These days he was tempted to move away from her. Wouldn’t benefit him to incite his twin’s possessive side, something Brendon hadn’t fucking known Braydon even had in the first goddamn place.
Sighing, Brendon took a sip of his warm beer and pretended Braydon’s fiancée wasn’t staring at him as though he was minutes away from being admitted to the looney bin.
He wasn’t, but his family certainly didn’t know that. Not with the way he’d been acting for the last year.
“She’s beautiful,” Jessie said softly.
Brendon glanced over at Jessie and frowned.
She simply laughed at him. “What? She is.” Jessie leaned closer, her shoulder bumping his. “And you, of all people, should know that, considering you’ve been starin’ at her for the last half hour.”
Sipping his beer, he pretended she wasn’t talking, but once more, he found his eyes homing in on the beautiful, dark-haired woman who was standing toe to toe with Brendon’s brother-in-law Beau, their arms linked together as they each took a shot and then laughed. Brendon smiled. Their arms twined together like that reminded him of a twig wrapped around a ninety-year-old oak tree.
Lord have mercy, the woman’s laugh made his balls tingle. His overzealous reaction to the petite beauty was fucking absurd was what it was, but for the life of him he didn’t know what the hell to do about it.
The problem was, Cheyenne Montgomery didn’t want to have anything to do with him.
Not like that anyway.
When it came to Cheyenne, Brendon’s idea of getting to know her consisted of having her small, curvy body spread out on his bed, naked and writhing while he gripped her slim hips and pounded his dick into her sweet, wet pussy.
She, on the other hand, was thinking he could take a long walk off a very short pier.
Not that he blamed her. He’d earned the title of World-Class Dickhead for how he had reacted to her in the past and he would be the first to admit it. The way he’d treated her—calling her names and making unsubstantiated accusations—was the equivalent of him taking that title belt and flaunting it like he was a fucking prizefighter, holding it high in the air and shouting to the world, “I’m a giant fucking dickhead and I’m proud of it!”
But he wasn’t. Proud, that is.
He hated himself for the way he’d handled his attraction to her and that had only added to the depression that had consumed him for longer than he could remember. He’d been on an emotional roller coaster ride for the last few months, ever since the Sunday dinner when Cheyenne showed up to at his mother’s request. They’d sat together that night to eat, but it hadn’t been until Cheyenne asked him to talk to her that he’d realized how much he had to atone for with her.
“Are you really okay with me bein’ here?” Cheyenne asked when they stepped outside.
“Why should that matter?” he countered, instantly going on the defensive, as he always did with Cheyenne.
“Because it does. You have to understand, I’m not here to piss you off, I promise. Travis is my friend and your mother invited me. I can’t seem to tell her no.”
“And you shouldn’t,” he replied, sighing as he did. “Look, I get that I’ve been an asshole and I understand that you don’t like me, but I’m doin’ my best to stay out of the way.”
Cheyenne’s eyes narrowed as she studied his face, and the words that followed might’ve changed the course of his life. “I don’t want you to stay out of the way,” Cheyenne informed him. “In fact, I’d kinda like it if we could find a way to be friends.”
Friends. That was what Cheyenne had proposed that night. As much as he’d wanted to tell her that the last thing he wanted was to be her friend, he hadn’t. Brendon had merely nodded his head and promised to make an effort to do exactly that. In his head, he’d made a bigger promise, although that one had been to himself. Even if it killed him, he was going to do his best to prove to Cheyenne that he wasn’t the world’s biggest dickhead.
Between that vow and his father’s heart-to-heart, Brendon hadn’t had much choice but to figure out a way to move on and stop bringing everyone around him down.
He wasn’t quite sure how well he was doing on that front, but he had to give himself props for trying. After all, he’d once heard that admitting you had a problem was the first step.
And he certainly had a fucking problem.
And she was five feet one inches of sexy, breathtaking female.
Yep, his attraction to Cheyenne Montgomery was his only damn problem these days.
chapter TWO