The Virgin's Revenge (25 page)

“Cole—”

“They weren’t
you
.” Not a single one had ever come close. She’d been his friend, his ally. His heart. And she never had a fucking clue. “No one else ever will be, either. But why listen to facts when we can just dig out a convenient reason for you to avoid choosing something important in your life?”

“You can’t say things like that. You can’t just rewrite the past when it suits you. You spent years treating me like just another one of the boys. All that time, you never once noticed how much I wanted you to see me. To want me.” Fat tears fell over her cheeks while she spoke, her voice thick and choked.

It’d be easier to take another punch from Locke than to keep himself from crossing the room and hauling her against him. She tried to twist away, but he hushed her and held her close while she cried against his neck.

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he whispered when she’d finally calmed. “But no one is going to make this choice for you. You have to either believe that I love you, that we can make a future together, or throw everything we could have together away. Because I’m here and I’m telling you that I love you. That I think you’re beautiful. You’re the smartest, most creative, loving person I have ever known. You may doubt yourself, Amanda, but I never have. And I never will.”

He still held her, but the more he talked, the stiffer she went in his arms. Separating herself from his words. From all the things about herself she didn’t believe. Worse, her silence might as well have been a death knell.

He pulled back, trying like hell not to shake her. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

That beautiful blue-gray of her eyes was muted as she looked up at him through a sheen of tears. “How can I?”

”It’s called faith. It’s called trust. Hell, it’s called taking a risk. Like I’m taking right now, opening myself up to you when you know I haven’t done that for anyone in my life. Yes, I should have told you the truth from the beginning. I screwed up, I admit it. But that doesn’t change the fact that I love you. I’ll say it as many times as you need to hear it. Until you believe me. Because I don’t want us to end. I
never
want us to end.”

She wavered—he could feel her swaying closer to him—but somewhere between one breath and the next…she drifted away. She looked down, carefully pulling his hands from her arms and lowering them to his sides before stepping back once. Twice. When she met his gaze again, all he could see was regret. “So why does it feel like we just did?”

Yup, there it was. His heart, ripped out. And with such a softly spoken question, too.

He looked down at his hand, the bruising and the swelling growing by the second. Seemed fitting. Bloodied inside and out.

“No matter what happens from now on, how much it hurts, I’m never going to regret being with you. Not for your sake. Not for mine.” He went to her, his boots crunching on glass, and pulled her to a hard kiss that burned in more ways than one.

She didn’t fight him, her tears stinging the split in his lip. He didn’t care. He kissed her like a brand he only wished he could leave on her.

Love me back.

Love me enough.

When he finally let go, she was clinging to him. But she wouldn’t look up, and that was the only answer he knew he would get.

“You know where to find me. I’ll be waiting.”

Brave words.

Too bad bravery doesn’t mean shit when the one person you need is the only person you can’t have.

Amanda sat at the register, staring out the front window with her chin in her hand. She could see Dean and Daniel changing the window dressing in the sporting goods store. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen the elder twins wrestle a kayak into that space before—fun as it was to watch—but more because she couldn’t keep herself from wondering if they’d spoken to Cole.

Not that she wanted to ask.

Five days, and she hadn’t heard from either Cole or Locke. Hadn’t seen them, either. Cole, she wasn’t
as
worried about. He often locked himself in his apartment, working on code or his designs uninterrupted for days on end. His parting comment about her knowing where to find him didn’t let her worry much, either. Apparently, he was serious about her making a choice. But not Locke.

Amanda couldn’t remember the last time Locke had ever missed a day of work for anything but the rare vacation or business trip. He just…didn’t. His routine was so strict the boys had actually set their clocks by him once to test him. After a while, they just left all the clocks in the house that way.

Why wasn’t he there?

Of course, when that question wasn’t hovering in her mind, one of her brothers was distracting her. This week had been a blend of strangeness she still hadn’t quite figured out how to process. Once they realized she knew about their plot to get Cole to marry her—a plot they all claimed Locke had come up with on his own, as if that excused their agreement to it—it occurred to them that she might be mad at them too. More surprising, they were all determined to get back into her good graces.

