“I—”
“Please.” He’d beg if he had too. He wanted her close. Wanted to be able to convince her they could be more than childhood friends. He couldn’t do that if she went home.
She searched his eyes, looking for something he wasn’t sure he understood but desperately wanted to give her. “I’ll need to make a phone call and check on things before I can say yes.” She stayed in his arms, studying him.
“Make the call.”
Neither of them moved; lost in their own thoughts, they remained still, wrapped in each other’s arms.
Brady took the time to catalogue the changes in her face from when they were kids. She was still the same Ren; the girl he’d loved had grown into a beautiful woman, there was no denying that, except there were subtle changes. Small lines beside her eyes, her hair was shorter than she used to keep it, and her body had developed curves in interesting places.
Places his body was all too aware of.
All those changes had barely begun when he’d left and he had to wonder if he was the only man who noticed her. Now or in the years he’d been gone.
“You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?” he blurted before the thought even registered in his head.
“What?” She pulled away from him; breaking out of his hold, she took a step back and slammed her hands on her hips. “What kind of question is that? Do you think I’d be here with you, in your arms, if I did?”
“You’re not here with me though, are you? And that was just a comforting hug between old friends, right?”
Her mouth opened. Closed. The ends tipped down.
“Forget I asked. It’s none of my business.”
“None of your business.” Palms flat on his chest, she gave him a shove. “Of course it’s your business, Brady Connelly, you’re my mate.”
He sucked in a breath, every muscle snapping taut, his coyote howling with pleasure. Neither of them had voiced the mate thing out loud yet. Hearing her say it, admit it, had Brady’s insides scrambling.
He wanted to throw her over his shoulder, find the nearest bed, and claim her.
Wanted to pick her up and spin her around.
Wanted to race outside and yell it for the mountain to hear.
“What are we going to do about that?” he asked instead.
“Nothing. Yet.” She paced away from him. “I’m not ready for that. I don’t think you are either. There’s too much”—she waved a hand at the boxes—“to deal with before we deal with us.”
“Is there an us?” Brady mentally crossed his fingers.
“I might not be ready for there to be, but I’m not stupid and I refuse to live in denial. We’re mates and even if I’m not happy about it, that’s our reality. And I’m okay with it, as long as you don’t pressure me to accept you. I get that neither of us really has a choice in this, but I’ll be damned if we’re forced to do anything before we get our heads around it and I’d like to get to know you again before jumping into a mating bond. So, yes, there is an us, but we’ll deal with it in a way that suits us.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? Okay what? You’re happy to wait until I’m ready?”
“Yes.”
“Why do I not believe that?”
Brady laughed. “I’m not going to force you into anything, and I definitely won’t be forcing myself on you. I will be honest about what I feel and the struggle I’m having waiting though. But you are right, there’s far too much I need to deal with first. I want to put all of it behind us, put it in the past where it belongs, so when we are ready we’ll be going forward with a clean slate.”
“So we agree to put the mate thing aside and deal with all of this as friends.”
“We’re more than friends, Ren.”
“Obviously. Still, we ignore all that for now.”
“We can try. I don’t know how successful we’ll be. A mate connection is hard to ignore. It’s the strongest connection there is, and we had it long before we knew what it was.”
She tilted her head to the side, one eyebrow arching in question.
“You have to admit we were inseparable as kids. Our subconsciouses knew long before we did that we were meant to be together.”
“I think our being mates explains a lot of things,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She gave his shoulder a push. “Go get the other boxes and I’ll make that call.”
“You didn’t really answer my question.”
“What question?”
“Do you have a boyfriend, Ren?”
She growled, her scowl cute in its fierceness. “No.”
“Good.”
Before she could comment on his remark, he left the house and went to retrieve the last two boxes from the back of his truck. He hadn’t bothered to bring them inside until now because he didn’t want to deal with any of this. Except what he said to Ren was true. He—they—needed to put the past in the past and more forward with a clean slate. They deserved that.
And Whispering Springs deserved to know what his father had done.
Brady could only hope whatever his father had done hadn’t left permanent scars.
Unfortunately, he thought those hopes would go unrealized. He had no idea what his father had been like outside of the house because Brady rarely spent time with him at home, never mind in town. Marcus truly had been the favored son and as bad as it was to think, he couldn’t help but be grateful his brother had taken their father’s affections.
Marcus had ended up dead, and Brady had to assume their father’s influence had a lot to do with the outcome of his brother’s life.
He’d struggled to understand how his mother could leave with only one son but maybe she knew something he didn’t. Maybe there was something in her journals or papers that would explain everything.
“Hey, you bringing those boxes in? It’s starting to snow.”
Ren’s words pulled him from his thoughts. He had no idea how long he’d stood there in a daze but she was right. The snow was coming down and it wasn’t a light fall either. Glancing up, he scanned the sky. “The storm moved in early.”
“Looks like it. Wendy said the sheriff was in to let all the out-of-towners know they should head on home before it got to the point they couldn’t.”
“Wendy?”
“My manager. She’s keeping the Den open in case anyone gets stuck in town. She lives in one of the apartments above so she won’t have to go out in the storm to get home.”
“You’re staying?”
Frowning, she turned her face up to look at the sky. “Yeah. Even if I hadn’t decided to, I don’t think I’ve got a choice now.”
Brady turned to hide his smile. She might not be exactly happy to be staying with him but he’d work with what he could get. A lot had changed in just a few hours. With a day or two of snowed-in time he would have hours to convince her not only that their mating wasn’t a bad thing, but it was something good.