Five guys with no sense of tact and no leader turned out to be a frightening thing. With the exception of Locke, all her brothers had at some point lain in wait for her.

It started with Peter and Steven coming to her door on Sunday, armed with the most unexpected things guaranteed to get her talk to them—out-of-state college acceptance letters. Always studious, they hadn’t been content to go to one of the local UCs or state universities, so they snuck their admissions applications behind everyone’s back. Peter had even enrolled The Brainiac, cousin Spencer, to help them out with letters of recommendation. Smart plan, really. Though the science community apparently considered his teaching high-schoolers an eccentricity, the big nerd was still something of a rock star in his field and he could keep a secret like no one else in town. Now they’d been offered scholarships to three Ivy League schools, which appealed to their joint desire to go to medical school. They faced only one insurmountable problem.

“Can you talk to Locke for us? He’ll never let us go if you don’t,” Peter had asked, his nearly brown blond hair falling into his eyes. Steven had given her his best dimpled beg-face. “He listens to you.”

Which was laughable, but she’d told them she’d try. Because she always tried for them. Because they’d shared their secret with her, and she’d known when they told her about their scholarships that they wanted her to be proud of them. Needed her to be.

That was when she understood. When their parents died, the boys were only six. Little more than babies, sensitive kids who’d latched onto the only mother they had left—her. The same way all of them had latched onto Locke.

So she gave them what they needed. The support, the love and yes, even the pride she felt that they’d accomplished this huge step in their lives. But the ache in her heart at the thought of them moving across the country? That she kept to herself.

Even before the boys had gone home, the guilt had started setting in about Locke. The things she’d said. The hurtful way she’d thrown everything in his face…If he never forgave her, she wouldn’t blame him. He had to learn limits but most of what she’d said wasn’t about setting limits. It had been simply to hurt him. After all he’d done for her, for all of them. She wasn’t sure she could forgive herself.

And, it seemed, her brothers weren’t sure she could forgive them either.

Andrew had come into the shop during a break at the sporting goods store the next day. He’d brought a card, one all five of them had signed, apologizing. “You know we’d just make a mess of it if we tried to tell you at the same time,” Andrew pointed out when she opened the card. “We figured if we said it with this, we stood less of a chance of pissing you off.”

The front read, “So Sorry…” over a picture of a flying dove. The inside had a rainbow and in somber script read, “Thinking of you in this difficult time.”

She stared at it, then up at her only slightly younger brother. “This is a bereavement card, Andrew.”

He nodded, smiling for a few awkward beats before glancing at the card more carefully. “What’s bereavement?”

“Andrew?”

“Yeah?”

“Get out.”

He’d kissed her cheek and hightailed it back to Locke’s store. Where Locke wasn’t. Where Cole wasn’t, either.

At least the elder twins had brought her dinner. Sort of. They’d apparently spent all day sitting on her porch, hoping to talk to her. Unfortunately, they hadn’t thought to check her shift times and spent all that time waiting for nothing. By the time she got there, half the pot pie they’d brought her from Shaky Jake’s was gone and the note on the bag told her they were sorry. Considering either Dean or Daniel would normally bite her for snitching any of their food, the half-pie was a sweet concession.

So far today, none of her brothers had come or called.

Especially not Locke.

She couldn’t even think about Cole…

“Still no sign of him?” Susie asked, her loose curls pulled up into a ponytail, walking out of the back room with yet another packed box for the mailman to take. She put it down behind the register. If anything had paid off, it was that catalog they’d made. Susie’s designs had been in steadily increasing demand for weeks from individual buyers, and she’d just gotten her first boutique order online the other day. Happy as she was for her friend, Amanda hadn’t had it in her to celebrate much.

Strangely enough, neither had Susie.

“Nope.”

“You still not going to ask your brothers where he is?” Susie’s gaze felt like a laser on the back of Amanda’s skull.

“Nope.”

“Why? And I want the real reason this time. Not that bullshit you tried to shovel me yesterday.”

Amanda sighed and laid her hands flat on the counter in front of her. Then she stared at them for as long as she could before Susie cleared her throat pointedly.

“Why does this matter to you so much?”
That’s right, Mandy. When ashamed of yourself, always strike out. No one will know what’s
really
going on.

Man, she hated her conscience some days.

“Because you’re my friend.” Susie leaned over the counter on her forearms, her gaze direct. Almost cutting, actually. “Because obviously you’re worried about him or you wouldn’t have been staring at that window all week long, looking for him. Possibly because your brother is a good man. A pushy, obstinate one, I admit, but still one of the best ones
I’ve
ever met. I’d hate to think something horrible happened to him because his sister was too stubborn to ask her own siblings where he is.”

“Nothing happened to him.” Except her.

Susie’s mouth quirked hard to the side. “So why am I getting the distinct scent of shame wafting off you in waves?”

Amanda scrunched her face but she could still feel Susie next to her. Waiting. “We had a fight.”

“Would this fight be the same one that turned Cole black and blue?”

Amanda straightened. “You’ve seen Cole?”

Susie shook her head. “No, but he was seen fleeing the scene of the crime at your house looking like someone had pounded the hell out of his face, and everyone in town knows it.”

“What crime?”

“The same one that had your brother storming out an hour earlier, if Kelly Marchand can be believed. The deflowering of the town virgin. You didn’t see the news at eleven?”

Amanda dropped her head down onto her hands, whimpering when her forehead knocked her knuckle like a hammer.

Susie patted her shoulder. “Hey, look at it this way—no one thinks you’re the only virgin in town anymore.”

“I hate you so much right now.”

Susie’s laugh didn’t exactly ring with regret. “Tell me what you did to Locke, Amanda. It can’t be that bad.”

“I broke a vase on his head, told him he wasn’t my father, that he has no right to try to run my life and that he’s alone and scared all of us are going to leave him.” Since she didn’t lift her head to speak, her mouth way too close to the counter, she wasn’t sure if Susie actually made out the words. “And I called him an uptight monk.”

The long silence just made Amanda feel worse.

“Boy, when you’re an ungrateful shit, you really take it to the hoop, don’t you?”

Huh. Who would have guessed the silence was better?

“I broke up with Cole, too.”

Susie’s nails tapped the counter in loud clacks. “Maybe you’d better start at the top.”

“I really shouldn’t.” But Amanda did. It took twenty minutes, with Susie only interrupting a few times with a clarifying question or two. When it was all out on the table—every confused, unflattering moment—they just sat there. Listening to the digital clock change numbers.

Susie put her hands down on the counter and pushed herself to her feet. “Be right back.”

Amanda frowned. “But—”

“I said,” Susie intoned, the sharpness of her glare making Amanda lean back on her stool, “I’ll be. Right. Back.”

Amanda watched her walk out of the shop, check the nonexistent traffic, then stalk over to the sporting goods store with that hip-swaying walk of hers that caught the elder twins’ attention immediately. Amanda stood up, watching the way Susie walked in, gesturing to Daniel and Dean with her hand. The twins looked at each other, shuffled a little, then—if their mouths moving at the same time meant anything—proceeded to tell Susie something she didn’t like. All of a sudden, Susie reached out and got both of Amanda’s brothers by the ear. She had to have been twisting pretty hard, because both of them bent down until they were nearly on their knees. She must have gotten what she wanted out of them because she let go, turned around and came right back.

The bell above the door rang again as Susie swept in. She stopped in front of Amanda, blew out a breath and took hold of Amanda’s hands.

“What I’m going to say to you, I’m saying because I love you as a friend.”

“Okay.”

“You’re an idiot.”

Amanda blinked.

“And you know
why
you’re an idiot, don’t you?”

She didn’t want to, but she nodded.

“Why?